Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company

El Águila — the Mexican Eagle — was the dominant oil company in a country that, in 1921, produced about a quarter of the world’s oil. Founded by the English contractor Weetman Pearson and later owned by Royal Dutch Shell, it controlled well over half of Mexican output, ran the great gushers of the Gulf coast, and operated as a foreign power inside the Mexican economy. For decades the foreign oil firms set their own terms, and Mexican governments lacked the leverage to change them.

That changed in 1937–38, when an oil-workers’ strike went to arbitration, the companies lost, and they then defied even a ruling of the Mexican Supreme Court. President Lázaro Cárdenas treated the defiance as a challenge to Mexican sovereignty and, on the night of 18 March 1938, invoked the constitution to expropriate El Águila and every other foreign oil company at once. Their wells, refineries, and pipelines were folded into a new state monopoly, Pemex, founded that June. The foreign majors retaliated with a boycott that cut Mexican exports by half, but the seizure held; the companies were eventually paid a fraction of what they claimed. The Mexican operating company simply ceased to exist — its British parent lived on globally, but El Águila itself was gone — and 18 March became, and remains, a Mexican national anniversary: the day the oil was taken back.