US media is paying zero attention to this major story. Perhaps because it’s not as luridly eyecatching as bad drugs, big guns and severed heads.
Regardless, the Pemex scandal coupled with the one at Procampo is bleeding the Calderon administration of what little life force remains in its veins after a failed three-year war against the narco cartels and its resultant “collateral damage” to a hapless Mexican citizenry, plus a major flu epidemic and a cratered economy.
Corruption in Mexican governance is not news. but the Zetas/Pemex enterprise went into a whole other dimension.
Sources in SEDENA (Secretaria de la Defnsa Nacional) intelligence revealed that computers seized in the raids at Pemex security last week show that from 2007 to June 2009 Los Zetas’ milking of Pemex pipelines was massive. Investigators discovered the Zetas had 557 clandestine outlets along the Pemex pipelines from which they siphoned fuel and oil. The cartels’ operations extended across Veracruz, Tamaulipas, Estado de Mexico, Nuevo Leon and further south to Oaxaca and Tabasco.
The stolen fuel–sold at 4 pesos per liter–was transported to outlets in tanker trucks with 15,000 and 45,000 liter capacities, yielding $4,500 and $13,500 per load. No fewer than 329 trucks were used in the operation.
According to records retreived from impounded Pemex computers, the amount of stolen fuel fuel increased every year since 2006, yielding millions of dollars–most of which was laundered into bank accounts in the US and France.
Thirty-eight Pemex officials and employees have been arrested thus far–20 of these have said they were “working for Los Zetas.”
The Zetas located the Pemex fuel ducts with computer data from Pemex officials, who also provided the cartel with intelligence on Mexican military and Pemex security operations. To go along with that lucrative information, the Pemex insiders furnished the Zetas with Pemex uniforms, official vehicles and identification documents.
“The Zetas’ road was paved by corruption at Pemex–from the management level to security officers, ” said one SEDENA investigator.
The question now: how high and wide does the Zetas’ road run in Mexico?
