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The US prohibits access to Mexican ex-governor Roberto Sandoval for his ties to drug trafficking

2020-02-28T20:21:26.667Z


The Government warns that the politician and other corrupt officials face serious consequences


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The US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, announced Friday that Roberto Sandoval, the former Mexican governor of the State of Nayarit (2011-2017), is banned from entering the United States. "He improperly seized state assets and accepted bribes from drug traffickers," he wrote on Twitter. Sigal Mandelker, undersecretary of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, had already warned that the ex-president of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and "other corrupt officials" would face a “serious consequences,” including the isolation of the US financial system, Roberto Sandoval has not been arrested and his whereabouts are unknown despite being investigated for his links to organized crime by Mexico and the United States.

The Department of the Treasury, through the Office for the Control of Foreign Assets (OFAC), froze Sandoval bank accounts and those of a federal judge issued in the neighboring State of Jalisco, Isidro last May Avelar The US authorities found links between the income of criminal officials and organizations, mainly the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), a violent group that has become the hegemonic criminal organization in recent years in Mexico. The bastion of the CJNG is precisely the states on the Mexican Pacific coast, including Jalisco and Nayarit.

Both Sandoval and Avelar were at the service of criminal organizations, granting them protection in the western region of Mexico. Among them would be, for example, favorable rulings in courts for capos and hitmen of the organization and the collection of several bribes. The US Government investigation also included a network of nine people and ten companies used to launder illegal resources of the CJNG.

Suspicions about Sandoval's criminal conduct are not recent. Mexican justice has followed in the footsteps since 2017, where the wealth of the local president did not correspond to that of a public official of an entity that does not reach two million people. Since the administration of Enrique Peña Nieto, also a member of the PRI, the prosecution had begun to document the bonanza of officials and relatives of Sandoval, who had bought goods, horses, cattle and had received public works contracts. Since then, the United States Government had canceled the visa of the governor, who intended to visit the Spanish Horse Fair in California.

The United States also crushed one of the most powerful criminal arms that the Mexican mafia had in the Nayarit government. In September, Edgar Veytia, the local prosecutor during Sandoval's term, was sentenced in New York to 20 years in prison for drug trafficking. Veytia was signaled to allow the transfer of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines and marijuana from Mexico to the United States. In addition, it was a piece that worked with the cartels of Sinaloa, Los Zetas and that of the Beltrán-Leyva brothers.

Criminal penetration in the Nayarit government also aggravated the wave of violence. The entity has exceeded 1,200 disappearances since 2011, when Sandoval came to power. Many in the State describe that Veytia, together with a group of 20 police officers, established a "terror regime" in which shootings, executions and kidnappings began. In March 2017, the doubts were cleared when US authorities arrested Veytia while crossing the border. The journalistic coverage underlined the nickname with which the person in charge of delivering justice in the entity was known: "The Devil."

"Officials like Roberto Sandoval are cruelly enriched at the expense of their fellow citizens, whether they are receiving bribes from drug trafficking organizations or participating in a variety of other illegal activities," said Mandelker. In May of last year, the PRI withdrew from Sandoval and said it should respond to the requirements of the authorities. The political party, however, did not expel the ex-president, who today extends the list of corrupt politicians who militarized in the tricolor organization.

Source: elparis

All news articles on 2020-02-28

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