The former head of the Political Unit and Budgetary Control, Isaac Gamboa Lozano.RR SS
Isaac Gamboa Lozano, a former senior official in the government of Enrique Peña Nieto, had retired with his family to a luxurious subdivision in Temixco, in the State of Morelos, to spend the first weeks of the confinement imposed by covid-19.
On May 21, 2020, at around 3:00 p.m., four armed men entered the house and shot and killed Gamboa, his 60-year-old mother, and his three brothers.
It took them three minutes.
They did not force the locks to enter and quickly and accurately located the Gamboas among the twenty people—relatives, friends, workers—who were with the victims at the time.
Three years after the multiple homicide, one of the murderers, Jesús Manuel “N”,
El Mongoy
, a former member of the Navy, has been sentenced to 125 years in prison and to pay compensation of 6.7 million pesos, as reported by the Morelos Prosecutor's Office on Wednesday.
Isaac Gamboa was throughout the Peña Nieto government (2012-2018) head of the Treasury Budget Policy and Control Unit.
Gamboa's boss was Luis Videgaray, secretary of said ministry and a close associate of Peña Nieto.
His murder is part of a complex plot of political corruption and millionaire diversions that involved the red circle of Peña Nieto, the PRI and various governors.
Gamboa was in the crosshairs of another Prosecutor's Office, that of Chihuahua, for his participation in
Operation Safiro
, a corruption mechanism through which 250 million pesos were triangulated from the Ministry of Finance to the Government of Chihuahua, then headed by César Duarte, and from there to the coffers of the PRI, directed by Manlio Fabio Beltrones.
The purpose of this machinery, replicated in various States governed by the PRI, was to illegally finance electoral campaigns.
Former Marine Jesús Manuel "N".RR SS
Gamboa was, nothing more and nothing less, the official who authorized million-dollar transfers to state governments from the Treasury.
His murder exposed that he and his wife, Bethzabee Brito Álvarez, had laundered a fortune through shell
companies
.
The Ministry of Finance in the Administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has maintained that the resources came from bribes paid to Gamboa for his readiness to participate in acts of corruption.
But the authorities also presume that Gamboa's business network could have been used by the federal government, state governments and the PRI to launder, precisely, the diversion of resources from
Operation Safiro
.
Given that the multiple homicide of the Gamboas took place in Morelos, the Prosecutor of that State took over the investigation, which they named
the Black Widow case .
.
The name, clearly misogynistic, was born from the hypothesis that the murder of Isaac Gamboa was engineered by his wife, Bethzabee, who - always according to the Prosecutor's Office - was having an affair with Gamboa's bodyguard and wanted to keep the illicit fortune amassed. for the marriage.
The 39-year-old woman, who had two children with Gamboa, was captured a few weeks after the crime in Mexico City.
A judge from Morelos linked her to the process and ordered that she be admitted to a women's prison until a conviction was handed down.
Bethzabee has served two and a half years without her responsibility in the murder, if any, being determined, and she has even been transferred to a maximum security prison.
El Mongoy's three accomplices—including Bethzabee's alleged lover, also a former marine—are on the run from justice.
Despite Gamboa's political biography, the Morelos Prosecutor's Office has established that his murder was a simple "crime of passion", which has ruled out continuing as a line of investigation his involvement in the government corruption network in the six-year term of Peña Nieto .
Javier Corral, ex-governor of Chihuahua —in whose administration
Operation Safiro
was discovered and investigated— , has previously indicated that Gamboa's death meant the loss of a key witness to the
peñismo
's millionaire diversions and whose testimony could have led to the red circle of the former president.
Until today, only a handful of minor officials of the Government of César Duarte in Chihuahua have been prosecuted for acts of corruption.
At the federal level, there is an investigation folder initiated by the Attorney General's Office to investigate the laundering of resources of the business network of Gamboa and Bethzabee Brito.
However, the file runs a separate path from the investigation into his homicide.
That the Morelos Prosecutor's Office —which accumulates questions about the probity of its investigations— has framed the murder in the “crime of passion” augurs an attempt to
shelve it
and another episode of impunity for acts of institutional corruption.
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