The former Mexican governor César Duarte He has been arrested this Wednesday in Florida, as confirmed by the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic (FGR). The former president of the northern state of Chihuahua has been a fugitive from the Mexican Justice since 2017 and has at least twenty complaints of corruption against him. The Mexican government launched a arrest warrant in 2018 and asked Interpol to issue a red card, which allowed the arrest for extradition purposes in US territory.
The arrest occurred during the visit of the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, to Washington, with the announcement of the capture less than two hours from the joint statement that López Obrador gave with his American counterpart, Donald Trump. It also occurs in a week full of heavy announcements by the Mexican Government. On Monday, the extradition from Spain of Emilio Lozoya, ex-director of the parastatal Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) and the main one pointed out by the Odebrecht plot in Mexico, accused of accepting around 10 million dollars in bribes that ended in the PRI campaign, was agreed in the 2018 voting. On Tuesday a turnaround was made in the investigation of the Ayotzinapa case, with the discovery of the remains of one of the 43 students who disappeared six years ago and the dismantling of the so-called “historical truth”, the version of events that the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto defended. This Wednesday, it was the turn of former governor Duarte, captured in Miami, although further details of the arrest have not yet been revealed.
Duarte ruled Chihuahua from 2010 to 2016. His successor, Javier Corral, accuses him of diverting around 1,200 million pesos (more than 60 million dollars) during his Administration. The former governor was also accused of diverting around 250 million pesos (12 million dollars) from the public purse to finance the campaigns of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2016. He is also responsible for increasing the state debt to 48,000 million pesos ($ 2.5 billion) and embezzling more than $ 6 billion ($ 320 million). The bulk of the allegations accuse him of embezzlement. The Mexican press reports 11 arrest warrants against the politician. In 2018, the Attorney General’s Office, predecessor of the FGR, rejected a complaint against Duarte for the deviation of 65 million pesos.
Duarte went from being publicly recognized by former President Peña Nieto as one of the faces of the “New PRI”, in a promise to leave behind the negative image of the political group, in 2012 to be expelled from the party in the middle of last year. “I have always said it, the PRI will be on the side of the law, and against corruption, up to the limit,” the PRI leader, Alejandro Moreno, wrote on Twitter, who has avoided mentioning the name of Duarte. “If any PRI member fell into acts of corruption, he will have betrayed the government, the institutions and the party,” added Moreno, leader of a party that paid for the shadow of corruption in the 2018 elections and has dragged on the worst results since then. his story.
The narrative of a “new PRI” only worsened the image of the party in the end. Duarte is the last link in a chain of former PRI governors who have been accused and prosecuted for corruption. The list includes Javier Duarte, former governor of Veracruz and without any blood link despite his last name, sentenced to nine years in prison after pleading guilty to money laundering and criminal association, after being captured in Guatemala in 2017, as well as Roberto Borge , ex-president of Quintana Roo, who was arrested in June 2017 in Panama for various frauds that exceed 45 million dollars.
