“Morogris” for Borderland Beat
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| Sinaloa Cartel leader Juan Jose Esparragoza Moreno (alias El Azul) and his daughter Brenda Guadalupe Esparragoza Gastélum |
A Mexican federal court approved a motion in favor of Brenda Guadalupe Esparragoza Gastelum, the daughter of Sinaloa Cartel kingpin Juan José Esparragoza Moreno (alias El Azul).
The motion was issued by Ms. Esparragoza-Gastelum’s defense team to recover MXN$28,119,686 pesos (approximately US$1.7) that were seized by the Mexican government from the drug lord’s family on 24 April 2013.
The court’s decision effectively terminates the agreement that gave approval for the seizure, and now Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office (FGR) and Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) have to prove their case again. The FGR is not allowed to provide new evidences to the case and may only rely on what was presented for the original seizure when it was done ten years ago.
The FGR pushed for the court to discard Ms. Esparragoza-Gastelum’s motion, but the court did not agree with this and claimed that the motion was “sufficiently reasonable” and that enough time had lapsed for them to allow for a case re-review.
When the UIF froze these assets in 2013, they argued that Esparragoza Gastelum and her sister Nadia Patricia were involved in money laundering because they were investing in companies that were sanctioned by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act) on 24 July 2012. Many of these companies were owned by suspected Sinaloa Cartel members that were sanctioned by the US individually too.
On May 2022, the UIF ordered that Ms. Esparragoza-Gastelum’s be taken off Mexico’s blacklist, but the MXN$28 million that were seized were not returned.
It is worth noting that in August 2014, El Azul’s son José Juan Esparragoza Jimenez was arrested and claimed that his father died earlier that year. Mexican authorities conducted an investigation but they were not able to conclude with if El Azul had died, mainly because they did not have biometric information of El Azul in their database.
El Azul is historically regarded as one of the Sinaloa Cartel’s most important figures along with Ismael “El Mayo” Zamabda and Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.