On the night of February 14, a winter storm wreaked havoc with Texas’ deregulated electrical grid, leaving millions to cope with days of power outages, burst pipes, food shortages, and, as a capper, astronomic energy bills that spiraled for some into the tens of thousands of dollars. The images were stark, with the downtowns of cities like Austin lit brightly while residents on darkened peripheries melted snow and icicles for drinking water.

The blackouts quickly spilled over the border into Mexico. Cut off from its supply of natural gas, and facing their own spate of freezing temperatures, some 4.6 million residents of the states of Sinaloa, Nuevo León, Chihuahua, and Tamaulipas braved outages of their own. The crisis was a stark reminder of how decades of failed policies have made Mexico dependent on private energy production, domestic and imported, precisely at a moment when Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) is signing key legislation to strengthen the hand of the nation’s long-debilitated public energy sector.