Fmr Gov Feliz Arturo González Canto and his alleged links to drug trafficking

Sol Prendido  Borderland Beat from Perspectives MX

For at least 12 years, the former governor of Quintana Roo and former senator, Felix Arturo González Canto, along with the former state governor, Roberto Borge Angulo, have been repeatedly singled out for their alleged ties to drug traffickers; today they are mentioned again, but internationally, in the trial against Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, described as "the criminal leader of the largest drug cartel in the world".

Jesús Reynaldo "El Rey" Zambada García, one of the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel, third in hierarchy within the criminal structure, turned into a collaborating witness in exchange for benefits, points out those who were once his accomplices and exhibited not only to former governors, but to the military, police chiefs, high officials and even former presidents.

Quintana Roo: Caribbean Narco Corridor

During the regime of Mario Ernesto Villanueva Madrid, from 1994 to 1999, the Juarez Cartel, under the leadership of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, "The Lord of the Skies", settled in Quintana Roo and what was a paradise for millions of tourists national and international, for its attractions, its culture, its beaches and its security, it was transformed into land of the narco, where the big organizations of crime disputed and they contest territorial control.

Villanueva Madrid, under pressure from the United States government, was captured, prosecuted in Mexico, extradited to the neighboring country and then repatriated to pay pending charges in his country, such as money laundering and organized crime, among other crimes.

Since then, Quintana Roo has been an operations center for organized crime gangs, a refuge for drug bosses, a tax haven for money laundering and a gateway for the tons of drugs that arrive in Mexican territory by air, sea and land. whose destiny is the American Union

The subsequent leaders and even the Federation, little or nothing could or wanted to do to solve the scourge that gradually was turning the entity into a sanctuary of organized crime.

In the mandate of Joaquín Ernesto Hendricks Díaz, the situation remained almost the same, but with the arrival of Félix Arturo González Canto as governor, in April 2005, the transfer of drugs reached its highest level and the internal consumption of the same went up scandalously

In 2006, already with González Canto at the head of the state government, the entity registered a total of 798 cases of crimes against health, but many of them, almost all, were for possession, that is, 703 in total, that is to say, the tendency of drug trafficking crimes changed definitively in Quintana Roo and internal consumption exceeded the modes of trafficking and commerce.

The next year, in 2007, Quintana Roo arrived at one thousand 43 cases for crimes against health, of which 992 were for possession, while in the section of traffic 12 were registered and only 29 for trade were registered.

After that year, the one with the highest incidence in this statistic, the number of cases for crimes against health was maintained in the same standard, until the last year of Félix González Canto's government.

However, it was well known that official statistics were made up to try to hide the reality, in addition to the "black figure" exceeded by at least 300 percent by the officers.

During the course of his administration, González Canto was involved in scandals related to drug trafficking, prostitution, diversion of resources and other legalities, including a folder of investigation pending in the Prosecutor's Office of Quintana Roo, for the murder of a young girl. 15 years old, to whom, it is said, he ordered to assassinate when he was municipal president of Cozumel, because she was pregnant and tried to extort money from him.

At the time, the journalist and writer Lydia Cacho Ribeiro, released a military intelligence report that uncovered what was happening in Quintana Roo, where two large groups of the Zetas were fighting (or are they fighting?) for the control of Cancún and the Riviera Maya: some from the Gulf Cartel and others deserters from the same organization.

Detained his police office for protecting zetas

In August 2009, a "narcovideo" was broadcast on the Youtube social network, where three alleged "Zetas", when questioned by another group calling themselves "Matazetas", revealed the names of senior police chiefs and public officials who offered protection to organized crime .

Among the names was the delegate of the PGR in Quintana Roo, Nicolás Hernández Mendoza; the subdelegate, Jesús Vega Romero; State Secretary of Public Security of the State, Salvador Rocha Vargas; Alejandro Betancourt Pérez, director of the Municipal Tourist Police of Cancún; Mariano Martínez, preventive police and David Lozano Antillón, agent of the Public Prosecutor's Office of the Common Jurisdiction.

Two months later, on the night of September 2 of that same year, in less than 24 hours, the commander of the 34th Military Zone, General Anastacio García Rodríguez, arrested the aforementioned, who were transferred to the Deputy Attorney's Office for Special Investigations in Organized Crime, then SIEDO and from there to a house of authority of the PGR.

Finally, according to the criminal case 301/2009, they were registered and entered into the federal center of social readaptation (cefereso) #3, "northeast", with headquarters in Matamoros, Tamaulipas.

It was then established that the suspects maintained ties and provided protection to the criminal organizations of the Beltrán Leyva brothers and the Gulf Cartel, as well as to "Los Zetas", which at that time was their armed wing operating in Quintana Roo.

It should be noted that when Rocha Vargas was arrested, he already had several complaints against him for using the facilities of the C4 to torture detainees, without an arrest warrant, violating their human rights, and that police extortion against tourists grew exponentially during his command in Cancun and Playa del Carmen.

However, the then State Attorney, Bello Melchor Rodríguez, immediately came to his defense saying that he could prove his innocence and warned that the same lawyers of Villanueva Madrid would defend him.

The arrest of the previous, exposed the complicity of other employees of the government of the State who were also colluded, among them: Yonis Reyes López, alias "El Yoni", former agent of the State Judicial Police (PJE), arrested together with Juan Daniel Carranco Salazar, "El Colosio", who was the head of the Gulf Cartel in the state.

On December 11, 2010, after a year and three months behind bars, Rocha Vargas gained his freedom and left the rincón prison in Nayarit to return to Cozumel.

Gonzalez Canto hastened to announce his release, saying that justice had been done; his accusers, on the other hand, commented that the governor himself had been in charge of "fixing" the matter.

Linked to the czar of prostitution in the state

In February 2012, as governor Roberto Borge Angulo, the young Lorena Martins, daughter of Raúl Martins Coggiola, Argentine businessman and former intelligence agent in his country, arrived in Mexico to denounce her own father for attempted murder

She went to the Attorney General's Office, where she declared that she had been on the verge of being murdered by her own father Martins Coggiola, with the complicity of the government of Félix González Canto, who supported him to consolidate himself as the czar of prostitution in the Mexican Caribbean, as well as its successor Borge Angulo.

The denunciation of Lorena Martins in addition to pointing directly to her father, involved González Canto and Borge Angulo, when revealing them to characters of organized crime.

According to Lorena, the two had links with Raúl Martins, because he was favored by González Canto to become the czar of the white slave trade, in exchange for the fact that once he finished his term of office, he would support Roberto Borge's campaign.

"I remember that my father went to a dinner to support the campaign of a political party in Cancun. the entry was a thousand dollars and he bought four or five tickets, plus the concrete contributions that he did to that campaign ", mentioned Lorena.

Lorena said that her father was one of the leaders of a powerful organized crime mafia related to the Zetas and a group of politicians who she supported in her campaigns, as well as owning a network of clubs in Cancun, Playa de Carmen, Tijuana and Buenos Aires, with names like Mix, Divas, The One, Maxim and Bolero.

Her father, she said, was the leader of a gang dedicated to the prostitution of Argentines, Colombians and Brazilians who were brought to Mexico, against their will, as they deceived them with the idea of ​​coming to Cancun to work as waitresses and models. But in the end he forced them to prostitute themselves.

In his organization, she said, all trafficking networks work with protection. There are several officials involved, people from political parties, media people who covered all this and the annoyance of her parent accepted that she warned him that she did not agree with their activities of facilitation and that if he did not let the young sexually exploited women go, I would report it to the authorities.

The matter did not go any farther and at the moment Raul Martins Coggiola is a fugitive and missing.

Links with top  capos

With Mario Villanueva, after the investigations of the FBI and the DEA, it was established that Ramón Alcides Magaña, operator of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, was the one who coordinated the payment to police and officials of the state of Quintana Roo, in particular to the then governor, who received half a million dollars for each shipment of cocaine that the Juarez Cartel was allowed to put forward. 

In order not to lose the habit, González Canto continued the tradition of maintaining contact with the Carrillo Fuentes clan, but not with Luis Carlos Carrillo Cano, nephew of the "Lord of the Skies", who showed off as a successful builder.

According to police investigations, Luis Carlos Carrillo Cano attended holidays and all kinds of social events and even kept a very good relationship within the political scope, with which he could obtain support from the government's offers

These governmental benefits were not bargained, despite the fact that his brothers Ricardo and Alfredo Carrillo, the DEA, had already placed them as active members of the Juárez Cartel and allegedly responsible for drug trafficking, money laundering, extortion and homicide.

Under the façade of an entrepreneur, Carrillo Cano made millionaire trades with González Canto, to such a degree that he even granted him the concession for the expansion of the municipal jail of Cancún, through the SAFIE company of Quintana Roo, SA de CV.

When the relationship González Canto-Carrillo Cano was discovered, the building site had to be suspended and then when examining the plans of the prison, it was discovered that they even contemplated the construction of secret passages for eventual escapes.

On the night of October 18, 2011, the "successful businessman", friend of Borge and González Canto, was executed in the parking lot of one of the restaurants "El Pollo Feliz", located on one of the main avenues of Cancun.