Mexico’s government has eggs on its face after it carried out a large-scale raid at a fuel depot and tried to pass it off as a historic cartel fuel-theft raid. The embarrassing news came amid the victory dance when the company that owns the fuel depot produced documents and receipts showing the depot was in legal standing and had all the needed permits.
The incident began on September 17, when Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office (FGR), along with Mexican federal security forces, raided a large fuel depot in the state of Guanajuato, seizing 59 million liters of diesel. Mexican authorities hyped up the raid, claiming that the large-scale fuel complex was clandestine in nature and illegal.
The following day, Mexico’s top security official Omar Garcia Harfuch gave a press conference where he announced the “historic seizure” and claimed that while no arrests were made during the raid, arrests of illegal fuel dealers would follow.
The move follows an apparent crackdown on illegal fuel that is either stolen or smuggled into the country in a practice known as huachicol- a colloquial term for dirty fuel.
Hours after the news conference, the fuel company GRUPO SIMSA issued a news release claiming that its fuel depot in San Jose Iturbide, Guanajuato, was in full legal standing and had been operating for nine years. In its statement, Grupo SIMSA listed several permit numbers from state and federal licensing agencies, including national security, environmental, soil use, and transportation entities, that had all signed off on the depot’s use. The company said it had turned over all the documents to federal authorities, but the public can search for them in publicly available state, federal, and local government databases.
Hellbound and Down 