Tabasco, the new epicenter of huachicol
Imagine this scene: January 2019. The “A new era” memes flood the networks, people still believe it will be their year and in Tabasco, Adán Augusto López is sworn in as Governor. But as he raised his hand, someone else, in some dark duct, raised a blowtorch. And it wasn’t for an abstract art project, precisely. With the arrival of what would later be AMLO’s BFF in the Ministry of the Interior, the clandestine shots in the state decided that it was also their time to shine, and they skyrocketed like a viral tweet of juicy gossip.
Numbers don’t lie, and these in particular are as eloquent as a scream in a library. From 2018 to 2019, illegal picketing of Pemex – that practice where they basically put a straw in the national gasoline – increased by a scandalous 167 percent. We went from 201 to 536 pickets. It’s as if suddenly, instead of a quiet party, an army of crashers with hydraulic tools sneaks in. In its first year, the State Government of the now coordinator of the Morena senators achieved a dubious honor: turning Tabasco into a red light so intense that Pemex surely saw it on the map with Chernobyl alarm. An unprecedented increase in fuel theft that put the state on the map for all the wrong reasons.
The cast of villains: who is who in the Tabasco huachicol
But every great drama needs its cast, and the one in Tabasco in 2019 had more factions than a season of *Game of Thrones*. There was everything on the menu of organized crime. The star group seemed to be “La Barredora“, which, based on its name, one would expect to be dedicated to cleaning streets, but no: its specialty was “sweeping” with the security of Pemex. Military reports of the time attributed links to the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), because what is a local crime without a strategic alliance with a national cartel? It’s like the collaboration of an emerging artist with Bad Bunny, but with more violence and less reggaeton.
In command of this underworld gem were characters with low-budget video game nicknames: Hernán Bermúdez Requena, alias “Comandante H”; Carlos Tomás Díaz, alias “Tomasín”; Euler Ruvalcaba Colorado, “Commander Lightning”; and Roger Pérez Salazar, “Profe”, who was the head of the plaza in Macuspana, Tacotalpa, Jalapa and Teapa until, in a plot twist, he was plagiarized by an armed commando. Life takes more turns than a huachicolero’s tire on the run.
And in case “La Barredora” knew little, the criminal catalog included Felipe Mollinedo Montiel, “Águila”, in charge of Huimanguillo, and Eleazar Sierra Chávez, “Comandante Chelo”, in Playas del Rosario. It sounds like the name of a third division soccer team, but their game was much more dangerous.
To top off the cocktail, independent groups of illicit entrepreneurs operated, because the huachicol hustle also has its freelance version. Leading these crime startups were Uriel García Flores, “Pescuezo”; Lucero Naranjo García, “The Patron”; Tania Libertad Morales, “The Boss”; and Gerardo Ovando Jiménez, “Yayo” and/or “Tigre”. A sign that in the world of hydrocarbon theft there is also room for gender equality and creativity in aliases.
All this was happening under the mandate of a governor whose predecessor, the PRDArturo Núñez Jiménez, surely saw the numbers from afar with a mixture of horror and relief for having passed the baton in time. The question that remains floating, with all the sarcasm in the world, is: was it a simple coincidence or a perfect storm of factors that converged to make Tabasco the paradise of the huachicolero? The official data is there, telling a story of explosive growth that any startup would envy, but with a devastating impact on the economy and national security.
The narrative is clear: while the 4T promised to end corruption and impunity, in one of its key squares the numbers screamed the opposite. A reminder that sometimes, reality surpasses any attempt at an official story, with data as crude as the gasoline that leaked through the perforated pipelines.
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