A coalition of more than 40 Mexican environmental groups rallied at Alameda Central in central Mexico City on Friday evening to demand that President Claudia Sheinbaum reinstate a campaign-era pledge to ban hydraulic fracturing. The "Fandango por la vida" event, organised under the Alianza Mexicana Contra El Fracking umbrella, drew several thousand participants and prominent musicians who performed unpaid in support.

Sheinbaum, a climate scientist by training who served as Mexico City mayor before winning the 2024 presidential election, pledged during her campaign to end the use of fracking in Mexico’s onshore basins. Her government reversed that position on April 8, announcing that Pemex would begin technical studies on extracting natural gas from shale formations in the north of the country.

Government officials have framed the shift as a pragmatic response to declining domestic production and rising gas prices, which have intensified after the closure of the Strait of Hormuz disrupted global LNG flows. Energy minister Luz Elena González told reporters earlier this month that hydraulic fracturing would proceed only "under the most stringent environmental safeguards" and would be confined to a small number of pilot fields in Nuevo León and Coahuila.

Opponents say that framing misses the point. The Alianza’s spokeswoman Beatriz Olivera Villa pointed to surface-water depletion concerns in the targeted basins and to seismic activity recorded in previous Mexican fracking pilots between 2014 and 2016. The coalition is preparing constitutional challenges in three federal districts and is gathering signatures for a citizen-initiated referendum on the policy.

Sheinbaum’s approval rating has eased to 65 per cent according to the latest AS/COA tracker, down from a peak above 80 per cent at the start of her term but still well ahead of any predecessor at the same point of their tenure. The fracking reversal is the first issue on which her core Morena base has visibly fractured, with several leftist intellectuals who endorsed her in 2024 issuing public letters against the new policy.

Mexico’s shale resources are concentrated in the Burgos and Sabinas basins along the border with Texas. Pemex estimates the deposits at around 60 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas, although independent geologists have offered far lower figures. No commercial-scale fracking project has ever proceeded in Mexico, and the legal framework that would permit one remains unwritten.