In the early morning of September 16, a downpour broke out in Ojital Viejo, Veracruz, which covered everything in black: the trunks, the plants, the crops, the stream and the surrounding animals. Although the villagers reported it early in the morning, no one arrived because it was a holiday.
The oil that painted Ojital Viejo began as a leak a month earlier. At first, they confused the smell coming from the pipeline with the asphalt of the road that was being paved. When they found the rupture, they called Petrleos Mexicanos (Pemex), who sent a crew of uniformed personnel to do the cleaning work.
“But they didn't take what had been spilled and it stuck in the stream,” says Romualdo García de Luna, grandfather of the community council.
The downpour washed away the stagnant waste from the spill, contaminated the stream and what it found in its path. By September 16, everything was under a black coating with the smell of solvent that stayed in the air for weeks. This was one of the last major spills of the year, in addition to the 270 on a serious and moderate scale that occurred in the past six years, according to official information obtained for this report.
Ojital Viejo is a community in the municipality of Papantla, in the center-north of Veracruz, with around 700 inhabitants. As part of the Totonacapan region, their mother tongue is Totonaca and they have a Council of Grandparents that acts as an authority figure responsible for transmitting ancient knowledge and participating in decision-making.
Close to the community, just 20 minutes away by road, is Poza Rica, a city with an oil history due to its deposits discovered in the 1950s.
Given the history of the region, spills and leaks were known in Ojital Viejo, but they had never experienced anything like last September 16. However, it took two days and a closure by the population of the El Chote-Coatzintla highway, which connects Poza Rica and Papantla, for Pemex to send its staff.
“We had no choice, we know that we affected third parties (with the closure of the road), but it wasn't because we wanted to, it was because everything was contaminated: the stream, the fauna, the aquatic, the terrestrial and more than eight kilometers of our crops,” says grandfather Romualdo.
They closed the road for a couple of days and negotiated giving 15 more for Pemex to do the cleaning work. Otherwise, they would take over the oil facilities in Poza Rica.
Although the company sent a representative with a group of workers, a month after the spill there was no significant progress for the people, who also reported attitudes of intimidation and discrimination during the process. The population decided to file a complaint with the Security, Energy and Environment Agency (ASEA), which is the regulatory body for the hydrocarbon industry in Mexico.
On October 17, ASEA reported in a statement that it had held a meeting with the Papantla City Council to discuss the spill, where it said it would impose “measures of urgent application for environmental care.”
Moderate and severe
Historically, Veracruz and Tabasco have been the entities with the highest oil production in Mexico. These are states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, where hydrocarbon deposits are concentrated. However, the presence of the oil industry has also brought environmental damage.
As was the case in Ojital Viejo, the fishermen of the Pánuco River have abandoned their jobs due to pollution; in Papantla, agricultural producers report damage to their sugar and soy crops; and to the south, communities near the Coatzacoalcos River can't find anything to fish because of the fish die.
In a breakdown of the last six-year period, from December 2018 to July 2024, the Pemex Emergency Coordination and Support Center (CCAE) reported 270 spills and leaks on a moderate and serious scale, mainly to soil and water, according to information provided via transparency to Causa Natura Media.
Of the 270 spills and leaks on a serious and moderate scale, Tabasco reflects 70 and Veracruz 62, ranking first and second, respectively. This represents 50.7% of the total number of spills that occurred across the country.
If we add those classified as having the lowest impact, the figure rises to more than 6,000 in this same period throughout the country.
This official information does not take into account spills generated by clandestine takeovers. In addition, the data are given until July 2024 because this is the information available from Pemex at the time of making the request for information.
It is important to highlight that the CCAE has changed the records of the previously reported figures. In an information request made in 2023 by Causa Natura Media, the total number of moderate and severe spills for Tabasco was 80 as of 2022.
“It is worrying that there is this lack of public policies and this refusal to accept that these incidents exist. It places the authority in a total violation of human rights,” says Alejandra Jiménez, a member of the Regional Coordinator for Solidarity Action in Defense of the Huasteca-Totonacapan Territory (CORASON), a network of groups and communities that emerged in 2015.
Jiménez has accompanied the communities of Huasteca-Totonacapan in reporting several oil spills. “It's not just one of the last administrations, we see that for years there has been a lack of public policies to address incidents generated by the hydrocarbon industry,” he said in an interview.
During four six-year periods, from 2000 to 2018, Pemex reported 7,276 leaks and spills of different scales, according to official figures published in its Sustainability Reports. If we add the estimate from 2019 to 2024, the figure rises to more than 13,000 incidents.
It should be considered that the increase has been in the number of spills and leaks. If we talk about the volume spilled per barrel, the figure has been decreasing. It was the highest in the six-year term of former president Vicente Fox (2000 - 2006) with more than 288 thousand barrels spilled, followed by Felipe Calderón (2006 - 2012) with more than 166 thousand barrels, then López Obrador with more than 15 thousand until 2023 and, finally, Enrique Peña Nieto (2012 - 2018) with more than 11 thousand barrels.
Faced with the various figures, civil society organizations such as the Mexican Alliance against Fracking have called for a public platform where any citizen can access information about these spills: how many they are, where they have been generated, what are the mitigation and remediation measures taken.
For Jiménez, the lack of transparency is enhanced in the peasant and indigenous communities that are the most affected.
“We noticed that the industry pays less attention here because it knows that there are conditions that allow it not to do repairs as they should be. Unlike a city where it knows that the media will arrive, with a civil society willing to denounce and organizations that will more easily cover these complaints,” he points out.
Communities among oil
Grandpa Romualdo learned that the orange groves growing in Ojital Viejo will take five years to become edible several weeks after the spill. This was told to him by a chemist whom he consulted in a search for information to understand what would happen next.
“For me it was an ecocide,” says grandfather Romualdo, listing the animals they couldn't rescue, the crops and the stream that remained contaminated even after cleaning work and comments about chronic-degenerative diseases in regions with an oil history.
“After all that, I began to organize myself to see the problem more deeply, concerned about the children who live by the stream, thinking about what effects they will have on their health when they are 30 years old,” he says.
In the search, grandfather Romualdo visited the mayor of Ojital Viejo to ask him to summon some communities in Veracruz that also experienced oil spills.
This organization led to the meeting of 11 municipal agents who are currently seeking to proceed before ASEA and other bodies such as the National Water Commission (Conagua) and the Federal Attorney's Office for Environmental Protection (Profepa).
One of the objectives is to speak with the current president Claudia Sheinbaum to explain the effects that are being experienced in the Totonacapan territory. As well as reaching an agreement with Pemex.
“There are a lot of oil wells in the area and that is why we are asking in writing that the Mexican Petroleum Institute make a commitment to us and that every month it gives us information on how this is being handled,” says grandfather Romualdo. 
And Pemex?
“It is assumed that every year the global hydrocarbon sector has more knowledge and implements better measures, but this has not happened to Pemex and, fundamentally, it is because the reduction in resources, the reduction in budget, has not been accompanied by an improvement in practices,” explains David Rosales, managing partner of the consultancy firm Elevation Ideas.
For 2025, Pemex received a budget of 464,255 million pesos, which positions the parastatal company over other agencies such as the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources, but represents a decrease of 3.6% (in nominal terms) compared to 2024.
The current 2025-2030 Work Plan, presented by President Claudia Sheinbaum, is committed to continuing the exploration, production and refining of oil and gas.
“Actions will be implemented to increase hydrocarbon reserves with the objective of guaranteeing at least ten years of consumption. 269 exploration wells will be drilled distributed over six key projects,” said the Work Plan.
For Rosales, one of the mistakes that has been made since the last six years is to involve the parastatal company in the entire chain. “We insist on wanting to see Pemex as a company that it is no longer, as if it had been the small box to maintain national public finances,” he says.
The consultant points out that there is a high production in extraction, but the problem is that it has not been invested in the previous phase of exploration, which affects the efficiency of the rest of the chain. As well as “continuing to refine when our refineries were not in a position to start refining more”. 
For its part, since 2015, ASEA has acted as a regulator of the hydrocarbons industry. This gives him powers such as punishing for spills and leaks that occur. However, Causa Natura Media documented that there were only 14 sanctions between 2015 and 2022 against more than 5 thousand spills reported during the same period.
In another more recent request for information, ASEA reported a list of 256 files opened from 2015 to 2024 for spills, but none resulted in a financial penalty, which is monetary collection as a result of non-compliance with the law.
“I would tell you that the problem is no longer in regulation, but in the final concept of the regulatory cycle, which is enforcement, in Spanish I would translate it as the process of enforcing regulation,” Rosales explains.
The consultant points out that there is a conflict in which the sanctioned party and the sanctioning party belong to the State. “There is no way to make ASEA fight with Pemex to impose a sanction when the boss is the same and says 'leave this one alone because I don't want reputational damage, nor the fine, nor the obligations, nor the excess burden,” he exemplifies.
The repair
Now that Ojital Viejo is in a collective organization, another of his requests is a signing of an agreement between the community, Pemex and the government, in which the parastatal company undertakes to clean all its pipelines.
“Because if you don't do the maintenance, we are paying the consequences, we are the ones who live in these communities,” says grandfather Romualdo.
They also ask that an air study be carried out to determine the degree of pollution. Although the most tangible impacts are on the ground, the information that exists about chemical components in the air is almost zero.
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