The US Treasury Department has moved to cut off a violent Mexican fuel-theft cartel from the American financial system, sanctioning the Cartel de Santa Rosa de Lima (CSRL) and its jailed leader as part of a broader crackdown on criminal groups bankrolling operations through stolen oil and gas. The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated the Guanajuato-based organization after investigators concluded that CSRL was profiting by siphoning fuel and crude oil from Mexico’s state-owned energy giant, Pemex.
Under the new measures, OFAC also blacklisted CSRL boss Jose Antonio Yepez Ortiz, better known as “El Marro,” or “the sledgehammer.” Though he is serving a 60-year sentence in Mexico, US officials say Yepez Ortiz has continued to run parts of the organization from behind bars, relaying instructions to lieutenants through lawyers and family members. The sanctions freeze any US-based assets linked to CSRL or its leader and formally bar Americans from doing business with them, with civil and criminal penalties possible for violations.
Fuel theft — widely known as huachicol in Mexico — has quietly become the second-largest revenue stream for the country’s cartels after drug trafficking, the Treasury’s findings show. For CSRL, that racket centers on Pemex’s infrastructure. Officials describe a network that bribes insiders, taps pipelines, siphons fuel from refineries, hijacks tanker trucks, and intimidates workers to gain access to hydrocarbons. The stolen fuel is then sold across Mexico, the United States, and Central America, while crude oil is moved north through complicit brokers, often disguised as “waste oil” in order to skirt taxes and environmental rules.
Once inside the United States, that oil flows to unscrupulous importers along the southwest border and beyond, where it is sold at deep discounts on domestic and global markets. The proceeds are quietly recycled into cartel coffers, feeding corruption, violence, and a sprawling cross-border energy black market. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent framed the latest action as part of President Trump’s pledge to “eliminate” cartels by targeting not just their narcotics revenue but any scheme they use to raise or launder money.
CSRL itself, founded around 2014 and named for a community in Guanajuato, has been locked in a brutal turf war with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) since 2017 over control of fuel theft in a pipeline-rich region known as the “Bermuda Triangle.” That conflict has helped turn Guanajuato into one of Mexico’s deadliest states. As recently as August, authorities seized more than 164,000 liters of stolen hydrocarbons tied to the group. US officials say CSRL has also forged alliances with the Gulf Cartel and the Sinaloa Cartel, recruited former Colombian military and paramilitary fighters, and expanded into narcotics trafficking, including heroin shipments into the United States.
The sanctions build on earlier Trump-era moves to designate CJNG as a foreign terrorist organization and pursue fuel-theft networks connected to that cartel as well. A May alert from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) prompted banks to flag more than $827 million in suspicious oil-smuggling transactions, highlighting how large this gray economy has become. FinCEN’s analysis suggests that once extreme outliers are removed, a typical oil-smuggling deal comes in at roughly $5 million. Suspicious activity reports clustered not only in states like Florida and Texas but also in border towns such as Brownsville, Mission, and Eagle Pass — a reminder that the financial arteries of cartel oil theft run much deeper into the US economy than a casual glance at the headlines might suggest.
