It was practically the last handful of months before Enrique Peña Nieto left power. With the federal elections over and the approval of the last PRI budget for the country, the security conditions relaxed. The former PRI president limited himself to giving interviews less and less articulated by his advisors and tried to explain why 2017 had been the most violent year in the recent history of Mexico.

All this happened while billions of pesos were being robbed in goods from the offshore platforms of Pemex, the great Mexican oil company. The most popular word of this 2019 is huachicoleo and it was also during the last years of the peñismo. The Pemex pipeline milking and the sale of stolen gasoline seemed to be only a terrestrial crisis. But the pirate robbery (with boats and marine thieves included) rose 310% in 2018.

Thanks to documents presented by the newspaper Milenio, we know that Pemex’s theft of maritime platforms had critical cases during 2016 and 2018. At the end of the Peña Nieto era there were 197 attacks, looting and aggressions against Mexican oil platforms in national waters. This is a considerable increase if we look at the 2016 figures, where there were only 48 attacks detected.

Recall that pirates have returned in the early years of the twenty-first century. In African coasts it is already a tradition to shield oneself against pirates who assault other ships, something that also happens in Mexico, where very little is known about who are these thieves who use boats and weapons to subdue their victims in the sea. What is known is that the losses in Pemex resulting from these looting exceed 224 million pesos, a figure that severely damages the already most indebted oil company inthe world.

These robberies are part of an increasingly structured huachicoleros strategy. The theft of gasoline from the national oil company has only increased since Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto came to power.President López Obrador has already confirmed that the past administrations knew about the looting of the oil company and did not act as they should. Pemex leaders , politicians and businessmen who could be commanding these massive looting are currently being investigated.

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In the case of pirates, they can be understood as a natural response to the lack of security strategies in the fight against huachicoleo. The new administration has promised to increase the theft of hydrocarbons as a serious crime, without possibility of bail and with immediate jail. But the thefts of these pirates seem more amateurish than they sound. When arriving by boat, it is impossible for fuel suctions with the same capacity as the huachicoleros by land . The records show that they steal employees, technical equipment, tools and lights from the platforms more than anything else.

The areas where these robberies are committed the most are, clearly, territories close to the sea. From the platforms in Campeche and Tabasco, to those in Ciudad del Carmen, in Pemex, more and more constant robberies have been reported by armed pirates who arrive in increasingly larger groups (up to 23 boats per robbery, says Milenio).

The other big problem to understand the capacity of these looting is the lack of complaints. From the inside of Pemex they have stopped reporting all attacks by these Mexican pirates. We know of 312 robberies, where the amounts of the stolen are not clear, and also of several other cases where the authorities have not been alerted about the looting. This complicates investigations to stop a criminal network of which absolutely nothing is known.