A series of recent crises and arrests emphasize how powerful criminal groups in Mexico widen their involvement in the fuel flight, one of the fastest and profitable criminal economies in the country whose attraction also corrupts the most reliable security branches of the state.
Mexican security forces detained 14 people, including a high -level navy officer on September 6 after the discovery of 10 million liters of illegal diesel in March, one of the biggest crises in the history of the country. According to the authorities, criminal groups have introduced fuel smuggling from the United States to an oil tanker of 46,000 tonnes avoiding Mexican fuel taxes. The cross -border network has been activated by a network of accomplice companies and corrupt customs officials and police officers
These new arrests are only the latest example of how in recent years, criminal groups have transformed their participation in illicit fuel markets on both sides of the American-Mexican border. The country's fuel flight mafias, some designated By the American government as “terrorist organizations”, have widened to exploit international energy markets on a large scale, oil stolen in Mexico reaching the United States, India, and even to Japan, according to to the recent American intelligence.
See also: Empire of the CJNG fuel theft in the remedy for sanctions from the American treasury
Conversely, billions of liters of illicit fuel have also sank from the United States to Mexico, where criminal networks have used shine companies and customs fraud to escape the country's fuel taxes. The hydrocarbons are then sold in the country's booming black markets, generating tens of millions of dollars of profits for organized crime.
* This is the first of a special series in three parts detailing the changing dynamics of the fuel flight industry of several billion dollars in Mexico.
The fuel flight is the “most important non -drug unlawful income” for the criminal mafias in Mexico, according to the network for the execution of financial crimes of the US Treasury Department (Fincen) in May. The American authorities allegedly alleged that several energy -based energy companies were “accomplices” of illegal cross -border flows of hydrocarbons and had bought fuel stolen by groups of organized crimes.
From Robin Hood to CJNG
On January 18, 2019, fuel thieves in a field near the small town of Tlahuelilpan pierced in the Toxpan-Poza-Tula pipeline, propelling a fuel jet in the sky. The thieves fled, leaving the fuel in the cascade on a field. As night fell, local families started arriving at the pipeline to try to fill small plastic buckets and bottles with a few dollars of free fuel from the earth.
Then, a wandering spark of static electricity lit the whole scene, exploding an explosion which killed at least 137 people.
Criminal groups have used Huachicol as a source of criminal income since the 1990s. The first groups have drilled in oil pipelines that crisscross Mexico and used taps, pipes and jerry cans to extract fuel, a Modus Operandi that remains used today on a much larger scale.
The first fuel thieves were mainly small local organizations that cultivated an image of Robin Hood by peddling cheap fuel and stolen in their communities. The tapping pipelines with rudimentary equipment was a dangerous work, and the exploits of these groups were often famous in melodious ballads. Some thieves have even prayed El Niño Huachicoleo, the popular petroleum flight, to avoid arrest, protect their families and prevent pipeline fires.
But in 2007, large criminal groups, led by an armed wing of the Gulf cartel known as the Zetasstarted to build muscle in the Huachicol markets of Mexico in the northern state of the Tamaulipas, disturbing local thieves. This year, American intelligence common The Mexican government has revealed that the Zetas were involved in a sprawling fuel flight and a smuggling operation based on an extent of tamaulipas rich in oil known as the Burgos basin.
Some factors have merged to make Huachicol an objective for the great criminal mafias of Mexico. First, prolonged government repression, from 2006, against drug trafficking, groups of crimes organized to explore alternative sources of income. At the same time, the Mexican government began to reduce subsidies to fossil fuels, which means that the prices of the pumps check. This increased the potential benefits to be made by selling stolen fuel.
In 2010, the Gulf cartel and the Zetas doubled the fuel flight operations, in part to finance an increasingly bloody war against each other after the Zetas have spread. The resource race has made tamaulipas the first major fuel flight hotspot in the country.
After the arrival of these groups, the number of illegal pipeline taps detected by the Mexican oil company of Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) began to increase. The company, which first reported The existence of a pipeline flight to investors after the discovery of 152 taps in 2003, saw the number of taps go to 710 in 2010, then to a record of 14,910 in 2018.
As the number of taps increased, the geographic spread of the flight of oil in Mexico did the same.
The problem of Mexico fuel flight increases
The flight of oil began to break out in new places, partly driven by a security repression in the Tamaulipas, and the entry of new criminal players who have started to type pipelines to generate the necessary income to compete with the Zetas and to repel the incessant appetite of the group for territorial expansion.
Tamaulipas, fuel flight has spread in the central states of Puebla and Guanajuato. Jalisco Cartel New Generation (Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación – Cjng), which was already one of the most powerful criminal groups in Mexico by 2015, had bastions in the two states and followed the Zetas in the trade, starting a violent to resume of the territory close to pipeline infrastructure in central Mexico from 2015.
Some local groups have gathered to withstand the foray by CJNG. One of these collectives has become the cartel of Santa Rosa de Lima, a group specializing in fuel theft which fiercely retaliated against the CJNG in Guanajuato. The fighting between these groups broke out in 2017 and were partly responsible for the rapid deterioration of security in the state, transforming it of one of the most peaceful states of Mexico into one of the most homicide.
“You must control where the pipelines are to do the thief … So (criminal groups) fight on a physical territory in a way that they do not fight on the territory of synthetic trafficking such as fentanyl or methamphetamine,” said Jane Esberg, a researcher who studied fuel Theft in Mexico, Insight Crime.
Today, Hidalgo, another Bastion of the CJNG, is the capital of the country's fuel flight. The state is home to the Tula refinery, one of the largest in Mexico, which is equipped to treat around 315,000 barrels of crude oil per day. In 2024 alone, the state recorded 2,450 illegal pipeline valves, the most in the country.
See also: Rising violence in Hidalgo, Mexico oil flight center
Critical infrastructure has also attracted thieves to the state. “The center of the country has large highways … You have access to the entire central region of Mexico. This creates many options to distribute stolen fuel”, according to Samuel León Sáez, who wrote a book on fuel traffic in Mexico.
In the shadow of the Tula refinery stands Tlahuelilpan, the 2019 pipeline explosion site. In the field where fuel has now been a makeshift cemetery in memory of the victims of the disaster. But the city continues to attract fuel thieves.
The pipeline that crosses the city is one of the most tapped in Mexico. Between 2022 and 2023, Pemex detected an average of 3,226 clandestine taps along the pipe each year. Among these, 111 taps were in Tlahuelililpan.
Since the explosion, the Huachicol groups of Mexico have only allegated their looting. Thieves stole 987 million liters of fuel in 2024, according to approximate estimates of the company, against 371 million liters in 2019.
And even if this type of local flight is increasing, the quantities of fuel stolen from the infrastructure fleeing from the country is overshadowed by a new source of illicit supply: the criminal mafias have now exploited the international energy markets to generate their illicit profits beyond what they can steal from Pemex.
Our next article on fuel flight in Mexico plunges into the new international trade models used by the country's criminal groups, including the way in which the fuel in the United States is increasingly flooding the illicit fuel markets in Mexico, generating hundreds of millions of dollars of profits for organized crime.
Featured image: a Mexican navy officer looks at an oil tanker in the port of Tampico, Tamaulipas. Credit: Mexican Marine
