Showdown Brewing Over Fate of Runaway Mexico Governor
Time appears to be running out for the governor of the US-Mexico border state of Tamaulipas – after lawmakers stripped him of his immunity from prosecution and US officials shared their own investigation into his alleged criminal activity.
Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office announced on May 10 that
the US Justice Department had shared its case file on Governor Francisco García
Cabeza de Vaca. The investigation provides information on alleged illegal money
transfers and other banking irregularities, according to prosecutors.
This comes after the Chamber of Deputies – Mexico’s lower
house of Congress – voted on April 30 to remove the embattled governor’s
immunity after he was charged with organized crime, money laundering and tax
evasion.
The state congress of Tamaulipas objected to the decision
and chose to allow Cabeza de Vaca to remain in office, according to local media
reports. Mexico’s Supreme Court will now rule on the case.
Cabeza de Vaca is suspected of links to organized crime
groups and laundering illicit funds while in office, according to the Attorney
General’s Office. Prosecutors allege the governor amassed a multimillion-dollar
fortune that does not match his income as a public official.
This includes scores of hidden assets, including 30
properties located in Texas and Tamaulipas valued at around 951 million Mexican
pesos (around $47 million) that were purchased by front companies tied to his
family, according to Animal Político.
Prosecutors allege that he operated a shadowy network within
his state government between 2016 and 2019, handing out public contracts to
companies that benefited several members of his family.
Cabeza de Vaca has rejected these accusations, calling the
hearing to remove his immunity a “hoax” and a “political and criminal lynching orchestrated
by the government.”
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has called for
patience, as the courts make a final ruling.
But with rumors swirling about whether Cabeza de Vaca has
already fled Mexico for the United States, he joins the line of Tamaulipas
governors who have wound up on the wrong side of the law.
InSight Crime Analysis
Controversy has long surrounded Cabeza de Vaca’s career as a
public official with the conservative National Action Party (Partido de Acción
Nacional — PAN), especially during his time as governor of Tamaulipas.
Before becoming state governor, Cabeza de Vaca was accused
of having links to the Gulf Cartel and using some of the group’s illicit
proceeds to finance his campaign for mayor of the US-Mexico border city of
Reynosa. While mayor between 2005 and 2007, he allegedly granted special
permission to Gulf Cartel kingpin Osiel Cárdenas Guillén to hold a public
“Children’s Day” event in 2006. The former Gulf Cartel head is now serving a
25-year prison sentence for overseeing a “vast drug trafficking empire” that
imported thousands of kilograms of cocaine and marijuana into the United
States.
US and Mexican officials have both targeted Cabeza de Vaca’s
alleged criminal activity during his tenure as governor. In 2020, the organized
crime unit (Subprocuraduría Especializada en Investigación de Delincuencia
Organizada — SEIDO) of Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office opened a money
laundering probe. The unit reportedly obtained telephone wiretaps from the US
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) that may link Cabeza de Vaca to illicit
proceeds from organized crime groups.
More recently, Cabeza de Vaca came under fire after
authorities arrested several members of an elite special operations group
(GOPES) — some of whom received US training – in the January massacre of 19
people near the US-Mexico border. The GOPES – formed in 2017 out of the
Tamaulipas Center for Analysis, Information and Studies (Centro de Análisis,
Información y Estudios de Tamaulipas — CAIET) – report directly to Cabeza de Vaca.
Despite this and other alleged misconduct, Cabeza de Vaca
has maintained good standing with US officials, meeting with powerful senators
in the state of Texas and working on bi-national security initiatives with
Customs and Border Protection (CBP). At home, the Mexican Navy even honored him
on April 21 for his security work in the state.
Cabeza de Vaca, however, has been put on the defensive by
the stream of public allegations of financial misdeeds and ties to dirty money
from organized crime. In mid-April, he hired a US law firm to “mitigate the
effects” of confidential financial information allegedly leaked by Mexican
officials, according to public disclosures to the US Treasury Department under
the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). His lawyer also wrote a letter to
the director of the US Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) urging
them to “investigate what appear to be continuing leaks against my client.”
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