Oil a sticky issue for next Mexico president

ISLA AGUADA, Mexico (Reuters) – Romana Perez Vidal de Cantarell, the illiterate widow of a poor fisherman, scrapes a living selling cold drinks in this shabby fishing village on the sweltering Gulf of Mexico coast.

It’s not the life you’d expect for the widow of the man who set off an oil boom with his 1976 discovery of a massive oil field that has earned Mexico tens of billions of dollars.

“They never gave him anything. He died utterly poor,” she said, stroking the small gold medal that was Rudecindo Cantarell’s reward for leading officials to the oily bubbles he spotted gurgling up from the seabed.

“The oil belongs to all Mexicans but even we haven’t benefited. They keep it all,” she said, nodding toward the sea where a mass of state-owned oil rigs suck away at the field named Cantarell, source of 60 percent of Mexico’s oil.

Reuters