Arrest of Mexican drug boss has politicians scrambling once again
McClatchy Foreign StaffOctober 3, 2014
MEXICO CITY — It’s a
recurring pattern in Mexico. Authorities capture an alleged drug
kingpin, and politicians tremble, fearing news leaks about even casual
contacts with him or his coterie.
It happened again this week.
Authorities detained Hector Beltran Leyva, the head of an offshoot of
the Sinaloa Cartel that grew into a formidable rival narcotics gang.
Soldiers
captured Beltran Leyva on Wednesday as he dined at a seafood restaurant
in San Miguel de Allende, a colonial haven for American retirees and
artists. The mountain town is a three-hour drive northwest of Mexico
City.
Eating seafood at Mario’s Mariscos Frescos with him – and
arrested along with him – was a man authorities described as the Beltran
Leyva cartel’s financial brains, German Goyeneche Ortega, a rakish
bullfighting aficionado and real estate tycoon who occupied a place
among the political and business elite in the central Mexican states of
Guanajuato and Queretaro.
While Beltran Leyva lived a discreet
life in the city of Queretaro, pretending to be a real estate broker and
art dealer, far away from his cartel’s main operating centers,
Goyeneche was anything but circumspect, socializing with politicians,
impresarios and entertainment figures in his adopted hometown of San
Miguel de Allende.
“I know German,” federal deputy Ricardo
Villarreal Garcia told the newspaper La Jornada on Friday, “just like
Mauricio Trejo Pureco knows him and Luz Maria Nunez knows him,” speaking
of San Miguel de Allende’s mayor and former mayor, respectively.
“San
Miguel is a very small town, and when someone comes along and invests a
lot of money, the whole world knows about it,” Villarreal said. “I
assure you, there’s not a single businessperson who doesn’t know who
German Goyeneche is.”
If the lawmaker sounds defensive, it’s
because a photo taken from his Facebook page has rocketed around social
media. It shows Goyeneche sitting in the first row of a meeting that
Villarreal held with business leaders Monday in San Miguel.
Goyeneche
reportedly also had a relationship with Villarreal’s brother, Luis
Alberto Villarreal, a former leader of the National Action Party’s
parliamentary bloc who also was once mayor of San Miguel de Allende.
But
while the National Action Party, also known as the PAN, its Spanish
initials, was denying any official links to Goyeneche, it was the
Ecological Green Party, which is allied with the current government,
that was most shaken by Goyeneche’s arrest.
Goyeneche had joined the party in 2008. The party’s website said Friday that he’d been suspended and might be expelled.
“It’s important to note that Mr. Goyeneche was never put forth by the Green Party for any public office,” the statement added.
The party claimed it was far from alone in finding possible rot in its ranks.
“No
political party is exempt from having those persons join in partisan
activities who might have engaged in private illegal activities, since
political parties do not have legal tools of investigation at our
disposal,” it said.
Goyeneche is the bankroller of a high-end
resort development outside San Miguel de Allende called Otomi Lake &
Villas, which includes a horse track. Photos show large pools, lined
with palm trees, at the complex.
A Green Party deputy nominated
Goyeneche in March to serve in the Citizens’ Parliament, an activist
group that’s pushing for political reforms. Goyeneche’s biographical
page there notes he graduated from the Tec de Monterrey, a prestigious
private university, that he speaks English fluently and Portuguese
passably and that he has interests in real estate, railway, mining and
cement.
Local and state politicians who consort with cartel
leaders provide constant fodder for Mexican media. The head of the
Knights Templar crime group, a major producer of methamphetamine,
Servando “La Tuta” Gomez, has released a series of videos and photos of
his meetings with political figures in Michoacan state.
So
far, mayors from the port of Lazaro Cardenas and the towns of Patzcuaro,
Huetamo and Aquila have appeared in videos with La Tuta, as well as the
son of the former governor and a former state security chief who served
as interim governor.
A bodyguard employed by Sinaloa Gov.
Mario Lopez Valdez accused him last year of using a helicopter to fly
into the hills of his state to hold meetings with Joaquin “El Chapo”
Guzman, who until his capture in February was considered the world’s
most wanted drug kingpin. The bodyguard later turned up dead.
Last December, U.S. prosecutors charged Tomas Yarrington,
a fugitive former governor of Tamaulipas state, which shares a border
with Texas, with taking millions of dollars from the Gulf Cartel for
letting it smuggle tons of cocaine through his state.
In late 2012, two years after authorities captured U.S.-born Edgar Valdez Villarreal,
a drug lord known as “La Barbie,” the capo sent a letter to the
newspaper Reforma alleging that he’d made payments for years to Genaro
Garcia Luna, the head of then-President Felipe Calderon’s federal
security agency.
Email: tjohnson@mcclatchydc.com; Twitter: @timjohnson4
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