the neighboring states. During the 1960s and the 1970s, Mexico alienated private investment and decided to prevent market forces from entering the power system. In addition, the surge in oil prices of the 1970s provided a windfall to oil-rich Mexico, which allowed the country to maintain substantial subsidies for electricity generation. Only during the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the Mexican government implemented market reforms in several economic sectors, including electricity. In 1992, president Carlos Salinas reformed the electricity law, establishing that private electricity production was not a public service. This modification, which allowed for private participation in generation, was debated as unconstitutional for a long time; in fact in 2002 the Mexican Supreme Court ruled that it may have been unconstitutional. The Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE) was created in 1993 as an autonomous agency in charge of regulating the natural gas and electricity industries. However, its functions were only related to private power producers (e.g. award of permits, arbitration, tariff studies) and did not cover CFE and LFC. In this period the CRE's functions were mainly focused on the gas sector and not on electricity. Reform attempts 1990s and 2000s Attempts by president Ernesto Zedillo in the late 1990s, by the National Action Party (PAN) in 2000, and president Vicente Fox to carry out a comprehensive reform of the electricity sector in Mexico faced strong political resistance. In 1999, President Zedillo sent an ambitious bill to Congress requesting a change of the Constitution and allowing for the unbundling of the sector, including the creation of distribution companies under 3-year concessions. Existing power plants would also be sold, except for nuclear and hydro power plants. In 2001, President Fox issued a reform decree that would allow independent power producers to sell directly to industrial customers and would also allow the sale of private power to CFE under long-term contracts without competitive bidding. Among other issues, the decree also specified that electricity is not a public service of general interest but a commercial service. Both reform attempts failed, opposed on grounds that the electricity and, more broadly, the energy sector is strategic for national sovereignty. As required by the Constitution, the electricity sector remained federally owned, with the CFE essentially controlling the whole sector. Among the different proposals for the reform of the electricity sector, the main ones are the creation of the CFE's Fundamental Law and the modification of