Sunday, December 13, 2009

Thieving Crude

Theft of oil by organized crime has been a persistent little story in the Mexican media over the last year or so, and has now bubbled up into the American media:
Drug traffickers employing high-tech drills, miles of rubber hose and a fleet of stolen tanker trucks have siphoned more than $1 billion worth of oil from Mexico's pipelines over the past two years, in a vast and audacious conspiracy that is bleeding the national treasury, according to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials and the state-run oil company.
The article labels these thieves as drug-traffickers, although we don't see them having any interaction with drugs at all. It's kind of funny how, even as criminal gangs have diversified a great deal over the past few years, "drug trafficker" remains the catchall label for Mexican criminals. Beyond the mere semantics of it, I'd be interested to see a pie chart of the Zetas' (who seem to have the broadest base of revenue) income sources.

2 comments:

jd said...

Sounds like a task for Edgardo Buscaglia. If he stays true to form I don't know that the breakdown will be accurate, but I practically guarantee that it'll be very precise in its numbers, thus giving it that extra air of authenticity.

pc said...

Yeah he's got the market on that kind of stuff cornered. But between 17 congresses and 31 interviews a week, I wonder if he's got the time in his schedule to put something like that together. Let's hope he can get around to it.