“The government was on vacation, I made the decision to leave for three or four days.” This is how the governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha Moya, explained his departure from the state on July 25. That day, the U.S. authorities confirmed the capture of Ismael The May Zambada and Joaquín Guzmán López, members of the Sinaloa Cartel leadership, after landing unexpectedly at a small airport outside the border city of El Paso just after four in the afternoon. About eight hours later, the local press reported the death of Héctor Cuén, an influential local politician and known adversary of the governor. After two weeks of tensions and irreconcilable versions of what happened, the controversy reached a high point last Saturday, when El Mayo’s lawyer made public a letter in which he claims that he was ambushed, kidnapped and handed over against his will in the United States after being summoned to a meeting with Rocha, Cuén and the sons of El Chapo Guzmán on July 25. In the middle of the storm, the head of the state Executive assured that he was not present at any private meeting with the drug trafficker, but rather on a family trip to Los Angeles. In a new attempt to dispel suspicions, the governor offered more details of his version this week. “Why am I going to the United States? I am going to see my relatives,” he said at a press conference.
What happened on July 25? That is the question that intrigues and divides opinions in Sinaloa and the rest of Mexico. El Mayo states in his letter that he was summoned by Guzmán López himself, his godson, to an event hall in Huertos del Pedregal, a ranch on the outskirts of Culiacán, the state capital, at eleven in the morning. The reason for the meeting was “to help resolve the differences of the political leaders of our state,” according to this version. At the center of the conflict between Rocha and Cuén was the Autonomous University of Sinaloa (UAS), the most important educational institution in the state.
Zambada’s statement, which has not been corroborated, has been deeply uncomfortable because it explicitly links his capture with the murder of Cuén, offers a crude portrait of the collusion between organized crime and local politics, and fills in the gaps left by the official version of the arrest. Mayo speaks of Cuén as a “long-time friend of mine,” claims that a commander of the ministerial police was his bodyguard, and assumes that he is a consiglierea guarantor of the most relevant issues of public life in Sinaloa. “I know that the official version given by the authorities of the State of Sinaloa is that Hector Cuen was shot on the night of July 25 at a gas station by two men who wanted to steal his truck,” he explains. “That is not what happened. They killed him at the same time and in the same place where they kidnapped me.” The capo closes the writing with a call for harmony after his arrest: “Nothing is resolved with violence. We have already gone down that road and we all lose.”
“If they said I was going to be there, they lied, and if he believed them, he fell right into the trap,” said Rocha hours after the letter appeared, during an event for the visit of the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and the president-elect, Claudia Sheinbaum. The governor knew the seriousness of El Mayo’s accusations. “He told me before the event that he was going to make his version known, he just asked me for my point of view on how I saw this situation, that he was aware — he also said this, and it’s true — that it wasn’t just about involving him, but involving the head of the Executive, you know who,” López Obrador said on Monday. That same morning, thirty elected and acting governors of Morena, the ruling party, came out in defense of “integrity and a vocation for service.”
Rocha Moya’s version is diametrically different from that of El Mayo. The governor claims that he cleared his schedule to visit a nephew who works in Los Angeles, among other relatives who live in the United States, such as one of his sisters. “So that speculation does not spread in that sense, I was not aware of that meeting, nor did I go because I was aware of it, nor was I invited nor did they have to be,” declared the president at his weekly press conference last Monday. “I do not attend that type of meeting.”
This week, a flight log was also leaked to the media that corroborates Rocha’s version. According to the document, provided by journalist Marcos Vizcarra, Rocha left Culiacán at nine in the morning and landed in California at 11:15 a.m., which breaks with the timeline provided by Zambada. He arrived in the United States on a private plane from the company Servicio Ejecutivos Aéreos Viz, owned by former PRI deputy Jesús Vizcarra and his brothers. Jesús Vizcarra was mayor of Culiacán. His family is behind companies such as Salud Digna, which offers low-cost health services, and SuKarne, one of the main cattle empires in the country. The politician has been investigated by the authorities for drug trafficking and money laundering, and linked for decades to El Mayo and the Sinaloa Cartel, allegations that he has repeatedly denied.
Rocha did not refer to the plane he boarded with six members of his family. He did speak of his absence from the State and the succession of events that followed his departure being a “coincidence” and that the events took him by surprise. “I never thought, not even here, that such a notable phenomenon could occur in Sinaloa, Mexico and the world,” he said about the arrest of both drug lords. “Later, I found out about Maestro Cuén and I was there exclusively attending to that, I sent someone to make a Twitter, publish it and then I recorded a message, a little video,” he said. “I got up, took off my pajamas, put on the pants I was already wearing, the shirt that I think was wrinkled and that’s how I recorded it.” The video in which he expresses his condolences was published on his networks around two in the morning. The governor said in the message that “he was out,” but did not specify where.
The Morena politician said that he took a plane back to Mexico early in the morning to attend to both issues. Regarding the presence of a police commander in El Mayo’s escort, Rocha said that he was not aware of the situation. “The Prosecutor’s Office does not depend on me, it is a matter for the ministerial police,” he said. “I can hardly know what the state police themselves, the preventive police and the others do, in this case nobody could have told me,” he added.
The media war is not just about Rocha’s presence at the meeting with Zambada and Cuén. It is also being fought on another front: the politician’s own murder. The Sinaloa Prosecutor’s Office called a press conference on Monday in which it released a video of the attack on Cuén, a key piece in the authorities’ main line of investigation: that the murder occurred during an attempted robbery of his truck. The images, captured by the security camera of a gas station in Culiacán around ten at night, also contradict El Mayo’s version, who claims that his “friend” was killed at eleven in the morning. The ministerial authorities decreed the time of death at 11:13 p.m., according to the obituaries. The bullet impacts, according to the investigations, happened “two or three hours earlier,” said prosecutor Sara Quiñónez, although she clarified that sometimes they are not precise. That information also does not coincide with the time of the recording.
The video does not show who is in the vehicle or the license plate. The images show that two armed men on a motorcycle approach the truck, open the passenger door and leave after interacting with the victim for just a few minutes. Moments later, both units start off in opposite directions. The images show a direct attack, but are not clear as to an attempted robbery. A gas station employee remains impassive during the attack, does not react or lie down on the ground, despite being only a few meters away. The shots cannot be distinguished. The recording has deepened the doubts about what happened. Rocha said he was not going to comment on the investigation and insisted that it is up to the Attorney General’s Office to clarify what happened. The ministerial authorities, who agreed to let the Attorney General’s Office take on the case, have said that no hypothesis is ruled out, including the one disclosed by El Mayo.
The governor said he had nothing to do with what happened, but said he was willing to give a formal statement if requested by authorities in Mexico or the United States. “There are at least two versions,” López Obrador said Tuesday when referring to the video and Zambada’s statements. “We have to wait.” Meanwhile, the scandal remains latent, after the state Attorney General’s Office announced the indictment of Héctor Cuén Díaz, son of the murdered politician, for illegal negotiations at the UAS. In a sea of conflicting stories, there are only questions in Sinaloa.
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