Criminals Are Profiting From a Major Oxygen Shortage in Mexico City

MEXICO CITY -- He’s been shot at and attacked three times, kidnapped, and abandoned in a mine. Every time he shows up for work, he doesn't know whether he will return home. Alberto Escobar is a truck driver but he isn’t transporting drugs, guns or gold. He’s carrying medical grade oxygen tanks used to keep the sickest COVID-19 patients alive. 

In January alone, criminals stole fourteen trucks carrying oxygen across Mexico. Oxygen tanks have been stolen from hospitals in Tlaxcala, Sonora and Mexico state, many of them at gunpoint. Those tanks are selling on the black market for as much as 40,000 pesos (nearly $2,000) each, increasing the value of Escobar’s cargo by more than ten times. 

“Oxygen has become like gold to criminal organizations,” says Escobar, who lives in constant fear and anxiety when he’s transporting the tanks. “There is always that fear that they'll get me again and they will kill me and leave my body somewhere because that’s happened in a lot of cases. A lot.”

A second wave of the coronavirus pandemic hit Mexico this winter, and it now has the third-highest number of fatalities in the world. In February alone, almost 28,000 people died from the virus. Angel Palafox, a paramedic at Mexico City’s General Hospital in the Doctores neighborhood says sometimes he has to drive around in an ambulance with a patient for up to three hours, just to find them a bed in Mexico’s overwhelmed health system. 

Although Palafox is a paramedic, when his father contracted COVID-19 he struggled to find him oxygen in time. “I felt helpless because I work in health and I could not save him.” 

His father died from the virus. 

With hospitals overwhelmed and an urban myth doing the rounds that once their loved one is admitted they may never return, thousands of Mexicans have decided to treat their sick relatives at home. That has led to skyrocketing demand for individual oxygen canisters. Relatives of sick patients have been forced to scramble for the limited numbers of tanks floating around, and those lucky few who find them end up paying extortionate prices. Others have been tricked into spending thousands of pesos. 

Maribel Mendoza Alvarez paid $600 above market value for a machine that was supposed to convert air into medical-grade oxygen. “Instead of helping my cousin, it made him worse,” she says, and the seller ghosted her when she reported that the machine wasn’t working. Alvarez and her family had to scrape together the last of their savings to seek out oxygen in the early hours of the morning to help her dying cousin. 

She’s not alone. A number of Facebook groups have emerged with hundreds of posts telling stories strikingly similar to Alvarez’s. “Some people have transferred money but they don't receive [anything]. Others agree to meet at a place and they're robbed and beaten,” Alvarez says. 

Those who do manage to get their hands on a tank then have to keep them filled. Maria Félix Apango contracted COVID-19 when she was caring for her mother in January, who eventually died. Now she is fighting for her own life and her son and daughter, Carlos and Elizabeth Pineda, take it in turns every day to wait in line at one of the oxygen refill centers across the city for up to four hours to refill their tanks. “You are constantly finding yourself queuing to refill the tank. Morning, afternoon and night!” says Elizabeth.  

The siblings fill two small tanks of oxygen every day and one big tank every three days, which altogether costs them around $200 a week. Elizabeth is acutely aware that they are some of the lucky few. “People struggle even to get a small oxygen tank and refill it, because they don’t have the money.”

Many Mexicans have blamed the oxygen shortages on the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Alvarez says that “the government thinks it’s a game. I don't understand why they don't help us.” Mexico doesn’t make any of its own medical-grade oxygen - it imports it from either the U.S or China, both of which are dealing with high domestic demands of their own. 

Ricardo Sheffield, head of Mexico’s consumer protection agency (PROFECO), says Mexicans are partly to blame for the shortage of oxygen supply. ”Many people are keeping [oxygen tanks] in their houses and not using them. And right now the demand has gone so high that all the cylinders should go back into the market.” 

Sheffield oversaw a public campaign that urged Mexicans to donate their tanks so others could use them. But many are fearful that if a relative falls ill with COVID-19, they may not be able to track down the oxygen they need. Sheffield is also aware of the rampant fraud online and says he’s doing as much as he can, with the help of a team of cyber police, to take down the fraudulent pages. 

“The desperation of families for oxygen is one of the worst things I've seen,” says paramedic Palafox. “People will pay anything to keep their sick relatives alive.” Either way, the cost of both keeping them on oxygen, or losing them to COVID, is often more than they can bear.