Odebrecht's fight against corruption crashes in Mexico under the shadow of impunity

Emilio Lozoya Austin during a Houston event in March 2014. Aaron M. Sprecher / Bloomberg

Emilio Lozoya, the former director of the Mexican state oil company Pemex between 2012 and 2016, was arrested exactly one year ago in a luxury development near Malaga, Spain.

Since then, the file involving one of the men closest to former President Enrique Peña Nieto has grown.

The case, a branch of the network of millionaire bribes of the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, has been developing for months between little transparency and the controversy caused by the benefits granted to the politician in exchange for collaborating with justice.

With these premises, there are fears that the corruption scandal, with repercussions on Mexico's political balance, will go unpunished.

The investigation entered a new phase on July 28, when Spain extradited Lozoya.

The former director arrived in his country and entered a private clinic, alleging anemia and esophagus problems, from where he participated in the first hearing by videoconference.

The Mexican Institute of Transparency and Access to Information has ordered this Wednesday the Prosecutor's Office to make public the medical report that prevented Lozoya from entering prison in the case that follows him for bribery and money laundering.

The authorities also link it to other irregular payments from the steelmaker Altos Hornos de México and from companies related to the Spanish construction company OHL, as EL PAÍS recently revealed.

That day, Lozoya requested a figure known as the criterion of opportunity that, in practice, turned him into a kind of protected witness.

Since then he has not stepped on a court.

In exchange for benefits and to continue the process in freedom, Lozoya told the Prosecutor's Office that the corruption plot in which he allegedly participated reached the top of the Peña Nieto government dome.

He accused the former president and one of his most loyal men, his Minister of Finance, Luis Videgaray, who allegedly received and allocated some 500 million dollars to the 2012 PRI electoral campaign and the purchase of votes from opposition congressmen to ensure the approval of the controversial energy reform, which opened the sector to private companies after decades of nationalist politics.

It also involved former presidents Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994) in the plot.

The public information of the case was administered with a dropper, with leaks and veiled statements from the attorney general, Alejandro Gertz, who ten days ago assured in a meeting with PAN senators that the process is ongoing and the former director of Pemex will be tried.

Since early December, however, there is no information indicating that the case is progressing.

At the end of January, the Prosecutor's Office postponed the hearing of the former senator of the conservative PAN, Jorge Luis Lavalle, whom Emilio Lozoya has accused of having received the bribes for a part of the party bench that endorsed the energy opening, including former senators Ernesto Cordero, Francisco Cabeza de Vaca and Francisco Domínguez.

Lavalle rejects the accusations despite the fact that one of his collaborators has admitted to appearing in videos in which he receives bundles of cash.

"I will exercise my right of defense against the lies of the confessed criminal Emilio Lozoya," Lavalle wrote on January 26.

A case in total darkness

Opacity is one of the biggest concerns surrounding the case.

Lawyers platform Tojil and Transparencia Mexicana sent a letter to the President of the Supreme Court of Justice, Arturo Zaldívar, on July 9, days after Spain extradited Lozoya to Mexico.

The organizations demanded opening in a case that has become the banner of the anti-corruption crusade of the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

However, the Council of the Judiciary established additional restrictions, forced by the pandemic, to the initial hearings.

“The principle of constitutional publicity of criminal hearings should not be affected by these [sanitary] measures.

This is especially important in a case that could be linked to a transnational corruption network associated with the Odebrecht company.

The transparency of this procedure is in the public interest at the national and international level ”, indicated the association's letter.

It was of little use.

The judiciary reported the only hearings of Lozoya in Mexico by a WhatsApp group.

Requests to the judge and amparos were also discarded, says the lawyer Adriana Greaves, from Tojil, who questions that Lozoya was granted the opportunity to collaborate with justice and rejects the defense strategy, which is presenting him as "a mere cog" of the corrupt plot.

The jurist considers it crucial to frame the process in the Odebrecht case as a whole, which infiltrated and bribed - or at least tried to do so - dozens of administrations throughout America in exchange for concessions and contracts.

Since the scale of the scandal became known, between the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2017, the investigations have caused real political earthquakes in Peru, Ecuador, Brazil and Colombia.

Mexico runs the risk of becoming an exception.

“The Lozoya case, once brought to Mexico, already gave strange signs.

Those suspicions and those initial strangeness have been confirmed ”, affirms the constitutional lawyer Luis Pérez de Acha.

"The reasons why Lozoya was intended to be granted the benefits of the opportunity criterion were not clear, and that strangeness resulted from the type of crimes with which he has been accused," says this expert, who also sees in the accusations of the ex-director of Pemex a story full of rumors already known.

“It was more of a hypothesis-based fictional narrative.

He pointed out selectively more in the manner of gossip, gossip, with unsupported information ”, he values.

"One year was more than enough time for Lozoya to have provided evidence to support larger and more relevant information."

Prosecutors in the investigation have suggested that they are willing to suspend the two proceedings against Lozoya before March 7 if he provides sufficient and robust evidence to support his accusations.

The acid test will be the formal appearance of former Senator Lavalle, which still has no date, despite having reiterated his willingness to defend himself from what he considers "politically motivated lies."

If the case against Lavalle does not prosper, it will be difficult for Lozoya's accusations, a free man for the moment, to stand up.

To these considerations is added the media coverage of the process in the middle of the electoral year, where the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, refers to the case from time to time since his morning conferences to charge against the political class that preceded him and whose parties have taken refuge in a great opposition alliance heading for the July elections.

At the beginning of the year he admitted that this case has been going on for a long time and asked to be informed about the evolution of the investigations.

Meanwhile, despite being very different cases, another ghost hovers over the process and this is what happened with the former Secretary of Defense, Salvador Cienfuegos.

Accused of drug trafficking, extradited from the United States and finally exonerated by the Prosecutor's Office.

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