Former Mexican Governor Tomás Yarrington pleads guilty in the US to money laundering

Former Mexican Governor Tomás Yarrington, in 2005.

Mexican politician Tomás Yarrington has admitted that he received more than $ 3.5 million in bribes that he used to buy property in the United States.

The former governor of the border state of Tamaulipas has pleaded guilty to money laundering in a Texas court on Thursday and faces a sentence of up to 20 years in jail.

The bribes, according to the United States Department of Justice, were paid by "private individuals and companies" seeking to do business in Tamaulipas, where Yarrington, 64, ruled between 1999 and 2005. After leaving office, the politician he failed in his attempt to seek the presidential candidacy of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

It was at that time, according to the police summary, when his investments in the real estate sector increased dramatically.

He was a fugitive from 2012 to 2017 after US and Mexican authorities accused him of corruption and ties to drug trafficking.

The Houston court statement says Yarrington used the bribes to buy real estate and cars and other personal consumption products.

"He had name men who bought the properties in the United States to hide that they belonged to him and the illegal origin of the money with which they were acquired," a statement read.

One of those properties was a luxury condo in Port Isabel on the Texas island of South Padre.

The condo was seized in 2012 and had an estimated value of more than $ 640,000.

As part of the pact with prosecutors, Yarrington has given up fighting to get the condo back.

The agreement with the Prosecutor's Office, according to the first information, is that Yarrington is not tried for other charges against him, which include, in addition to money laundering, criminal association, bank fraud and drug trafficking.

As part of the negotiations, it is expected that the politician will not appeal the sentence, with a date yet to be defined.

In Mexico he is accused of organized crime and operation with resources of illicit origin.

Yarrington was arrested in April 2017 in Italy, where he traveled under another name and with a false passport.

Mexico and the United States requested his extradition, but the Italian authorities denied the shipment to his country of origin, arguing that there were not adequate conditions in Mexican prisons.

US prosecutors succeeded in getting Yarrington sent to Texas in 2018, where he has been in prison ever since.

Since 1998, the United States accused him of receiving bribes from the Gulf Cartel, a criminal group with a strong presence in Tamaulipas, which is in turn one of the states most corroded by violence in Mexico.

The deal was to give drug traffickers a go-ahead and facilitate drug trafficking across the border.

Between 2007 and 2009, the authorities had him in their sights for the transfer of "large amounts of cocaine", which entered the Mexican port of Veracruz bound for the US market.

His successor in office, fellow PRI Eugenio Hernández, was also accused of money laundering.

Hernández was arrested in 2017 in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of Tamaulipas, and has been fighting for more than two years to avoid extradition to the United States.

Egidio Torres Cantú, Hernández's successor, also from the PRI, has also been investigated in the United States and Mexico.

In 2020, the Tamaulipas Financial Intelligence Unit investigated him for diverting more than 10,000 million pesos (about 500 million dollars) in public resources.

The current governor, Francisco García Cabeza de Vaca, of the conservative National Action Party, appeared this week before the Attorney General's Office, which has launched an investigation against him for money laundering, organized crime and tax fraud.

Yarrington's arrest is the latest link in a long chain of cases against PRI politicians for corruption.

His fall represents a new blow to the PRI, which in the 2018 elections obtained the worst result in its history and was worth losing the presidency, after the mandate of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2020).

At the beginning of the month, Interpol issued an arrest warrant for Roberto Sandoval, former governor of Nayarit, and last July César Duarte, former governor of Chihuahua, was arrested in Miami following accusations of embezzlement of billions of pesos.

In June 15 governorships and the renewal of the Chamber of Deputies are at stake.

In Tamaulipas, 36 seats in the local Congress and 43 City Councils will be voted.

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