Some of you may have heard of the recent explosion in the Pemex main offices in the Pemex offices complex in Mexico City. Pemex is the official Mexican Petroleum company, which is state owned.
As best as I remember, there are about 36 deaths from this explosion (up to now).
The news media as well as the official government sources are all repeating the same thing, it was methane gas build up that caused the explosion. I live in Mexico City, and we know people that work/worked in that building.
I am no bomb expert, but it is obviously a bomb that caused the damage. I list my observations here:
1) The destruction done points to some kind of powerful explosive, i.e. dynamite or C4 or something similar.
I have seen 60 liter propane gas tanks on fire. The explosion basically makes a fireball, and throws the shards of the tank in all directions making shrapnel. The damage is very distinct. In this building, the building is steel and concrete, and the pictures we are seeing on TV is of a hole blown in the floor and ceiling, somewhere around 60-80 feet across with extensive damage extending probably 500 yards in all directions.
We saw pictures on TV of the damaged area, and the concrete floor (about 8 inches thick with reinforced steel rebar) was completely gone, with the rebar picked clean by the explosion. The picture at left is of ANOTHER area where the floor was gone. The one I saw in the news on the day of the explosion was easily 60 yards by 40 yards across, where the entire structure had collapsed.
Again I am not expert in explosions, but in these buildings, a gas explosion carries everything out the doors and windows, and rarely will it rip through concrete floors 8-20 inches thick pulverizing the concrete. We see some of that in the photos, but any explosion will cause that kind of breakage of the building structure. The point is that a gas explosion will cause burning, and most of the time (in what I have seen) the burning will last for a while, making the walls black, and igniting all combustible materials. We see none of that in the photos. Actually it is hard to find anything burnt in the trash they are removing.
Although I am no expert here, but the amount of gas necessary to do that kind of damage would have to be very great, perhaps 1000s of pounds of gas. Surely somebody in the building would have smelt that before the explosion. Nobody. The gas that people said they smelt was AFTER the explosion, not before. I am not 100%, but natural gas is odorless. All forms of commercial gas products carry a chemical that makes people able to smell it. So this points to a gas line breaking AFTER OR BECAUSE OF THE EXPLOSION, not one causing the explosion.
2) A gas explosion “burns”, and a bomb explodes.
The basic fundamentals of a gas explosion from build up of gas is a fireball. Normally, there is a tremendous amount of scorching on the walls, and combustible material (papers, plastics in the offices) are burnt.
What we see in the photos is rarely anything burnt, and everything out of place. This would indicate to me that most probably it was a bomb.
3) There were not the burns a gas explosion would have.
From what I have seen and heard of (which it is somewhat typical here in Mexico where propane gas is delivered in 30 liter tanks that often leak), that when a gas tank explodes or leaks rapidly, that there is fire ball. Typically these people near it when it happens receive third degree burns over parts or all of their body. Most of the people who were injured were released within a day or two, which is not gas burns. The government said that most of the injured were injured from blows of flying objects, not gas burns. So again, the evidence seems to point towards some kind of bomb (at least to me).
4) The valley of Mexico has no methane gas seepage through the ground.
This excuse or reason for the explosion is just ridiculous. In 25 years, I have never heard of even a concern about methane gas coming up through the ground into the basements here. Never has there been any news of this that I can remember. Never has there been any similar explosion. A flash fire from this kind of gas build up would be at least something to give credence to this theory the government is advancing, but reality is that the valley of Mexico does not have this phenomena that could enter as a viable reason for the explosion.
CONCLUSIONS AND RAMIFICATIONS
Although we cannot be 100%, it would appear that somebody set off a bomb in the Pemex tower. An employ said he found second bomb in a second adjacent building, and it was deactivated. Of course that never got into the press. It was amazing to hear the Attorney General of Mexico “reassure” the people, “The explosion was caused by an accident, and we are going to get the people responsible for this.” What? If it was an accident, then how is their guilt assigned? Things just don’t add up.
My opinion is as follows, yes it was a bomb. The details above would cause a lot of reasonable doubt on methane gas build up. Yesterday (February 7) they are changing the story to say that there was a gas line going into the boiler complex that provides energy to the building, and that is what caused it. (Even the government has a hard time with the methane gas seeping up through the ground theory, because that too will cause panic here.)
So we go down the merry trail of Mexican government lies yet once again. I am not a conspirator theory proponent, but the stories the Mexican government comes out with are just humorously unbelievable.
WHO DID IT? AND WHY?
These are the questions most pertinent in our minds if we assume (which this is an assumption, nothing is proven either way) that it was a deliberate bomb.
1) There was nobody claiming “they did it.”
This is the strange thing if it was a terrorist plot. Living here in Mexico City, I would give my perspective. The chief opponent of the Peña Nieto government would probably be the PRD and Manuel Lopez Obrador. Personally I doubt they had anything to do with it. The PRD has separated themselves from Obrador’s Morena movement, which is pushing to become its own political party at the moment. So this would kill any popularist support if they did such a thing, and they claimed it. So I doubt very seriously they had anything to do with it. Honestly, and without belittling Obrador (personally I kind of like him, although I don’t know what to do with him myself), I doubt Obrador has the brains and planning to pull of something like this. This is more profession.
The Zetas. These are a trumped up semi-military group that are connected with the drug lords here in Mexico, and basically they are not what they are thought to be (in my opinion). Although they are promoted as a rebel political group with guns, they seem likewise incapable of pulling off much. Obrador manufactured a “meeting” in the Zocalo in D.F. with over a million people (buying them lunch and giving them a T shirt and $50 dollars if they would come), so Obrador has more power than the Zetas in my opinion.
The Drug lords, like Chapo Guzman. These people are possibles as far as who has done this. But there is a great problem. Pemex is basically a worker for Mexico, funding a tremendous amount of the annual government’s budget. A strike at Pemex, is a strike at Mexico’s pocket book. Anybody that disables or cripples Pemex, even for a few weeks, costs Mexicans income. That point would make me think, no Mexican would be behind this.
So who? a foreigner. Who is out there that would do this? My money would be on the french woman, Florence Cassez, who was recently set free from Mexican jail when Peña Nieto entered office.
See Accused French Kidnapper Freed from Mexican Jail
What happened here is that she was a kidnapper operating in Mexico. There were people who she (and her gang) kidnapped, and were later released that positively IDed her as being their kidnapper. Those eyewitness testimonies are not heard apparently. She was released “on a technicality” that the police did something wrong in apprehending her (which is entirely believable also). But if we examine this a bit more, her release was 8 years after her trial. Why now? Because Calderon wouldn’t allow it, and now that Peña Nieto is in office, he apparently put the ball into motion as soon as he officially won.
The electoral fraud that was so apparent with thousands of people (7 million dollars dispersed according to proceso.com.mx which they promised them that the cards had $500 pesos / $38 US dollars on them, but in actuality, most only had $200 pesos/$15 US dollars for around giving a sway vote of around 460,000 votes to Peña Nieto) receiving a debit card from the banco Monex (french?) would come into play here. This was not the only fraud in the recent election, but it was the grossest. (As a footnote, the Mexican Federal Election Commission let the election results stand, and they will study the case, which they fined the PRI for doing this, so it just boils down to how much money do you want to pay to get into office down here. Manuel Lopez Obrador on the other hand is taken to the IRS and accused of spending too much in his campaign. The Peña Nieto campaign didn’t claim this 7 million dollars and Obrador didn’t have these kinds of allegations against him. Go figure!) This Bank Monex, is suspected of being a money laundering operation (www.marxist.com) and is under investigation by the USA and Spain for said money laundering. The Marxist.com article links them with the likes of drug lords, Arellano Félix, los Beltrán Leyva, Zhenli Ye Gon, etc.
So I suspect that the French paid for Peña Nieto’s campaign fraud, in exchange for the French woman, Florence Cassez, to be released. She was, and she has expressed her “disdain” and “dislike” of the Mexican people because of this. “She is innocent.” And the french government received her like a returning war hero. People here say they saw her kill people (kidnapped person), and they testified against her in her trial, and their testimony is somehow wrong. The Mexican government even went so far as to express the idea of prosecuting the Mexican police involved in this case. That was squelched quickly though. We don’t want those guys opening up and telling all.
So who did the bombing?
I would guess that the amount of T-N-T to that damage as far away from the source as it did, you would need maybe a small desk full of it. Since it was a building under surveillance, and with “tight security”, one asks himself, how did they do it? You don’t just drag a big box of explosives through that kind of security unnoticed. Which leads me to think that some kind of military explosive was used (small and compact, and also very powerful). The drug lord’s here as well as political opponents of the PRI government don’t have that kind of thing. The french military does.
Things don’t make a lot of sense, but let’s just say, it most probably was not methane gas that caused the explosion, but if enough people are paraded in front of us, saying that “it was gas” “it was gas”, maybe everybody will believe it!
Our situation here is that we observe these things, and then we ask ourselves, where is this Mexican society going? Things continue to get worse, and the “solutions” offered us seem to be worse than the problems they are supposed to fix. Whoever did it (if it was a bomb), they don’t like Mexico, and they don’t like Peña Nieto. If it was natural gas build up, there are literally hundreds of thousands of buildings in Mexico City sitting on top of a natural gas bomb? Waiting for the next tremor to open a crack and seep up and cause explosions all over the place? We will wait and see, but as time goes on, the ridiculous nature of these explanations continue to get worse and worse. They cannot cover up the facts very well.
As to the most recent morph of this, it was not methane gas, but a propane gas line going into the boiler building of the Pemex tower complex. Wow! Can we not get something more believable? Electric power plants use diesel guys, not propane gas. Diesel just does not hardly even burn (needs high pressure to burn well) and will not explode like that. A propane gas line coming into the building? Very few areas have underground propane gas lines because it is dangerous with the temors we have constantly (well that is really a lie, because it is not because of the danger, but because they develop leaks constantly with the earth’s shifting, so the gas company would spend too much money to fix it all the time, i.e. economics). At least we have entertainment to wonder at.