Former Governor Roberto Sandoval and former President Enrique Peña Nieto, in May 2016.
The Attorney General's Office (FGR) has issued an arrest warrant against the former governor of the Mexican state of Nayarit Roberto Sandoval and his daughter for an alleged crime of "operations with resources of illicit origin," as reported by the Public Ministry this Monday .
The authorities have assured that they have evidence of the alleged involvement of the politician "with various people who have been detained in a foreign country for crimes related to organized crime" and have communicated that they will ask the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol) to issue of red card for the location of the fugitive politician.
Sandoval ruled Nayarit between 2011 and 2017, a period in which the State suffered a wave of torture, kidnapping and disappearances.
After the end of his term, he was disqualified from holding public office because it was found that in his government he accumulated wealth of an uncertain origin.
The judge has assessed that "only through an arrest warrant will it be possible to bring these people to justice", since "those investigated probably have a high economic capacity and have links with an organized criminal group."
In November, when a state judge ordered the capture of Sandoval, the authorities reported that the former governor was no longer in Nayarit.
The magistrate has also considered that the crime for which the capture of Sandoval and his daughter is requested "is of special relevance and social impact" due to the "excessive" amount of operations reported "to the economic detriment of the public finances of Nayarit ”.
Sandoval, from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), governed the State between 2011 and 2017. Two years after finishing his term, the politician was disqualified from holding public office by the Nayarit Congress when it was found that during his government he accumulated wealth of a origin uncertain.
In September 2017, the local prosecutor during Sandoval's term, Edgar Veytia, had been sentenced in New York to 20 years in prison for allowing the transfer of heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana from Mexico to the United States.
Suspicions about Sandoval's criminal conduct are not recent.
Mexican justice has followed in his footsteps since 2017, when 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, the prosecution had begun to document the prosperity of officials and relatives of the politician, who had bought goods, horses, cattle and had received public works contracts.
Since then, the United States Government had canceled the governor's visa when he tried to visit the Spanish Horse Fair in California.
In 2019, the United States Department of the Treasury froze the bank accounts of the former governor and a state judge after finding links between the origin of their resources and their relationship with criminal organizations, mainly with the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG).
The State is located between Sinaloa and Jalisco, territories of the two large cartels that control international drug trafficking in Mexico, and is also the gateway to the so-called golden triangle, a huge network of crop fields dedicated to the poppy.
The former governor had received several bribes from the CJNG in exchange for protection and information, according to the US government investigation.
In January 2020, the United States banned the former governor due to his ties to drug trafficking.
Months later, in November, a state judge requested an arrest warrant for Sandoval.
The local prosecutor's office then reported that he was being investigated for "probable crimes of embezzlement and improper exercise of functions" linked to an investment fund for social enterprises.
"In recent days he was in the states of Jalisco and Nuevo León, in addition to presumptively the priority objective already has knowledge or suspicion of the arrest warrant against him," the authorities of the local prosecutor's office reported.
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