Jeb Bush and Carlos Slim
http://www.unz.com/isteve/jeb-bush-and-carlos-slim/A little primer about how GW and ¡JEB! interacted with Mexico the last couple decades.
While refusing to pour his money down the Lehman rathole, Slim went on to bail out the New York Times. It’s almost as if Slim understands America better than the Bushes do …
The background on all this is that the Bush family has been interested in reversing Mexican economic nationalism / protectionism — highlighted by the 1938 kicking out of American and British oil companies (recently reversed) — for a very long time. There’s a lot of money to be made grinding down the border between America and Mexico, and it’s by no means impossible to persuade yourself you are doing it for the good of your country.
George H.W. Bush named the oil firm he cofounded in Texas in 1953 Zapata (similarly, George W. Bush named his oil firm Arbusto). By 1960 the elder Bush had hired a Mexican front man, Jorge Diaz Serrano, to allow Zapata to operate in Mexican waters. Diaz Serrano later went on to be head of Mexico’s Pemex monopoly and to steal so flagrantly during the late 1970s boom that he was one of the three government officials symbolically imprisoned for corruption by the new PRI president elected in 1982.
