A Gas Heist Gone Wrong
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
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.
> 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.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/03/08/701613540/epis...
“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.
- 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.
It is the same if you replace the lack of education with despair..
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.
This is why ending the war on drugs in US will not improve the Mexico violence problem much.
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.
No need to dress it up in extraneous LARPing where you have a producer.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/17/venezuelan-vic...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
That doesn't sound like it has anything to do with the incident where 137 people died.
"Huachicoleo is becoming one of Mexico’s most pressing economic issues. In 2018 thieves made off with about $3 billion in gas from 12,500 siphonings, almost double the number of thefts of two years earlier. The motive comes down to math. “Most people here earn around 1,500 pesos [$78] a week in a normal job, but by doing this you can get your hands on 2,000 pesos a night for being a hawk and up to 15,000 pesos for being the one who solders the tap,” the Hidalgo huachicolero says. “In an area where people were not long ago riding donkeys, they now have fancy cars.” He and other gang members say a night’s worth of stolen fuel, sold on the black market, can net their bosses roughly $46,000 in profit."
Which means all that has nothing to do with the story, right?
A small bit of information about what's growing on the field (alfalfa), the date it happened and what farm equipment are generally used at the time would make it pretty easy to conclude.
So just because you're not convinced doesn't mean they aren't right.
They are having some actual success reforming in this area - http://www.arabnews.com/node/1353116
Are you talking about something else?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Mexico
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.
Kinda like every other subsidy in a capitalist society.
>I would blame less on "right wing deregulation"
And that's called being blind by ideology.
Having a pro-market stance is respectable position. Being blind to our ideology shortcommings is less than ideal but normal. Trying to rewrite history to fit our own ideology either by mistake or willingly, is being a propagandist.
Or, effectively, most other petro states. At the very least, the leading petroleum venture is a public-private hybrid.
Petro-state political economy is a strange, fire-breathing, beast.