Police offices in Colombia are documenting “extreme” environmental damage, Reuters reported on Friday, caused by thieves who steal oil from pipelines to create an ugly improvised fuel called pategrillo.
The pategrillo is employed to process coca leaves into cocaine. Soaring cocaine production has created a huge demand for pategrillo and the clumsy methods employed to steal and process oil are wreaking havoc on the environment.
Pategrillo cookers obtain oil by punching holes in pipelines, which generally run above ground in Colombia. Since they wish to avoid being spotted by police or oil company security teams, the thieves prefer to steal oil in remote, densely forested regions. Crude instruments like hand drills and cheap plastic tubing are used to perforate and tap the pipelines. Then the oil is poured into whatever cheap and dirty plastic containers the thieves can scrounge up.
Oil leaks into the soil from the clumsy taps created by smugglers, and the process of cooking the oil into pategrillo, releases toxic fumes from crudely-maintained equipment. The fumes are poisonous enough to strip leaves from trees and kill wildlife.
The thieves also have a habit of stealing much more crude oil than they need and simply dumping the excess into the ground – or pouring it into rivers, which contaminates the water supply for rural communities.
Pategrillo can be used to soak coca leaves and extract the substances needed to produce cocaine. Gangs also use improvised gasoline to power machinery for illegal mining.
“The damage is extreme. The animals, the trees – everything is totally burned. Words aren’t enough to show the world the damage,” police commander Col. Johan Pena told Reuters on Friday.
Another police official told Reuters a single refinery contaminates an average of three square kilometers with toxic liquids and gasses.
Colombian police say they are raiding and destroying over a hundred pategrillo refineries near the Pacific port of Tumaco every year. Many of these refineries are reportedly run by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a Marxist terrorist organization that produces a great deal of cocaine. Another major culprit for fuel theft is the National Liberation Army (known by its Spanish acronym ELN), an active left-wing insurgency that declared a Christmas ceasefire this week.
Environmental activists have long suspected oil thefts and pategrillo manufacturing in Colombia are dramatically under-reported for a variety of reasons, including the remote location of the thefts and both corporate and government officials reluctant to discuss how much oil is being stolen.
Pategrillo is a low-quality fuel that creates a much lower purity of cocaine than proper gasoline, but it is so much cheaper that pategrillo refiners can barely keep up with demand, especially when properly refined gasoline becomes more expensive.
Besides cocaine producers, pategrillo is often purchased by customers who want a cheaper alternative to gasoline for their vehicles. This ironically includes Colombia’s neighbor Venezuela, which has vast oil reserves but inadequate refining capacity. Before socialist dictators Hugo Chávez and his protege Nicolás Maduro came to power, Colombian cartels smuggled in gasoline from Venezuela to prepare cocaine, but now desperate Venezuelans buy pategrillo to use as fuel.
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