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Mexico’s Mezcal Boom Is Colliding With a Cargo Theft Crisis
Oaxaca’s mezcal industry is having a moment. Mexico bottled 7.7 million liters of mezcal in 2025 — up more than 400% from a decade earlier — and the global market is projected to cross $1 billion by the early 2030s. Nearly 90% of that production still comes out of Oaxaca, largely from small, family-run distilleries using traditional wood-fired ovens and stone mills rather than industrial equipment.
The problem: every one of those bottles has to travel roughly 750 miles by truck to reach the U.S. border, and the route runs straight through the most dangerous cargo corridor in the country.
A high-value target on a high-risk route
Mexico is now considered the world’s highest-risk country for in-transit cargo truck hijacking. In a recent op-ed for The Hill, Mark Vickers — EVP and Head of International Logistics at Reliance Partners — points out that the highways connecting Oaxaca’s mountain towns to central Mexico have become the riskiest logistics pathways in the country. Mezcal and tequila shipments are attractive targets precisely because they’re easy for criminal groups to resell through informal markets.
A few recent incidents make the pattern clear:
- September 2024: A truckload of Monte Alban mezcal was hijacked at gunpoint on the Mexico–Tuxpan highway near Zempoala.
- July 2025: A shipment of 9,000 bottles of premium agave spirits, worth an estimated $1.3 million, was stolen in Guanajuato.
- July 2026: Hijackers made off with 64 tons of bottled alcohol in Hidalgo.
Oaxaca itself isn’t yet a hijacking hotspot, but that’s cold comfort — mezcal has to pass through Puebla, Mexico State, Michoácan, Jalisco, and Guanajuato to get north, and those states account for the overwhelming majority of incidents. Data from Reliance Partners’ own Mexico Cargo Truck Hijacking Data Portal shows Mexico State and Puebla alone accounted for over 79% of all recorded hijackings in the first half of 2026. Puebla in particular — a key crossing point for Oaxacan mezcal — is now viewed by private-sector analysts as the worst hijacking hotspot in the country, with local collusion between residents and criminal groups making recovery and investigation even harder.
The stakes are bigger than one industry
Cargo theft is costing Mexico close to $1 million a day in lost goods, with an estimated 50 trucks hijacked daily nationwide — a scale that pushed the Mexican Association of Transport Organizations to stage a major protest earlier this year. For most artisan mezcal producers, losing a single truckload isn’t a rounding error — it can be an existential financial hit. That risk lands hardest in Oaxaca, Mexico’s third-poorest state, which pulled in only a sliver of the country’s record $41 billion in foreign direct investment last year. Mezcal is one of the few real growth engines the region has.
President Claudia Sheinbaum has presided over an overall decline in violence since taking office in late 2024, but scrutiny of alleged ties between local Morena party officials — including governors in Oaxaca, Puebla, and Mexico State — and organized crime has moved slowly. Untangling the hijacking rings preying on this corridor will likely mean confronting that political dimension as well as the criminal one.
Why this matters for cross-border shippers
This isn’t just a story about spirits — it’s a preview of the risk profile facing any high-value cargo moving through central Mexico’s trucking corridors, whether that’s food and beverage, electronics, or industrial goods. Route selection, in-transit visibility, and the right cargo insurance coverage aren’t optional extras on these lanes; they’re the difference between a shipment that arrives and one that becomes a claim.
This is exactly the gap Borderless Coverage was built to close. As a Reliance Partners business, we combine cross-border cargo insurance with real hijacking and theft data — including the Mexico Cargo Truck Hijacking Data Portal referenced above — so shippers and carriers moving freight across the U.S.–Mexico border can make informed routing decisions and protect their goods when the worst happens.
If you’re moving high-value freight through Mexico, talk to our team about coverage built for this exact kind of risk.
Adapted from “Mexico’s mezcal boom is under threat from organized crime,” an opinion piece by Mark Vickers, EVP and Head of International Logistics at Reliance Partners, originally published in The Hill.