Mexico’s National Customs Agency (ANAM) has seized more than 50 million liters of diesel that have been smuggled into the country via trains, ships, or tankers over the past five months, Rafael Marín Mollinedo, head of the agency, reported Thursday.
The customs official indicated that this illegal practice has been detected at customs offices in Tampico, Laredo, Ciudad Juárez, Matamoros, and other locations.
After participating in the 85th National Congress of Customs Agents , organized by the Confederation of Associations of Customs Agents of the Mexican Republic (CAAAREM) , he commented that they are monitoring the different customs declarations that have been entering different parts of the country and have detected various modifications.
“First, they started changing the tariff items; instead of saying diesel, they said fuel oil additives. We flagged all those items under Chapter 27, but then they started changing them to other products; now it’s a chemical product,” he explained.
It’s worth remembering that on July 7, a joint operation involving various authorities seized 129 tanker trucks and 15 million 480 thousand liters of fuel in Coahuila, considered the largest seizure so far during the six-year term of Claudia Sheinbaum, President of Mexico.
The first action took place in the municipality of Ramos Arizpe, where state police informed security agents about several tanker trucks that were apparently abandoned near a train station; at the site, they located 33 tanker trucks containing 3.96 million liters of hydrocarbons .
In another incident, near a station in Saltillo, 96 tank trucks were found stranded on the railroad tracks, containing 11 million 520 thousand liters of hydrocarbons.
In this regard, Marín Mollinedo explained that they were able to detect what was passing through the railroads through the Electronic Customs Data Processing Center, which provides information from the 14,000 cameras located at all customs offices.
“We checked what was coming on those trains, and there we found the last seizure we made. 129 trains, tank trucks, passed on one train. They had only declared 10% of the fuel, meaning they were carrying 120,000 liters, and they had only declared 10,000 liters on the customs declaration,” he explained.
Regarding the results of the National Customs, Logistics, and Foreign Trade Survey presented at the congress, which highlighted the limited infrastructure at maritime customs offices and the state of the facilities, among other topics, he indicated that they are working to remedy this situation.
“We’ve replaced many customs directors, and we’re reviewing their operations and performance. Wherever we see a lack of progress, we make the change. We’re there, monitoring all the requests from ANAM and the central offices, ensuring that people pay what they owe,” he explained.
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