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MEXICO CITY, Sept 20 (Reuters) \u2013 Mexican authorities said on Sunday they had confiscated a vessel in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz and a warehouse in neighboring Tabasco along with storage tanks and trucks used by criminal groups to steal, transport and store hydrocarbons.<\/p>\n
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Fuel theft has been a problem in Mexico for decades but President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has enacted a range of measures to stamp out the practice and crush corruption and organized crime.<\/p>\n
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State oil company Petroleos Mexicanos said in a recent presentation that an estimated 106 billion pesos ($5.02 billion) had been saved since Lopez Obrador took office in December 2018.<\/p>\n
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Various anonymous complaints about criminal groups siphoning off hydrocarbons from pipelines in the area led to the operation, authorities said in a joint statement.<\/p>\n
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On Sept. 11 near the city of Cardenas, Tabasco, officials found a clandestine tap on pipelines, authorities said.<\/p>\n
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Officials then tracked down a warehouse near a highway with 16 storage tanks and five trucks that authorities said were used to store and transport the stolen resources.<\/p>\n
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Several days later, officials located a vessel, called the Blue Commander, docked in the Pajaritos Lagoon in Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz. Officials there surprised people loading hydrocarbon from the trucks onto the vessel.<\/p>\n
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Mexican authorities said 21 people were arrested while the Blue Commander was confiscated.<\/p>\n
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Mexico\u2019s oil-producing southern states have been convulsed by criminal groups and political corruption scandals for years.<\/p>\n
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Across the country, criminal groups have tapped pipelines and other parts of the infrastructure. ($1 = 21.1270 Mexican pesos) (Reporting by Stefanie Eschenbacher; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel and Peter Cooney)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2020.<\/em><\/p>\n gCaptain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" MEXICO CITY, Sept 20 (Reuters) \u2013 Mexican authorities said on Sunday they had confiscated a vessel in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz and a warehouse in neighboring Tabasco along with storage tanks and trucks used by criminal groups to steal, transport and store hydrocarbons. Fuel theft has been a problem in Mexico for decades …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17970,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[1615,1707,1930,1592,1070,8930],"class_list":["post-17969","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-marine-world","tag-fuel","tag-linked","tag-mexico","tag-seizes","tag-ship","tag-theft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17969","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17969"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17969\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/17970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17969"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17969"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.al-sindbad.net\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17969"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}