“Socalj” for Borderland Beat
From an Excelsior Opinion Column by Jorge Fernández Menéndez
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They are not included in the count of missing persons that the federal government poorly keeps, but it was one of the most extensive and unpunished criminal operations that we have known. At the end of last March, more than one hundred people, entire families, women, the elderly and children were kidnapped in one night in Culiacán. For Governor Rubén Rocha, these are things that happen. Days later he assured that all of the kidnapped people, 66 he said there were, had appeared alive.
In reality, there were more than a hundred, and nothing has been heard from many of them. Of course, there are no open files in the state prosecutor’s office regarding the case. Nobody filed a complaint.
The story is more complex. In March of this year, in Culiacán, in a house that was being remodeled and owned by Iván Archivaldo Guzmán, $20 million dollars in cash that belonged to the leader of the Chapitos “disappeared.” Iván Archivaldo attributed the robbery to the workers and elements of the state ministerial police who were at the scene and ordered the kidnapping of all those involved and their families to try to recover the money.
They say that it was Governor Rocha himself who contacted Iván Archivaldo to return the women and children as soon as possible because the issue had become a national scandal.
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| Enrique Díaz Vega, Sinaloa’s State Treasurer. |
Sinaloa Governor Meets Los Chapitos
The person who organized the meeting, all according to Sinaloan sources, was the State Treasurer, Enrique Díaz Vega, who according to this version is the one who maintains direct contact between the state government and Chapo’s children. Díaz is also very close to the federal undersecretary of expenditures, Juan Pablo de Botton.
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| Sinaloa’s Governor Rocha. |
The meeting between the governor and the Chapitos took place at Díaz’s house, in the Alamos subdivision, property of the Coppel family. At the meeting it was decided to release the family members and liquidate those directly involved in the theft of Iván Archivaldo’s money. Those are the missing people who did not return.
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| The 4 men Ivan called out, including two law enforcement/military agents, have not been located dead or alive. |
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Water Rights Handed Over
As part of the agreement for the release of the kidnapped people, control of the drinking water boards (a very powerful instrument in the state) was given to the Chapitos, particularly those of Mazatlán, Culiacán, Salvador Alvarado and the irrigation modules of the center and the north of the state.
The Chapitos themselves were the ones who made the appointments that were confirmed by the state government. On the other hand, as had already happened in 2021, the criminal organization promised to become fully involved in the June 2, 2024 election.
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| Sergio Carmona, Killed in Tamaulipas in November, 2021. |
Corrupted Elections
This whole story is related to another. Since the murder of Sergio Carmona, in November 2021, a network of secret accounts for money laundering in different tax havens began to be revealed with million-dollar amounts that were supposed to support electoral processes and political projects of Morena candidates. One of those campaigns was that of Sinaloa.
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Morena’s delegate in Sinaloa for the elections in which Rocha was elected, was the now governor of Tamaulipas, Américo Villareal. In Sinaloa, there was not only highly suspicious and illegal financing, part of which circulated through the accounts of the son of the now Tamaulipas governor, but also an entire operation, already disclosed in detail, by the Sinaloa cartel against the PRI-PAN alliance.
PRD, which kidnapped the electoral operators of the opposition alliance, including the PRI’s organizational secretary, throughout the electoral weekend, to paralyze the entire organization, including many key polling station representatives.
Carmona’s participation in that plot was reported before his murder, but after his execution and when days later his brother Julio Carmona surrendered to US justice and took advantage of the protected witness system, many details were revealed. Since then, the secret accounts of his brother Sergio de Jesús and many other operations and complicities began to be disclosed.
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Because with the information provided by Julio Carmona, the United States Department of the Treasury organized an international investigation that ended up discovering a wide network of bank accounts with more than $60 million dollars. The fortune of the Carmona brothers, a product of huachicol, according to US media citing sources from the American Union, would exceed $2 billion dollars.
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Sergio Carmona had several accounts in the Cayman Islands, the Netherlands and the Bermuda Islands. The same investigation discovered operations with one of Américo Villarreal’s sons, Humberto Francisco Villareal Santiago, with a transfer of more than $20 million dollars in mid-2021, before the elections that year in Sinaloa, where his father, Américo, was a Morena delegate. That money, American investigators assume, was used in the Sinaloa elections.
One thing is certain: the influence of the Sinaloa cartel and particularly the Chapitos in the state reaches notable levels with direct intervention in government issues and positions. There had always been penetration of criminal groups into social and political life, but never at this level and with this dimension.
And with such a specific commitment to participate in the elections both in Sinaloa and in the entire area of influence of this criminal organization in different states of the country. We’ll see what course next Sunday’s elections take.
Sources Excelsior, Borderland Beat, Borderland Beat, Saga