AP WAS THERE: Mexico’s 1938 seizure of the oil sector from US companies

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico took control of its most precious natural resource by seizing the oil sector from U.S. companies in a move that’s taught to schoolchildren and celebrated as a great patriotic victory. The front-runner in the June 2 presidential election is an environmental engineer who helped produce the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. She is a protege of the current president, who led a 2008 fight against energy reform. An AP story from March 18, 1938, reported on the expropriation of foreign oil companies.