How “Huachicol” became Mexico in a crime comparable to drug trafficking (and why it is central to Trump and Sheinbaum)

Much of this last episode of Huachicol has to do with the arrival of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States. Its agenda fight against drug trafficking and organized crime has meant enormous pressure for Mexican authorities, which have had to strengthen their phenomena such as this phenomena strategies.

To this is added something that for many is not disconnected from Trump: Sheinbaum and his Secretary of Security, Omar García Harfuch, implemented the most ambitious campaign that a Mexican government has launched against this crime.

Recently, García Harfuch again disseminated the results of his portfolio in less than a year: hundreds of detainees, dozens of insured carnants and recovery of more than 40 million liters of stolen gasoline.

Last year, however, the highest fuel theft figure was recorded in 15 years, according to the Citizen Energy Observatory (UCE).

At the time of all this, Huachicol is in the center of a political scandal that shakes the official coalition for the alleged involvement of leaders of the State of Tabasco in part of the oil criminal structure.

What is huachicol, and how it became the largest criminal industry in Mexico?

The term apparently comes from the Maya, which calls “Huach” to the “thief.” The suffix “col” was added in reference to an illegal activity. But there is also the theory that comes from the Latin “Aquati”, which means “Aguado”.

At the beginning of the 20th century it was used to define the illegal act of adulterating the liquor, but over time it was transferred to the world of fuel, although with a similar connotation that suggests adulterating.

The theft of fuel in Mexico is a centenary crime, but the first version of contemporary huachicol arose from the bowels of Pemex, the oil company of the Mexican State created in 1938.

“It was the same Pemex employees who began stealing fuel,” says Ana Lilia Pérez, one of the journalists who has most investigated the issue. “And they, so that the milking was not noticed, mixed the product with other substances.”

They stole it in many ways, but the main one was with clandestine shots – precarious some, other sophisticated – throughout the pipelines. Pemex estimates that criminals open an average of 10,000 clandestine shots.

Today it is estimated that there are about 22,000 active shots, almost two for each formal gasoline station.

“For years it was a problem that nobody wanted to see,” says Pérez. “The governments did nothing to stop it and, thanks to that, it was getting bigger.”

But not only thanks to that: before the economic boom of drug trafficking, the posters found in Huachicol the most efficient way to wash their assets while generating new income by putting gas stations and, in them, selling gasoline smuggled or stolen.

“Since 2006 the drug traffickers get fully into huachicol in complicity with entrepreneurs, carriers, people of the energy sector, customs, taxes,” explains the journalist, who has interviewed several narco capos on the subject.

“It was a way for them to have an industry as large and lucrative as drug trafficking, but no one was looking at,” he adds.

He grew so much that he was even created a saint: the “Holy Child Huachicol”, a divine Child Jesus who, instead of carrying staff and flowers, loads a drum and a hose.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who ruled from 2018 to 2024, was the first president who launched a frontal fight against the crime: oil fields were shielded, the transporters received escorts, tens of thousands of illegal shots were disabled and a little less than 8 million liters were recovered, less than a quarter of what Sheinbaum has seized in 10 months.

Although AMLO – who came to say that the crime was “practically eliminated” – made unpublished efforts, experts say that huachicol never grew so much as in his government, not only because clandestine shots continued to increase, but because the diversification of the business was consolidated.

“AMLO’s measures, although the former were insufficient,” says Pérez.

Oil is a special chapter of Mexican history.

The industry, emerged at the end of the 19th century, was until 1938 in the hands of foreign companies that enjoyed easy access to resources and paid few taxes.

That year, President Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the industry, and made Pemex a symbol of sovereignty for a nation facing European and American imperialism.

In the 70s and 80s Mexico became one of the world’s greatest producers in the world thanks to the discovery of the Cantell Campo, in the Gulf of Mexico.

But, meanwhile, the other fields were abandoned. Pemex concentrated on the administration of Cantarell and, after two decades, the field stopped giving supply.

With that the debts came, the corruption scandals, the losses and then, to finish off, the huachicol. Above, the international price of oil fell.

The Mexican oil industry ceased to be what it was. Pemex, which has 130,000 employees, almost 500 production fields and 6 medium machine refineries, is today the most compromised oil company in the world with a debt of US $ 20,000 million.

In 2013, the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto ended 76 years of nationalist history by approving an energy reform that allowed foreign investment.

“Before 2013, as Pemex was the only one in the industry, it was not measured how much it was lost on behalf of Huachicol,” says Diana Pineda, lawyer and consultant on the subject of Sainz firm.

“It was a problem without detecting that, when it is detected, the result of the requirements demanded by the opening, they realize that it is huge, and then the new companies, which planned to invest in pipelines to expedite transport, realized the risks, and that gave a boom of the transport of road and transfer by boat by boat,” he says.

To avoid theft, then, the new industry decided to transport oil and its derivatives by roads and seas.

In Mexico, product of oil nationalism, finished gasoline has a high import tax that seeks to protect the local industry. Instead, the derivatives necessary to refine have no tax.

And that is, the experts say, that the “fiscal huachicol” arises, a crime that does not seek to steal fuel, but to scam customs and taxes services – and, incidentally, to users – importing false or rendered fuel.

There are Mexican states, especially in the border of the north, where half of the fuel consumed last year was smuggled, according to FuelPricing, a Mexican page that monitors fuel prices.

A third of the almost US $ 30,000 million that Mexico has lost in account of this illegal industry is attributed to fiscal huachicol, according to OCE.

The passage of the huachicol of theft to fiscal crime made the industry great, allowed the posters to diversify and involved dozens of Mexican officials and entrepreneurs who are now in the eye of the US authorities.

And not just Mexicans. Fiscal huachicol implies a triangulation of imports with US companies. This year, the United States has sanctioned Mexican citizens and companies, and has arrested a dozen wealthy US businessmen who are supposedly involved in the scheme.

The secretary of the Treasury, Scott Besent, has said that “the theft of fuel and the smuggling of crude oil are sources of income for the narcoterrorist activity of the CJNG (New Generation Jalisco cartel), since they provide a lucrative source of income for the group and allow it to sow chaos in Mexico and the United States.”

In addition to the CJNG, it is known that the Sinaloa poster had a thriving gas stupid network, that the Gulf cartel is a key piece of the US triangulation and that the Santa Rosa de Lima poster is an organization exclusively dedicated to this crime.

Now the posters are, according to the United States, terrorist organizations, so that anyone who is related to them can be charged.

Anyone, for example, the political elite of the State of Tabasco, in the south of the Gulf of Mexico, considered the “Eden of Huachicol” and where the Sheinbaum government has made most of its recent seizures.

The former Secretary of Tabasco Security, Hernán Bermúdez Requena, has a arrest warrant for criminal association, extortion and kidnapping. He is a fugitive.

And his former Chief, former governor Adam Augusto López, who is today a senator and head of the Morena bench and used to be shown as Amlo’s great friend, is against the ropes. The congressman has denied having knowledge of illegal activities during his term in Tabasco.

Sheinbaum has said that he will not issue trials without evidence, but that he will not protect anyone either.

When talking about fiscal huachicol, it is often said that its management is impossible without the endorsement of the authorities. Now that Sheinbaum and Trump seem aligned in their persecution, those authorities could be revealed.

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