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A Gas Heist Gone Wrong
- lifeeeeee 7y agoThere was an article recently about how the drug cartels in Mexico pivoted into stealing gas. Much easier and less risky than drug trafficking. This is why ending the war on drugs in US will not improve the Mexico violence problem much.
- mschuster91 7y agothe war on drugs should have been aborted years ago. If that had been done, there would not be any gangs blowing up pipelines today.
- threezero 7y agoWe haven’t fought any drug wars in Venezuela, and they have routine gas theft, including tanker truck hijackings. It sounds more like economic causes than “the US did it!”
- privateSFacct 7y agoGas theft is rampant in a number of countries that are not meaningfully part of the US war on drugs as they are not on shipping / growing routes. While less critical than the injuries, there is often significant environmental impact in the cruder cases of pipeline theft. There also ends up being some pretty bad behavior by the private security / mercenaries hired to try and protect some of the infrastructure. Clean goverment, effective law enforcement, pro-social behaviors and economic improvements etc all might reduce some of these issues.
- ch 7y agoAnd we certainly have never interfered in any economic sense in Venezuela ... hold on, my producer is telling me that this is incorrect.
- antidesitter 7y agoElaborate?
- hombre_fatal 7y agoThis type of sarcasm adds nothing and is noise compared to you just making your simple counter-assertion. No need to dress it up in extraneous LARPing where you have a producer.
- giancarlostoro 7y agoVenezuela is a narco state[0], but it wont be till this is in every media outlet that anything will be done about it. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/17/venezuelan-vice-president-just-latest-to-be-called-drug-trafficker https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/17/venezuelan-vic...
- xrd 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93Venezuela_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States%E2%80%93Venezuel... Hugo Chavez's rise was definitely a response to US (and other powers) involvement in Latin America. The US did not "do it" (where it is directly causing gas theft). There is more to the history in South America and directly inside Venezuela and what the US was doing. These issues are much more complicated than "the US never sent troops to Venezuela to fight against drug dealers..." [edit]: removed assertion that parent was purposefully ignoring history. That was my assumption, not what they said.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jopsen 7y agoRemoving one revenue source might help... Even just reducing it. Obviously, no single thing will fix it, and whatever you do it'll take a long time. Economic opportunities might be just as important too.
- catacombs 7y agoLike a Hydra: Once you caught off one head from the beast, three more appear.
- wil421 7y agoThe gas theft is just a way to reduce the risk of drug trafficking. The drugs make far more money than theft or kidnapping.
- stickfigure 7y agoNonsense. It's orders of magnitude easier to protect a pipeline than to stop millions of people from engaging in secret commerce. You could secure that infrastructure with a mere tiny sliver of the tens of billions of dollars spent annually to fight the drug war.
- dsfyu404ed 7y agoAgreed. Cartels aren't run by idiots. There's a reason they didn't pivot years ago and it's not because stealing fuel was too easy/lucrative.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoJust getting rid of the guns for drugs trade would eliminate a lot of Mexico’s violence: Mexico’s gun production is trifling compared to the USA, they would be underwater on gun violence without that illicit trade link.
- mcguire 7y agoThis is what happens when you take a story, in this case gangs and cartels stealing gasoline from pipelines, and add a human interest element that has nothing to do with the story. In this case, that is a group of locals taking gas spewing from a broken pipeline and being killed or injured by the explosion.
- TotempaaltJ 7y agoI'm pretty sure the story here is how 137 people died in a gas explosion in Mexico (plus probably hundreds injured for life), including some backstory as to why that explosion happened. > The Mendoza sisters, however, say seeking out a guilty party is a low priority for them, at least for now. They’re trying to survive the consequences of the fire and get used to the idea of being alone in Hidalgo.
- jjeaff 7y agoFortunately, that is the story. But the headline makes it sound like the accident in particular was due to a heist. This implying an organized effort to steal gas. But as the precious poster mentioned, this was a broken line that locals just started showing up to in order to take advantage of the free money.
- Causality1 7y agoIt wasn't a broken line, it was a botched tap job. I don't see a lot of moral difference between an organized heist and an impromptu opportunistic criminal mob, except that the former has the decency to not get children involved.
- mcguire 7y ago"The scene in the green alfalfa field abutting the pipeline appeared to be a free-for-all, roughly 80 villagers swarming a leak inside a 100-foot-long, 5-foot-deep irrigation trench that bisected the field. There seemed to be no organization, no tap, no hose—only two holes in the pipe, which made the fuel spurt as if from a wonky fountain. It seemed possible a local huachicol gang had screwed up the extraction, but the holes had none of the typical hallmarks." There's no description or picture of the pipe, other than that and the photo captioned, "Survivors have erected a memorial at the site of the fire." Similar pipes get punctured by farm equipment fairly routinely; there's no reason to believe this was a criminal tap rather than an accident that the local people tried to take advantage of. What I suspect Bloomberg wants is an article about the evils of gasoline thieves and they're sticking the human interest story to that to get attention.
- miguelmota 7y agoA great podcast episode on this is Planet Money's 'Mexico Fights The Fuel Pirates'; they explain how it all led up to this https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/08/701613540/episode-899-mexico-fights-the-fuel-pirates https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/08/701613540/epis...
- ghostbrainalpha 7y agoWow... that was a lot better than your average Planet Money segment.
- gnusty_gnurc 7y agoWorth remembering Mexico nationalized gas, leading to gas shortages, rationing - and higher prices.
- forthwall 7y agoThat seems like a un-nuanced generalization of Mexico and it's politics. Saudi Arabia has nationalized gas and has no shortage and low prices.
- privateSFacct 7y agoSaudi Arabia's subsidy of gas prices likely results in either unsustainable economic performance without oil revenue and/or a total lack of value for fuel efficiency = environment impact. They are having some actual success reforming in this area - http://www.arabnews.com/node/1353116 http://www.arabnews.com/node/1353116
- gnusty_gnurc 7y agoI'm just relaying the sense I get from all of my Mexican friends, and studying their culture and history. Their government is unbelievably corrupt and under-performing - and insofar as they've nationalized the provision of gas, yes I expect their government to be less reliant than private&international companies.
- ac29 7y agoMexico nationalized the petroleum industry... in 1938 [0]. Are you talking about something else? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Mexico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Mexico
- licebmi__at__ 7y agoWorth debunking that, as: a) Mexico nationalized gas on 1938. b) Fuel shortage and price hike actually started on 2016 when the previous right wing government deregulated the gas price, and allowed other companies to sell fuel in a free market scheme. Panic sales as everyone was expecting a price hike were the cause of fuel shortages across 2016 and 2017. While the current government has currently halted the privatization process for PEMEX, based on allegations of corruption and dirty business; the fuel shortage was (at least the official story) because of an operation to stop fuel theft, again with allegations of complicity of previous governments.
- BlueTemplar 7y agoDid a kid get shot for seeing too much ?
- gwbas1c 7y agoVersion of story without a paywall: https://1stamendmentnews.org/2019/06/26/a-gas-heist-gone-wrong-an-explosion-and-137-deaths-in-mexico/ https://1stamendmentnews.org/2019/06/26/a-gas-heist-gone-wro...
- knd775 7y agoYou mean a stolen repost of the article?
- gwbas1c 7y agoReminds me of the Zoolander gasoline fight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTrxEQnPtAg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTrxEQnPtAg
- Johnny555 7y agoThat's exactly what I was thinking when I read: “People were fighting, others laughing, and most were drunk on the fumes. They were throwing gas at each other.” It's amazing (and tragic) that people would do this in real life.
- katbyte 7y agoIntoxication is a hell of a thing.
- gwbas1c 7y agoI can think of examples of "mass" misbehavior when I was younger: - Camp councilors eating the freeze pops in the lunch freezer that were for the kids - High schoolers eating all the candy in the vending machine when someone broke the glass - A very large group of us went to a local restaurant. The next day we heard of a lot of people leaving without paying. (I left a lot of money before leaving, and told everyone I sat with to do the same too. Now that I'm older I'd at least track down our server and hand them money personally.) In all cases, there's this weird thing that seemed to turn off in other peoples' heads. It's like all reason just goes away.
- aaron695 7y agoLiveLeak has the footage of it exploding and before and after. It's worth watching if your up to it but the footage of people escaping on fire is hard to handle. But like all such things it is both informative and might help you handle similar situations such as a small gas fire. https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=sLpTO_1547875958 https://www.liveleak.com/view?t=sLpTO_1547875958
- hirundo 7y agoThis is primarily about the poverty of the victims. Most of the adults must have known about the extreme danger of being close to gasoline fumes. If we can't blame their innocence, what's left besides an overwhelming need for the gas or the profit from it? Maybe the answer is herd following behavior. A few oblivious people go into the danger zone, and the less oblivious think maybe they know a reason why it isn't dangerous and I shouldn't miss out. It's a human variation of the myth of lemmings jumping off cliffs, but less mythical.
- crooked-v 7y ago"The profit from it" is underselling the effects of extreme poverty. > Many of the survivors say they’re among the 43% of Mexicans living below the poverty line—about $1,940 a year in the city, $1,260 in the country—and can’t afford to ignore free money.
- fopen64 7y agoMexico is a failed state
- gyrfalcon 7y agoInteresting, reading it brought up this songs lyrics to memory... We don't need no water—Let the motherfucker burn! Burn, motherfucker, burn!
- always4getpass 7y agoGreed breeds corruption, corruption breeds poverty, poverty breeds lack of education, lack of education breeds stupidity. It is the same if you replace the lack of education with despair..