Former Mexican politician pleads guilty to money laundering in areas including San Antonio

[TexasTowelie]

In a high-profile case that dragged on for years as he avoided arrest by both U.S. and Mexican authorities, the former governor of the Mexican state of Tamaulipas has pled guilty to one count of money laundering.

Tomás Yarrington Ruvalcaba entered a guilty plea in court Thursday, eight years after he was hit with a 53-page indictment, as reported by Jason Buch of the San Antonio Express-News.

The U.S. government accused Yarrington of taking bribes from the Zetas drug cartel while he was in office, actively taking part in their drug trafficking operations and laundering bribe money in the United States.

In the end, Yarrington admitted to using Texas real estate transactions, including investing in property in San Antonio, to launder millions in bribes he received from individuals and companies who wanted to do business with Tamaulipas. But he did not admit to taking bribes from drug traffickers.

Read more: https://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local/article/Former-Mexican-politician-pleads-guilty-to-money-16057149.php

[Judi Lynn]

1. Not the worst idea, trying to put this jerk away: "The importance of being Yarrington"

Google translation from El País:

The former governor of Tamaulipas, considered one of the political fathers of the Zetas, worries the political class that fears his confession

JACOBO GARCIA
Mexico APR 14, 2017 - 23:34 EDT



Tomás Yarrington in an image from 2005

The importance of being called Tomás Jesús Yarrington Ruvalcaba is to have had eight bodyguards paid by the State until October despite having been a fugitive for five years. Exactly twice as important as his successor at the head of the Tamaulipas government, Eugenio Hernández, also a fugitive, who had four. The importance of being called Yarrington was to be able to put your feet on the table at George Bush's ranch, when they were “compadres” , as defined by the governor of Texas before becoming the 43rd president of the United States.

The significance of Yarrington is to escape from Mexico despite being the central political figure in the emergence of the most criminal enterprise in recent Mexico: the Los Zetas cartel. The importance of surname Yarrington Ruvalcaba is to remain "calm" despite all this, as his lawyer said, and to dine in an elegant restaurant in Florence's Piazza de la Signoria, until April 9 when he was arrested.
Until five days ago there were many fingers that pointed to him and few hands that caught him despite the long list of accusations against him.

The political and business class now fear the confession of a politician who has spent more than half of his 60 years in public office, who wanted to be president of Mexico and whose shady deals were documented during the governments of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón without never left the drawer.

Born in the city of Matamoros in 1957, there are not a few analysts who these days have recalled that his hometown, where he was mayor, is today the capital of the Los Zetas cartel that bleeds Tamaulipas.

When Yarrington came to power in 1999, Capo Osiel Cárdenas Guillén hired 20 members of the Mexican Army trained in the United States. Those 20 quickly became 500 recruited from the former Guatemalan kaibiles and began to spread through Tamaulipas and Veracruz. The bloodiest cartel in recent decades was born and its mission was not only drug trafficking, but extortion, migrant smuggling or kidnapping. Any item that gave money. In a few years its tentacles extended to Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tabasco, Guerrero, Michoacán and Nayarit thanks to a bloody strategy of terror that continues to this day, while Yarrington looked the other way.

The criminal accusation against Yarrington in the United States, presented before the Court for the Southern District of Texas indicates that, since 1998, the Tamaulipas politician received bribes from the Gulf Cartel so that the criminal group would not have "interference" in the transfer of drugs to USA.
The former state president is charged with money laundering, conspiracy to defraud, making false statements to US banks and drug trafficking.

According to the indictment, the payments of said cartel were maintained during and after his tenure as governor, between 1999 and 2004. To move the money he obtained from the drug trafficker, and also from the public treasury, the former governor acquired "valuable assets" in United States through namesakes and different companies. Assets include bank accounts, residences, airplanes, vehicles, and homes and ranches in the United States and Mexico.

After he left office, Yarrington became "more directly" involved in drug trafficking, according to the criminal case. "In accordance with this agreement, large quantities of cocaine were transported from Mexico via boats to the United States," the indictment maintains.

Despite all this, according to Yarrington's lawyer in Italy, where he is imprisoned, "there is no formal extradition request," he told the Notimex agency. "From the United States Department of Justice there is an 'act of anticipation' (of the extradition request), but there is not even a shadow of Mexico. Everything seemed very informal to me, "Luca Marafioti explained.

The importance of being called Yarrington is to have made normal what seemed something extraordinary.

https://elpais.com/internacional/2017/04/14/mexico/1492206443_007572.html

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The Kaibiles mentioned in the article above are well known throughout the Americas for their massacres of indigenous Mayan people in Guatemala. Many of them poured into blood-thirsty Zetas membership. Their history in Guatemala is a complete nightmare and, of course, their training skills were useful to them in Mexico:

Guatemalan genocide

The Guatemalan genocide, also referred to as the Maya genocide,[2] or the Silent Holocaust[3] (Spanish: Genocidio guatemalteco, Genocidio maya, o Holocausto silencioso), was the massacre of Maya civilians during the Guatemalan military government's counterinsurgency operations. Massacres, forced disappearances, torture and summary executions of guerrillas and especially civilian collaborators at the hands of US-backed security forces had been widespread since 1965 and was a longstanding policy of the military regime, which US officials were aware of.[4][5][6] A report from 1984 discussed "the murder of thousands by a military government that maintains its authority by terror".[7] Human Rights Watch has described "extraordinarily cruel" actions by the armed forces, mostly against unarmed civilians.[8]

The repression reached genocidal levels in the predominantly indigenous northern provinces where the EGP guerrillas operated. There, the Guatemalan military viewed the Maya – traditionally seen as subhumans – as siding with the insurgency and began a campaign of wholesale killings and disappearances of Mayan peasants. While massacres of indigenous peasants had occurred earlier in the war, the systematic use of terror against the indigenous population began around 1975 and peaked during the first half of the 1980s.[9] The military had carried out 626 massacres against the Maya during the conflict.[10] The Guatemalan army itself acknowledged destroying 440 Mayan villages between 1981 and 1983, during the most intense phase of the repression. In some municipalities such as Rabinal and Nebaj, at least one-third of the villages were evacuated or destroyed. A study by the Juvenile Division of the Supreme Court sanctioned in March 1985 revealed that over 200,000 children had lost at least one parent in the killings, of whom 25% had lost both since 1980, meaning that between 45,000 and 60,000 adult Guatemalans were killed during the period from 1980 and 1985.[11] This does not account for the fact that children often became targets of mass killings by the army in events such as the Río Negro massacres.[12] Former military dictator General Efrain Ríos Montt (1982–1983) was indicted for his role in the most intense stage of the genocide.

An estimated 200,000 Guatemalans were killed during the Guatemalan Civil War including at least 40,000 persons who "disappeared". 93% of civilian executions were carried out by government forces. Of the 42,275 individual cases of killing and "disappearances" documented by the Commission for Historical Clarification (CEH), 83% of the victims were Maya and 17% Ladino.[1] A UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification in 1999 concluded that a genocide had taken place at the hands of the US-backed Armed Forces of Guatemala, and that US training of the officer corps in counterinsurgency techniques "had a significant bearing on human rights violations during the armed confrontation".[9][13][5][14]

More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_genocide