Huachicoleo is modern Mexican slang for fuel theft. A huachicolero is a fuel thief.

The words are also related to the making and selling of cheap alcohol.

I stumbled on this word in a news story last year and I was intrigued because it looks like it might be related to a word used in northeastern Guatemala: huechero, which means “tomb raider” or “grave robber.” My Mayan friends there use it when they talk about the people who find the thousands of tombs and temples in the dense forest (this is the downside of lidar maps becoming widely available) and dig into the base in search of pottery to sell.

According to Wikipedia, the origin of the word huachicolero is not clear. Maybe it’s from huachicol or guachicol, which mean cheap and poorly made alcohol.

Another source suggests that those words refer to the tool used to pick fruit from trees (a pole with a basket on one end, like we use for apples in our orchard, to reach the high fruit without breaking branches) and by association a person who uses it.

Most commonly, the word means someone who steals fuel by tapping into pipelines. When a word like that comes into common usage, it tells a story. Well, all words tell stories. But new words tell stories about new things, often using old words in new ways. In this case, it probably tells a story about local economies.

Wikipedia adds one more possible etymology, suggesting that it is from the Mexican slang word guacho, which Wikipedia says is from Mayan waach, which means thief.

That last sentence caught my eye for a few reasons.

First, there is no one Mayan language. Guatemala alone recognizes 21 different Mayan languages, subdivided into different families. Throughout Guatemala and Mexico I think there are thirty or so Mayan languages altogether. They bear some similarities, but they are different enough that a speaker of one Mayan language might not be able to understand a speaker of another.

Second, that word waach looks to me like the word used in some Yucatecan Mayan languages for “armadillo”. In Maya Itzá, that word is hueche or huex. The huecheros or grave robbers get their name from the armadillo, which spends its days rooting around the forest floor looking for food and digging small holes to get what it needs to eat.

Mine is just another speculative etymology, but I would guess that the modern Mexican slang is a new word that tells a story of economic problems, taken from a very old word that tells the story of a part of nature.