Confrontations Between the Mexican Military and “Huachicoleros” on the Rise

Yaqui for Borderland Beat from: AnimalPolitico

                         Military and alleged huachicoleros have met at least 46 times since 2012

The year with the most attacks, according to information from the Sedena, was 2016, with 11 cases; the state with the most attacks has been Tamaulipas.

By: Itxaro Arteta
Clashes between alleged fuel thieves, called huachicoleros, and the Army have been a constant in recent years, especially since 2015,  before the plan to combat hydrocarbon theft undertaken by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

In Peña Nieto's 6 year term of office there were 2,000 detainees per huachicol, only 11% were sentenced.

The Ministry of Defense (Sedena) recognizes 46 confrontations, between 2012 and the beginning of 2019, to which can be added at least another 4 reported by the press in the last two months. On March 12, eight soldiers were held by residents of the municipality of Tetepango, Hidalgo, after a presumed confrontation in which a 22-year-old man died, the newspaper Criterio reported .

The first reports of the municipal police indicated that the soldiers were attacked by presumable huachicoleros, although the inhabitants of the place claimed that the dead young man was a peasant  who was watering the land and for that reason they kept the soldiers for hours.

In response to two requests for information made in 2017 and 2019 about clashes and fights between the military and criminals linked to fuel theft, the Sedena listed a total of 46 "aggressions against military personnel" in which eight elements were killed and 25 wounded.

The hideous Tula, Hidalgo explosion which caused more than 130 deaths and many more wounded

From the beginning of the current government, the unit recognizes four events, without dead or injured, two of them in Hidalgo - which heads the list of states with clandestine takes and where the explosion that caused more than 130 deaths-; on December 23 in Irapuato, Guanajuato; on December 28 in Tula, Hidalgo; on January 7 in Cuautepec de Hinojosa, Hidalgo; and on January 10 in Matamoros, Tamaulipas.

The March 12 incident, the one of January 25 in Otumba, State of Mexico, where three soldiers were wounded , and of January 13 in Tula, Hidalgo, where after a confrontation in the community of Santa Ana, the villagers detained three soldiers and threatened to set them on fire .

Also not  recognized in the report delivered by the agency; the attack with stones and pipes by residents of Tepeaca, Puebla, to a convoy that sought to recover a stolen Pemex pipe, on December 13. With these, they would add eight clashes since the beginning of this six-year term of AMLO.

The year with the most attacks, according to the information provided by the Sedena via transparency, was 2016, with 11 cases, followed by 2015 and 2017, when there have been 10 clashes.

Four of the attacks of 2016 occurred in the same municipality: Palmar de Bravo, Puebla. That state topped the list with more confrontations during that year, six in total, and in 2017, with another six, among the municipalities of Palmar, Tecamachalco and Quecholac.

     Red Triangle: the zone of stealing gasoline that authorities ignore and where crimes increase

But the state with the most attacks has been Tamaulipas. In 2012 there was one in Rio Bravo; in 2014, two, in the same municipality; in 2015 it registered five and headed the list that year, with two in Matamoros, one in Altamira, Reynosa and Nuevo Laredo. For 2016 the military had two clashes, in Matamoros and González; in 2017, two others, in Matamoros and Reynosa; in 2018 two, in Miguel Alemán and Cuauhtémoc, and in 2019 there is one, in Matamoros. 15 attacks in recent years in the State of Tamualipas.

Another state that has had disputes with certain constancy between the military and huachicoleros is Guanajuato: in 2012 there was one in the state capital; in 2014 in Silao, in 2016 in Irapuato and León, and in 2018 another in Irapuato.

The figures show that in 2012, the year that Enrique Peña Nieto was elected, there were only two attacks, and in 2013, the first of his government there were two others, while for 2014 they doubled to four in total. In 2018, two of them were still under his mandate, in addition to two of December, in the midst of a fuel crisis due to Lopez Obrador's plan to combat huachicoleo.

According to the then owner of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), Carlos Alberto Treviño, clandestine fuel intakes increased 262% during the past six years , which also increased the operations and confrontations of the Army to combat this crime.

Robberies and violence increase in "huachicol" zone:

According to the information of the Executive Secretariat of the National Public Security System, in the Red Triangle , the complaints of homicide, robbery, rape and kidnapping have increased in 2018 .

In Acatzingo, Palmar de Bravo, Quecholac, Tecamachalco and Tepeaca, municipalities belonging to the Red Triangle , the most recurrent crime was the theft of transporters and vehicles.

"Milking the Sea":

Huachicoleros in the Gulf of Mexico plunder Pemex with the help of employees. 81% of Mexicans believe there is complicity between Pemex employees and huachicoleros: Parametría.

At least 90 ships are investigated for co ordinating with Pemex and its shipping by sea in the Gulf of Mexico. In each robbery they subtract between 600,000 and up to 800,000 liters of fuel.

From the coasts of Tamaulipas to Campeche, the Gulf of Mexico encompasses vast waters dispersed over more than 3,000 kilometers that, in their depths, have abundant hydrocarbon deposits. The Gulf has the largest proven oil reserves in Mexico, as well as exploration and extraction by Pemex and a wide range of companies of different sizes and nationalities.

Officially, these waters are the most watched: they watch patrols with men in white uniforms with chevrons, also the green ones, those in blue uniforms, those of camouflage that in patrol boats travel armed to the teeth. But that "vigilance" is relative since, ironically, in this high seas area is where the largest volume of Pemex fuel is milked.

Currently, from the northeast to the southeast of the Gulf of Mexico, the volumetric fuel is milked, with the direct collaboration of employees of the oil company. This has been identified by the intelligence area of ​​the Secretariat of the Navy of Mexico (Semar) and this information is part of an internal report classified as "confidential" dated July 2018, which was accessed by Newsweek in Spanish, and whose The content was also verified by several sources of the Semar that currently carry out a confidential internal investigation on the illicit and that gave details about their researches and findings.

In each robbery the delinquents subtract thousands of liters that they commercialize inside and outside Mexico with the support of legally established shipping companies. They use supply vessels and vessels that carry out logistic support maneuvers to the oil industry, and also fishing vessels that are even affiliated to local fishing cooperatives.

Its destination is the black market in Mexico, but the fuel is also taken to the United States, Central America and South America.

Naval milkers - or huachicoleros, as it has become common to generically call fuel thieves - operate with a well organized logistics structure that includes the participation of Pemex personnel, ship owners, shipping companies, ship captains, crew chiefs and crews. experts In addition, people responsible for managing and custody of warehouses and storage areas participate; responsible for the sale of hydrocarbons and money laundering - because the resource would also be used for the purchase of ranches, buildings, warehouses and more boats, according to the investigation of the investigation to which we had access.

This modality of milking, by sea, which began to register sporadically a decade ago, has become a structured and well-organized mechanism, which has intensified to the point of becoming one of the most profitable activities for organized crime groups that take hydrocarbons directly from the Pemex refineries with the collaboration of oil company personnel.

Among some 90 ships there are also supply vessels that work with official license plates in activities of the oil industry and fishing boats that have well trained crews that move in the regions of Campeche, Tabasco, Veracruz and Tamaulipas.

The system they use is similar to the one used in the 1980s to transport drugs via sea, where ships are sometimes hired for each shipment. For this reason, organized crime groups have an operator in charge of paying the lessors whose boats are used to transport stolen hydrocarbon shipments.

In the nautical field, boats used for illicit purposes used to be pirate vessels: without flag or flag of convenience, without permits or with apocryphal documents. But in the theft of fuel by sea that takes place in the Gulf of Mexico, crime now operates in a more sophisticated manner: legal vessels are involved, with legal permits, but which are used for the transfer of illegal cargoes of hydrocarbons with apocryphal bills.