McALLEN, Texas (Border Report) — Mexican officials say they dismantled a massive fuel theft ring in the border town of Reynosa, which comes as U.S. officials are warning of cartel fuel theft along the Southwest border.
The Mexican Attorney General’s Office posted on X this week photos and videos showing the arrests of several people in a neighborhood in Reynosa, where they said they found evidence of a fuel theft operation just south of the U.S. border.
Authorities say 1.8 million liters of stolen hydrocarbon oil — also called crude oil — was found and conficated, along with nine tractor-trailers, 12 motor pumps, 39 fracking tanks, two power generators and an industrial sweeper in the La Escondida neighborhood, according to a Sunday news release by the attorney general’s office.
The neighborhood is just south of the city’s cultural park and convention center.
In May, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the DEA and FBI and Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Security Investigations unit issued an alert urging financial institutions to be on the look out for fraudulent and suspicious activity “connected to the smuggling of stolen crude oil from Mexico across the U.S. southwest border.”
FinCen says several Mexican cartel organizations are in the business of stealing fuel including the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), Sinaloa cartel and Gulf cartel, which operate in the Mexican Gulf state of Tamaulipas.
“In recent years, fuel theft in Mexico, including crude oil smuggling, has become the most significant non-drug illicit revenue source for the Cartels and enables them to sustain their global criminal enterprises and drug trafficking operations into the United States,” the FinCen alert says. “The Cartels are using complicit Mexican brokers in the oil and natural gas industry to smuggle and sell crude oil stolen from Mexico’s state-owned energy company, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) to complicit, small U.S.-based oil and natural gas companies.”
Cartels are using complicit Mexican brokers in the oil and natural gas industry to smuggle and sell crude oil stolen from Mexico’s state-owned energy company.”
U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
Mexican cartels are increasingly turning to new forms of revenue as human trafficking routes to cross into the U.S. border are increasingly becoming more difficult during the Trump administration.
Stealing crude oil is one of those ventures that is costing Mexico because they are stealing from the country’s energy company.
The scale of this black market economy, known locally as “huachicoleo,” is massive and costs the country “tens of billions in tax revenue annually while simultaneously costing the U.S. oil and gas companies billions of dollars annually due to a decline in petroleum imports and exports during this same period,” according to a recent report by the DEA.
Oil theft is now the second-largest source of revenue for organized crime in Mexico, just behind drug trafficking, says the DEA, which has been investigating the crimes.
The DEA said in its 2025 Drug Threat Assessment report the operation is “a sophisticated trade-based money laundering scheme” spearheaded by trans criminal organizations (TCO).
“This black-market petroleum smuggling operation is the primary means by which the TCO funds its networks,” the report says.
Sunday’s seizures were carried out by Mexico’s Federal Ministerial Police of the Criminal Investigation Agency, in coordination with the Security Cabinet of the Government of Mexico through the Ministry of National Defense, the National Guard, the Ministry of Security and Citizen Protection and Civil Protection, firefighters, Pemex personnel, and forensic experts from the institution, the attorney general’s office said.
Sandra Sanchez can be reached at SSanchez@BorderReport.com.
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