MEXICO CITY — In an apparent case of politically motivated sabotage, six explosions blew apart oil and natural gas pipelines operated by Mexico's Pemex state oil and gas monopoly early Monday in Veracruz and Tlaxcala states, causing fires and forcing the evacuation of 15,000 people from surrounding towns.
The blasts forced Pemex to shut down at least four affected pipelines and prompted federal authorities to close two major roads. No injuries were reported.
Mexico is the world's sixth-largest oil producer and a major supplier of petroleum to the U.S. The outages drove the price of oil above $78 a barrel in futures trading Monday.
Monday's attacks occurred two months after a leftist guerrilla group, the Popular Revolutionary Army, known by its Spanish initials EPR, took responsibility for carrying out four similar bomb attacks on Pemex pipelines and a switching station in the central states of Queretaro and Guanajuato.
The 10-year-old group had sworn to continue its bombing campaign until the federal government revealed the location of two EPR activists from Oaxaca state who have been missing since last year. Oaxaca has been the scene of violent protests and government crackdowns over the last year.
Although no group claimed responsibility for Monday's attacks, political analysts here said they bore the hallmarks of the EPR or a similar group, and probably were intended as a message against President Felipe Calderon and his policies. Calderon, who is traveling in India, was quick to condemn the explosions as being caused by deliberate acts of violence.
"In the democratic Mexico of today there is no place for these criminal acts," Calderon said in a statement in New Delhi. "Those that attack the security of Mexico under whatever pretext attack against democracy and against Mexico."
Calderon, who had dispatched soldiers and federal police to increase security along oil pipelines and at other "strategic installations" after the July attacks, vowed to find and prosecute those responsible for the latest incident.
But Monday's explosions underscored the difficulty of protecting a pipeline system that stretches across multiple states and crosses many remote areas. Pemex is also burdened with aging equipment that is vulnerable to tampering or sabotage, said Erubiel Tirado, a specialist in national security issues.
