Highway robbers and railway bandits are riding high

Mexico | Highway robbers and railway bandits are riding high in Mexico, pulling off brazen daylight heists and inflicting serious damage on the national economy.

“It’s getting worse and worse every day,” said Luis Alvarez Marcen of the Mexican Insurers Association.

Train robberies occur an average of 4.5 times a day, and parts of Mexico are so rife with truck hijackings that a newspaper labeled them “Bermuda Triangles,” referring to the Atlantic Ocean region where ships and planes supposedly have vanished.

Along some major highways, armed gangs take control of one fully loaded 18-wheeler after another. They unhitch the tractor-trailers and hitch them onto their own cabs, hauling the loot away.

“They can do it in less than two minutes,” said Gustavo Passa, the regional safety and security manager for Ryder System, a global transportation and logistics company with headquarters in suburban Miami.

A highway cargo trade group in Mexico, known by its Spanish initials as Canacar, reported more than 10,000 highway thefts of cargo last year, a 40 percent spike over the previous year. No figures are available yet for 2010.

Using government data, the Mexican Association of Security and Industrial Satellite Companies estimated that losses from cargo theft last year amounted to about $9 billion, or nearly 1 percent of the country’s economic output, said the group’s secretary, Adrian Charansonnet.

One audacious technique of highway robbers is to masquerade as police officers, including fake uniforms and patrol cars.

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