“Sol Prendido” for Borderland Beat
The business consisted of transporting second-hand goods from the United States to Mexico for sale.
“El Cuate Martínez”, son-in-law of Osiel Cárdenas, was in charge of extorting customs in Tamaulipas.
Carlos Fabián Martínez Pérez, known as El Cuate, headed a criminal network of extortionists that generated millions in profits. His target was small transmigrant businesses, a business in which second-hand products are transported from US territory to Mexico for sale.
But El Cuate did not start operating out of nowhere. He is the son-in-law of Osiel Cardenas Guillen, the former leader of the Gulf Cartel who is serving a sentence for drug trafficking that would allow him to go free until 2029.
El Cuate’s crimes
The criminal organization’s operations centered on the Los Indios International Port of Entry in Texas, adjacent to Matamoros, Tamaulipas, the hub of transmigrant business operations since before the 2000s.
US authorities conducted an extensive investigation into the network, which involved hitmen, other businessmen who helped set up the quotas for the businesses, and even money launderers, among whom they identified Jose de Jesus Tapia Fernandez, a former PRI local congressman from the state of Tamaulipas, who helped launder the extortion money through bank transfers.
According to the investigations, in collusion with the owners of some transmigrant transportation companies, they agreed on payments of 40 to 80 dollars per vehicle, in addition to payments from time to time for percentages of the profits obtained. El Cuate alone was found to have $2.7 million in one of his accounts, between 2017 and 2022.
During the investigations, authorities were able to intercept some messages in Whatsapp groups where members of the criminal network discussed the costs and percentages of the fees charged for each type of transport crossing from the United States and Mexico.
They also intercepted a series of messages from August 3, 2018 between El Cuate and one of his colleagues, named Marco Medina where they discuss how to force companies to pay, through violence:
Martinez: “Tell me the latest.”
Medina: “It’s a disaster. Fucking Consuelo is cheating everyone because she didn’t want to pay on Friday.”
Martinez: “She didn’t want to pay or what? Otherwise we’ll have to beat her up.”
Thanks to that information, they discovered that Martínez Pérez is behind the murder of one person and the assault against another on March 7, 2019, when both, related to a transmigrant company, were returning from the United States to Mexico. He is also linked to the murder of three other people in November of the same year, under the same circumstances.
El Cuate was arrested in November 2022 after an operation against more than a dozen people in Mission, Texas.
He was later accused along with his colleagues of money laundering, extortion and price gouging, at least since 2011, a million-dollar operation in which they charged transmigrant business owners with the “right to work” so they could carry out their activities.