Picture a country where energy prices have quadrupled in the last year, where citizens have taken to the streets to protest, where five corporations manipulate the market in order to gouge customers at will, where said oligarchy holds a gun to the head of a government that has proven virtually powerless to act, and where a constant stream of former leaders and cabinet ministers spin through the revolving door to take up lucrative positions on the companies’ boards of directors.

If you were thinking Latin America, think again; that country is Spain.

However absurd it may seem in the light of recent events, it is precisely this liberalized Spanish energy market that, since its 1997 privatization, has been the model for successive neoliberal regimes in Mexico. It was with resolve to end this creeping “Spainification” that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) sent a package of constitutional reforms to Congress on October 1. If passed, the package would amend Articles 25, 27, and 28 of the Constitution in order to consolidate the role of the public Federal Energy Commission. This would mean its conversion into an autonomous legal entity, abolishing the subsidiaries and commissions that have kept it conveniently hamstrung, and reserving for it the production of at least 54 percent of the nation’s energy supply.