Mexican drug cartels cripple Pemex operations in basin

[mike r]

Source: Los Angeles Times

The meandering network of pipes, wells and tankers belonging to the gigantic state oil company Pemex have long been an easy target of crooks and drug traffickers who siphon off natural gas, gasoline and even crude, robbing the Mexican treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars annually.

Now the cartels have taken sabotage to a new level: They've hobbled key operations in parts of the Burgos Basin, home to Mexico's biggest natural gas fields. Forced to defer production and curtail drilling and maintenance in a region that spreads through some of Mexico's most dangerous badlands, the world's seventh-largest oil producer has become another casualty of the drug war.

In May, gunmen wearing camouflage and tennis shoes kidnapped five Pemex workers as they rode to the front gate of the Gigante No. 1 natural gas plant in the Burgos Basin... The kidnappings, plus the reported disappearance of at least 30 other employees of subcontractors in the same region, have terrorized a community where jobs on the oil rigs and at the gas wells are handed down, father to son, for generations. "The traffickers are establishing it clearly," said Sen. Graco Ramirez, a member of the congressional energy committee. "You collaborate, or you die."

The capacity of the traffickers to exert influence over a company as mighty as Pemex only solidifies the widely held perception that the cartels are growing in size and strength despite the government's crackdown. "How is it," asked a relative of a kidnapped worker, "that Pemex, supposedly the backbone of the nation, can be made to bow down like this?"


Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-mexico-pemex-20100906,0,4996948.story

[Bobbieo]

1. Because the cartels have become the backbone of the nation.

[dkf]

2. These guys are out of hand.

Can we really afford to have them run amok?

[Systematic Chaos]

3. So how many US troops are going to have to die to protect "our oil"

this fucking time?

:banghead:

[nvme]

4. Are we to stand idly while lawless druglords seize power?

I don't see us sitting that out for long if they threaten our continued uniterupted supply

[JDPriestly]

5. Mexico has its drug lords, and we have the Koch Brothers.

[Bobbieo]

6. The violence is going to cross the border - It can't miss!