Pemex Brand Guidelines: Mexico’s 1938 Oil Expropriation, an Eagle & a Red Drop

An expropriation, then a decree.

Pemex is short for Petróleos Mexicanos, Mexican Petroleum, and it grew out of one of the defining acts of twentieth-century Mexico. English Wikipedia says that by the early 1900s commercial quantities of oil were being extracted and refined in Mexico by subsidiaries of the British Pearson and American Doheny companies. Spanish Wikipedia traces a short-lived precursor, Petróleos de México, or Petromex, set up in 1934 to encourage national investment in the industry.

In 1937, Spanish Wikipedia says, a strike by oil workers against the foreign-owned companies was decided in the workers’ favour by the labour arbitration board, and the companies took the case to the Supreme Court. When they lost and refused to comply, President Lázaro Cárdenas decreed the expropriation of the industry on 18 March 1938, citing Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution, English Wikipedia says.

The company itself followed by decree on 7 June 1938 and began operating on 20 July that year, Spanish Wikipedia says, taking over installations of the expropriated companies, mainly American and Anglo-Dutch. Mexico promised compensation rather than confiscating outright, and English Wikipedia says many foreign governments closed their markets to Mexican oil until Allied demand for petroleum during the Second World War ended the boycott. Spanish Wikipedia says the last payment of the expropriation debt was made early, in 1962.

Today Pemex is owned by the Mexican government. Its board is chaired by the energy secretary of the day and its director general is appointed by the president of the Republic, Spanish Wikipedia says; it gives the company’s headquarters as the Miguel Hidalgo borough of Mexico City and Ciudad del Carmen, in Campeche. The same source says the oil workers’ union was formally constituted in the mid-1930s from the unions of the foreign companies, and that the first collective labour contract between the union and Pemex was signed in 1942.

Cantarell, refineries and a legal form that keeps changing.

Pemex explores for, produces, transports, refines and sells oil and natural gas, according to Spanish Wikipedia, with operations abroad mainly in trading, finance and oilfield services. Its largest discovery came offshore. In 1971, the same source says, a Campeche fisherman, Rudecindo Cantarell, reported an oil slick rising from the seabed in the Bay of Campeche; production from the Chac well eight years later began the exploitation of the field that carries his name, Cantarell. Spanish Wikipedia dates the Salina Cruz and Cadereyta refineries to 1979, and English Wikipedia says the new Dos Bocas plant opened in 2024.

The company’s legal form has changed several times. A 1992 organic law split its operations into subsidiary bodies, a 2008 law redefined the company, and the 2013 energy reform turned Pemex into an Empresa Productiva del Estado, a “productive state company” meant to compete with private firms, Spanish Wikipedia says. On 30 October 2024, Bloomberg Línea reported, President Claudia Sheinbaum signed a constitutional reform to Articles 25, 27 and 28 that removed that status from Pemex and the electricity utility CFE, placing both under public rather than commercial law. Spanish Wikipedia now gives the company’s form as an Empresa Pública del Estado, a public state company.

Pemex’s record also includes serious accidents, which English Wikipedia lists with dates: the 1979 blowout of the Ixtoc I exploratory well in the Bay of Campeche, which it describes as one of the largest oil spills in history; explosions at an LPG storage plant at San Juan Ixhuatepec, outside Mexico City, in November 1984; an explosion at the company’s Mexico City administrative complex in January 2013; and a fire at an illegal tap on a pipeline at Tlahuelilpan, Hidalgo, in January 2019. Each involved loss of life.

There have been bribery cases too. In 2016 a United States Justice Department case against the Brazilian group Odebrecht made public allegations of bribes paid to Pemex officials between 2010 and 2014, Spanish Wikipedia says, and Pemex and Mexico’s public administration ministry filed a criminal complaint in January 2017. Separately, English Wikipedia says the company’s computers were infected with DoppelPaymer ransomware in November 2019.

National oil companies as brands.

National oil companies present themselves differently from the listed majors. Most are owned or controlled by a state, and their identities often sit close to the national story: a flag or national colours placed beside a refinery skyline, a company name that includes the country, and a founding date tied to a concession, a nationalisation or a new state. The imagery tends to repeat across the category: offshore platforms photographed at dawn, drilling rigs in desert or jungle, tanker terminals and pipelines running to the horizon.

The brand also reaches the street. Many national oil companies run fuel retail networks at home, and sometimes abroad, so the identity has to work on a petrol-station canopy, a pump, a lubricant bottle and a forecourt sign as well as on a corporate tower. That puts a premium on a simple mark and a small set of strong colours that read from a moving car.

A third strand is people and the public. Engineering academies, scholarships and graduate programmes appear prominently in their communications, alongside sponsorship of national sports teams, marathons, motor racing, museums and cultural centres. These programmes carry the company name into places far from the oilfield, and they often appear in annual reports next to production figures.

Finally, the financial documents matter more than they used to. As several national oil companies have listed shares or floated subsidiaries, their annual reports, sustainability reports and IPO prospectuses have become major brand documents in their own right, with consistent typography, photography and colour. This guide reads each company through those public materials, separating what independent dated sources document from what the company says about itself.

An eagle in front of a red drop.

The name itself is a contraction: English Wikipedia calls Pemex a portmanteau of Petróleos Mexicanos, and Spanish Wikipedia writes it in capitals, PEMEX, as the company’s acronym. English Wikipedia also says the 1938 expropriation made Pemex an enduring symbol of Mexican nationalism.

The mark carries that history. Spanish Wikipedia describes the logo used from 1988 to 2019 as a Mexican golden eagle in front of a red drop. The version used since 2019 keeps the eagle and the drop and adds the Pemex name and the slogan “Por el rescate de la soberanía” — “for the recovery of sovereignty.”

For a design guide, Pemex shows how a national oil company can keep one founding moment at the centre of its image: the eagle and the drop have framed the name since at least 1988. Compare Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, and Ecopetrol of Colombia. For this guide we use a deep green, a drop red and a warm paper white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pemex’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.