The Second Collegiate Court of Appeals of Jalisco dismissed the allegations of torture by Abigael González Valencia, alias “El Cuini,” and decided to ratify his formal imprisonment on the charge of carrying a firearm for the exclusive use of the Army, in a new criminal case against him.
The federal court confirmed the start of the trial of the alleged financial operator of the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG), considering that the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) offered sufficient evidence of the crime.
This new trial against the Michoacan man stems from a grenade that was allegedly seized from him on the night of February 27, 2015, when he was arrested by agents of the Federal Police and elements of the Navy (Semar) at the Sonora Grill Prime restaurant in Puerto Vallarta.
The arrest warrant for this new accusation was served nine years after the events occurred.
On April 16, while giving his preliminary statement before the First District Court for Federal Criminal Proceedings in Jalisco, González Valencia reported that, after his capture, he was tortured at Semar facilities in Vallarta and threatened by a prosecutor from the then Specialized Subprosecutor’s Office for the Investigation of Organized Crime (SEIDO), in Mexico City.
The court, however, ruled out that his mere complaint would nullify the accusation and therefore on April 21, it formally ordered his imprisonment. “El Cuini” appealed the ruling, but it was later confirmed by the appeal court.
The reason the judge came to this conclusion was that in 2015, when he was imprisoned, the alleged drug trafficker did not say anything of what he is now alleging, despite having had the opportunity to do so.
In the preparatory statement for his first trial, nine years ago, he decided to reserve his right to testify.
The court also noted that his co-defendants did not testify against him, even though the man from Michoacan says they were also tortured.
“The mere statement that he was subjected to acts of torture would be insufficient, at this stage, to defeat the remaining evidence against him, since… such an extreme would impact the statements in which the accused had acknowledged his participation in the alleged acts and in which the various detainees had made accusations against him, which in this case does not occur,” the court ruling stated.
“El Cuini” has been in prison for almost a decade and during this time he was tried for murder and extradited to the United States on drug trafficking charges.
In 2014, the leader of the “Los Cuinis” organization was indicted in the District of Columbia on charges of leading a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiring to distribute significant quantities of drugs in the United States, and using a firearm to commit the crimes.
Your version
In the preparatory statement he made on April 16, González Valencia acknowledged that he was arrested at the restaurant along with his cousin Gilberto Mendoza González, “El Tapanco,” and his girlfriend Laura Alexandra Sánchez Ruiz, as well as the Colombian Óscar Betancourt Bermúdez and the Italian-Venezuelan José Miguel Leone Martínez.
With this version, he denied that his companions were captured, as reported by the Federal Police, in a black Cadillac Escalade, with Jalisco license plates JLV-59-82, in which they were supposedly carrying a kilo of cocaine.
“We were arrested at the Sonora Grill restaurant and taken to the Puerto Vallarta Marina, where I was tortured, along with my companions; they put a bag over my head and beat me all over my body. They tortured us there for about three hours or so and from there they took me to Mexico City on a plane,” said “El Cuini.”
“They arrested me at 11:00 at night and we arrived in Mexico City at 6:02; the next day, at around 9:00 in the morning, when we were at the SEIDO, they made us testify and I reserved my right and there a person from the SEIDO named Sinué told me: ‘if you don’t want to cooperate, I’m going to plant a grenade in you’ and he planted a grenade on me, as if I had brought it, which is not true, and he planted a drug on my companions, supposedly it was cocaine.
“They had us there in the SEIDO cells and from there they took us to a detention center, but I want to clarify that this agent told me ‘look, if you don’t want to cooperate, I’m going to fuck you up, I’m going to put a grenade in you’ and from the SEIDO they took me to a detention center for about 40 days and from there they took me to the Altiplano Prison, I wasn’t carrying any weapons or drugs.”
#Cuini #cornered
