Politics: Scandal puts massive and new forms of fuel theft back in focus
A new chapter has opened in the saga of Mexico’s history with massive fuel theft. The issue had been before the public for quite some time, when fuel theft, known as huachicol, was considered to be limited to siphoning off massive quantities of gasoline at Pemex pipelines around the country. But it has now assumed a new and costlier dimension with what is known as fiscal huachicol, which relies on the complicity of businessmen, government and customs officials, and Navy personnel and officers smuggling fuel from the United States into Mexico in operations designed to avoid taxes by passing these fuels off as lower-valued or tax-exempt products.
The numbers are impressive. Eight ports are under the control of huachicolero networks and at least 55 companies are linked to such activities. Under AMLO, huachicol losses reached a whopping half a trillion pesos, or US$24.5 billion. It was the largest corruption scheme in the country’s long history of such practices.
The arrests of 14 suspects, several linked to the Navy, on Sunday, September 7, put the issue on the front burner.
The government’s response has been weak. President Sheinbaum said investigations are ongoing. Navy officials said this corruption was an exception and not the rule in what had been considered to be an institution with high marks in society for being trustworthy. However, the political fallout is just beginning. For starters, it destroys the narrative that corruption ended under AMLO and that the armed forces are incorruptible. This is the second major corruption scandal involving figures close to AMLO this year, as former Tabasco governor and ex-Minister of the Interior Adán Augusto López Hernández’s security secretary has been accused of links with organized crime.
The balance Sheinbaum has tried to maintain between dismantling criminal organizations and protecting politicians and public officials who, from their positions in the previous government, promoted agreements and pacts with organized crime, is becoming unsustainable. Her pursuit of selective justice, keeping alive the complicity of high-level officials so as not to antagonize AMLO and to maintain unity within Morena, is at an intersection point with her need to appease Donald Trump and neutralize calls by hawks in Washington who seek to intervene militarily in Mexico against the cartels they characterize as terrorists.
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