‘Liberalized’ could just mean ‘no longer controlled by the government,’–which is true. The matter of energy reform is highly complex, encompassing a great many things like investment required to drill wells in deep water and refining crude oil into usable products. (Gasoline is not a natural resource, it’s a product made from a natural resource.) Who else other than multi-national corporations have the expertise and capability to explore and extract increasingly hard-to-get-at oil fields? What use is crude oil under the Gulf of Mexico to ‘Mexican Citizens’ if they cannot access and process it? Your statement implies that government-controlled oil extraction will deliver better value for Mexico’s people: is Venezuela’s approach a poster-child model to emulate so that “citizens” can receive more? Mexicans will indeed have to share the spoils of future extraction, but without specialized knowledge and tools to undertake that work — things they do not have — they would retain “control” (as you describe it) of a natural resource they cannot access.