Blood and oil

September 28, 2018 1:38 PM

Mexico’s drug cartels are moving into the gasoline industry — infiltrating the national oil company, selling stolen fuel on the black market and engaging in open war with the military.
posted by Chrysostom (8 comments total)

Good read. Thanks for posting.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 2:30 PM on September 28, 2018

Thanks, NAFTA and American gun laws!
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:11 PM on September 28, 2018

Speaking of Mexico and cartels... the entire municipal police force of Acapulco has been disarmed by federal and state authorities and placed under investigation.
posted by XMLicious at 6:23 PM on September 28, 2018

A really interesting article that highlights a major problem for Mexico: even if you could remove the income from drugs (presumably by total legalisation in both Mexico and the US, which for the moment remains a pipe dream*), you're still left with large numbers of heavily armed men who are already committed to a life of violence and easy money. They won't just disappear or become plumbers and bus drivers because one income stream has dried up. They'll move into kidnapping, people trafficking, fuel theft, whatever. To me it seems obvious that the authorities will need to reestablish a dialogue with the cartels, as well as a rehabilitation program similar to that used in Colombia for rightwing paramilitaries. It's going to be a hard process though, and a hard sell politically.

Meanwhile, PEMEX is increasingly using Mexico's long coastlines to transport fuel, rather than moving it overland through pipes. It's stored at ports and distributed inland from there. And Mexico, despite being having some of the greatest potential for renewable energy sources in the globe [Wiki] is showing no signs of moving away from fossil fuels. As the article makes clear, the reserves are a highly political issue in Mexico, and there's a lot of history involved. (Here's a picture of the massive "Monument to the Mexican Oil Industry", commemorating the government's expropriation of Mexico's oil in the 1930's. Aptly enough it's on a major traffic junction in the centre of Mexico City.) AMLO is an old-school politician and spoke out against the PRI's recent energy-sector reforms, although he's agreed not to reverse them. He has suggested building an 8 billion USD refinery, though, at a time when Mexico should really be moving towards further exploitation of its plentiful wind, PV and geothermal potential.

*pun sort-of intended
posted by chappell, ambrose at 7:49 AM on September 29, 2018 [1 favorite]

Also relevant: Foreign Policy, The Coming Crime Wars

In the classical view, criminal groups (such as mafias, gangs, and cartels) are not political actors formally capable of waging war. This means they can’t be treated as enemy combatants, nor can they be tried for war crimes. Yet, increasingly, such groups do advance tangible political objectives, from the election of corrupted politicians to the creation of autonomous religious states. What is more, they routinely govern, control territory, provide aid and social goods, and tax and extort money from the populations under their control. They also often collude with corrupt soldiers, police, prison guards, and customs officials to expand their rule. Put succinctly, cartels and gangs may not necessarily aim to displace recognized governments, but the net result of their activities is that they do.

I've long thought of Mexico's cartel problem in terms of basically a resource curse. Whether the natural resource in question is legal or not, the issue is that the flows of money produced by [suddenly appearing industry] are approximately as large (or larger) than the resources available to the government, and the private industry will tend to overwhelm the state.

In Mexico's case, the industry that grew up around drug trafficking has become astonishingly powerful and violent, and is now trying to hijack a legal natural resource, one that was previously under the government's complete control.
posted by chappell, ambrose at 8:05 AM on September 29, 2018 [4 favorites]

Still less than 20 years since the end of 71 years of one-party rule. This is what happens when the corruption runs that deep, for that long.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 11:12 AM on September 29, 2018

Yes, but there’s a lot more to the story than just corruption. Mexico has ended up with a ton of unintended consequences from US legislation and law enforcement. US laws made drugs profitable; heavy policing in the Gulf in the 80s drove transportation routes into Mexico; NAFTA undercut small Mexican farmers, encouraging them to shift to drug production; a steady flow of arms from the US into Mexico armed the cartels. There’s almost no part of the Drug War that doesn’t have bloody US fingerprints all over it.

Which doesn’t mean that Mexico doesn’t have significant internal problems, but those problems are more symptoms than root causes.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:48 AM on September 29, 2018 [5 favorites]

The weed spread quickly and everywhere... scary.
posted by CRESTA at 2:20 PM on October 1, 2018