The murder of Enrique Salinas de Gortari: the shadow of the drug dealer and the decline of his powerful brother’s empire

The lifeless body of Enrique Salinas de Gortari He was found on December 5, 2004 in a car parked in a neighborhood in the municipality of Huixquilucan, State of Mexico, as confirmed by the Attorney General’s Office (now the Attorney General’s Office) of that state.

Twenty-four hours later, the Attorney General of Mexico, Alfonso Navarrete Prida, claimed to have indications that the victim had gone to look for the murderers and said the strongest hypothesis was that the meeting had to do with an attempted extortion, or extortion already underway, by people who were willing information that could harm Salinas.

He even dared to speculate that perhaps the intention of the murderers was not the murder, because when a plastic bag is used to suffocate the victim, one usually seeks to prolong the agony, according to Navarrete himself, to make them suffer or to get information about something that is requested.

According to the lawyer, the brother of the former president of Mexico was crossing “very bad timesBecause he had recently divorced and the situation had led to several disputes regarding his property, debts, mortgages and payments he faced after the separation.

After discussing with relatives – ex-wife and children – and other people close to the victim, the prosecutor deduced that Enrique Salinas had spent the last two weeks very worried and “in a very difficult mood“.

As the investigation progressed and the days passed, more details of the last hours of Salinas de Gortari became known.

We learned that he had gone with his family to Cuernavaca to spend the weekend in search of some peace and quiet. However, on Sunday, shortly before lunch, he went out, according to his relatives, because he had to go see “certain people”. He didn’t elaborate. They calculated that he left around 2 o’clock in the afternoon; several phone calls were recorded on his cell phone for up to almost three hours.

The cell phone was in the same car where the body was found. Experts who examined Gortari’s Passat and the position of the body in the right front seat, explained that the crime was likely committed elsewhere and left him in the car in the Empresarios neighborhood in Huixquilucan.

Navarrete reported that three video cameras in the area captured the Passat in motion, although he said plans were unclear:

“Near the Passat you can see a black truck and a person, but the color or the license plates are not well seen“, He said.

On February 13, 2009, it aired on the radio program MVS News an interview that a few days before the journalist Carmen Aristegui conducted with the former president Miguel de la Madrid for a book she was writing: Transition (Grijalbo). In the conversation, De la Madrid did not hesitate to point out various crimes and acts of corruption committed by the Salinas de Gortari family. He even accused the former president of favoring his family and allowing them to commit various crimes:

-You thought Salinas was studious, intelligent, honest, a good boy. And it turned out that he had made some very serious mistakes. The worst, corruption.

-Yes and especially the corruption of his brother. He got government contracts, communicated with drug traffickers …

-With whom?

-I don’t know exactly who gave him the money to take him to Switzerland.

– Remember that a group of businessmen recognized part of this money.

-By complicity.

– Was that drug money?

-It’s possible, yes.

In the same interview, De la Madrid confirmed that Enrique’s murder was linked to the Drug traffic.

– What does he say about the death of Enrique Salinas?

– I don’t know he learned anything, but maybe it was related to the drug money

– Could the death have been the product of a dispute between brothers for the fortune of the family?

-I do not believe that

– Your own fortune linked to drug trafficking?

-Yes

The prosecutor’s office assured that Enrique Salinas de Gortari was killed by suffocation with a plastic bag.

The younger brother of the former president had an investigation open in France since 1996 to determine his alleged complicity in a crime of money laundering with his brother Raúl. Foreign prosecutors have found accounts in Switzerland with $ 120 million – likely narco controlled by Raúl Salinas.

At least three of the five brothers have been involved in various scandals of corruption, homicide, influence peddling, tax evasion and money laundering, and have even been investigated by Mexican authorities and Interpol.

The marriage between Raúl Salinas Lozano, former senator of the Ministry of Industry and Commerce during the six-year term of Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964), and Margarita de Gortari Carvajal, a teacher from a family of good prestige in the cultural domain of the time, five children were born: Raúl, Carlos, Enrique, Sergio and Adriana.

Carlos Salinas de Gortari He was President of Mexico from 1988 to 1994. His tenure was marked by the shadow of voter fraud in the 1998 elections, when he was the winner after a controversial “failure of the system” that shut out the public to announce the results within the date. that had been expected, thus arousing all kinds of still valid speculation.

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