Juan Gabriel Toribio Villarreal made national headlines this Wednesday after being arrested by federal authorities along with the mayor of Tequila, Jalisco, Diego Rivera Navarro, of the National Regeneration Movement (Morena), and two other municipal officials. The arrests were made as a result of the National Strategy against Extortion and the fight against corruption, as announced by the head of the Secretariat of Security and Citizen Protection (SSPC), Omar García Harfuch.
Toribio served as the Director of Cadastre and Property Tax in Tequila, but he had previously lived in Puerto Vallarta, where he was the municipal delegate of Ixtapa. He arrived in this coastal city at a young age and owned a blacksmith shop with his brothers. He lived in the Los Tamarindos neighborhood, where he and his wife, Chela, opened a grocery store. He was well-known and well-liked in the area, and was even elected president of the Neighborhood Association.
He was a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). When the PRI regained the mayoralty in 2003, then-mayor Gustavo González Villaseñor called him to work as coordinator in the Directorate of Social Development, specifically in the Ixtapa sector, where he continued working under the administration of Javier Bravo Carbajal.
During Salvador González Reséndiz’s term as mayor, the City Council appointed him municipal delegate of Ixtapa for the 2010-2012 term. After his party’s defeat and the victory of Movimiento Ciudadano, he left the city, residing ever since in his hometown of Tequila, Jalisco, where he first attempted to run for mayor as an independent candidate and later joined the National Regeneration Movement (Morena).
An active promoter of Morena, he can be seen in photos with López Obrador and Claudia Sheinbaum. He was the Morena candidate for mayor of Tequila in 2021, but Alfonso Magallanes of Movimiento Ciudadano won. He worked for the federal government at the Ministry of Welfare; upon taking office, Diego Rivera, a member of the Morena party, included him in his cabinet.
On February 5th, information was released that intelligence agencies had “learned that Mayor Diego Rivera Navarro leads a corruption network operating within the City Hall, in which public servants extort business owners and merchants in the municipality, in addition to embezzling public funds.”
The news of Toribio’s arrest, along with the mayor of Tequila, surprised many in Puerto Vallarta, especially in Ixtapa, where some of his relatives still live. They are baffled by what happened; they remember him as a very hardworking and helpful person to the community.
Source: tribunadelabahia
