The U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Public Affairs (DHS) announced that José Francisco Mendoza Gómez, a businessman with contracts with the Tamaulipas government during Américo Villarreal’s administration, was sentenced to 10 years in prison “for his role in a conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States.”
In a statement, the U.S. agency reported that the sentence was handed down after the defendant’s involvement in smuggling 1,900 kilograms of the drug into the United States.
“(The defendant) was a member of a drug trafficking organization led by Marisela Flores Torruco, responsible for importing hundreds of kilograms of cocaine into the United States for years,” the statement said.
They detailed that this group maintained operations in New York, Texas, and other parts of the United States, from where it obtained cocaine from Colombia and provided logistical and financial support to coordinate the movement of narcotics through Central America and Mexico to the United States.
“The organization transferred significant illicit profits from its operations to Mexico and other countries; its members made massive money transfers with cocaine suppliers and used a Chinese money laundering network to repatriate large sums of drug money from the United States,” the document states.
It is worth noting that Mendoza Gómez is one of the 26 inmates transferred to the United States by the Mexican government, and he is also accused of obtaining multimillion-dollar contracts with the government of Américo Villarreal.
According to the local news outlet Artículo 7, the state’s Public Works Secretariat, through the companies JF Konstruyendo, S.A. de C.V. and Megamax, S.A. de C.V., awarded contracts worth more than $70 million to José Francisco Mendoza Gómez and his partner, Perla Yasmin Garza Quintanilla.
Reporter Shalma Castillo’s investigation details that, according to information obtained from the National Transparency Platform, JF Konstruyendo was awarded three contracts worth 37 million 640 thousand pesos, while Megamax received 30 million 393 thousand pesos.
Source: latinus.us
