The oil giant is now a fiscal warning.
Mexico City, May 2026.
Carlos Slim placed Pemex at the center of Mexico’s economic debate after describing the state oil company’s crisis as the country’s main problem. His statement lands with weight because it does not come from the opposition, but from the most powerful business voice in Mexico, at a moment when Pemex combines falling production, weak investment and a debt burden of around 85 billion dollars.
The diagnosis is blunt: Pemex is no longer only an energy company under financial stress. It has become a sovereign-risk variable, a fiscal drain and a political symbol that tests the limits of Mexico’s economic model. The company closed 2025 with losses of roughly 2.5 billion dollars, while the federal government continues to support it through an aggressive rescue strategy.
Slim also praised the economic management of President Claudia Sheinbaum and criticized Moody’s decision to lower Mexico’s sovereign debt rating. That contrast is politically relevant: it separates the broader macroeconomic assessment from the specific structural emergency inside Pemex. In other words, the warning is not against Mexico’s economy as a whole, but against the unresolved cost of sustaining a weakened national oil apparatus.
For Slim, the priority is to increase oil production, which he considers insufficient, and to open space for new public and private investment capable of adding hundreds of thousands of barrels per day. Behind that proposal lies the central dilemma: whether Pemex can be rescued as a productive engine, or whether it will continue operating as a fiscal monument to an exhausted energy nationalism. Mexico’s problem is not only how much Pemex owes, but how long the country can keep financing a symbol that no longer produces enough power.
Phoenix24: claridad en la zona gris. / Phoenix24: clarity in the grey zone.