Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has cancelled his planned visit to the U.S. where he was expected to meet with President Donald J. Trump. The cancellation comes after Mexico’s government denounced Trump’s new border security measures aimed at interfering with the cash flow of the very Mexican cartels believed to have financed the current Mexican president’s campaign.
On Thursday morning, Peña Nieto took to Twitter to announce that his staff had notified the White House that he would not be going to the scheduled meetings with Trump.
On Wednesday, Trump signed two executive orders dealing with enforcing current immigration laws and the construction of a border wall. Trump specifically called out Mexican cartels in the executive order. In response to the anti-cartel measures, Peña Nieto took to social media, as Breitbart Texas reported.
In addition to denouncing the measure, Peña Nieto announced that he would be ordering the 50 Mexican Consulates in the U.S. to step up their efforts to protect “migrants”. The Mexican president made no mention of the fact that the migrants are one of the largest funding mechanisms for the cartels who reportedly helped him gain his office.
In response to Peña Nieto’s announcement, Trump responded on Twitter that it would be better to cancel the meeting. According to Trump, the U.S.- Mexico relation has been one sided with the current $60 billion trade deficit with Mexico in connection with the current North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Mexican President Peña Nieto has been the subject of immaculate investigative reporting in his own country, though his reported ties to Mexican cartels received little attention from the U.S. during the presidency of Barack Obama.
As Breitbart Texas previously reported:
An in-depth investigation has revealed that through the use of shell companies, members of the Juarez Cartel financed the political campaign of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. The cartel members appear to have also used government programs to launder money and profit form their networks of contacts.
The bombshell revelation was made this week by the independent news outlet Aristegui Noticias who claim that top officials of the Juarez Cartel financed thousands of cash cards that were handed out by Mexico’s Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) during the 2012 political campaign that resulted in the victory of Enrique Pena Nieto. According to the Mexican journalists, the cash cards were provided by a company called Monex. They were reported to be financed through a series of shell corporations by key players with the Juarez Cartel.
Through a three part series, the Mexican news organization identified Rodolfo David “El Consul” Avila Cordero as a key figure in the financial scandal that implicates the leading figures in Mexico’s ruling party the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI).
Avila Cordero was arrested in 2005 in Mexico City in connection with the seizure of almost $750,000 in cash. At the time authorities had identified him as a top tier operative with the Juarez (Carrillo Fuente) Cartel who worked as their financial operator an a key figure in their connections with Colombian drug lords. Avila Cordero had earned the nickname “The Consul” because of his links to high ranking officials within the Mexican government and acted as an ambassador of sorts, Aristegui Noticias reported.
Eight years after his arrest, Avila Cordero became a contractor for a government funded program called Crusade Against Hunger. Using a company called Conclave SA de CV and Prodasa SA de CV, Cordero was able to secure more than $396 million pesos or $25 million in government contracts through rigged bidding processes by government officials.
The Crusade Against Hunger is a pet project of Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto who claimed that with that program he would improve the quality of life for his people.
According to the investigation by the Mexican journalists, Conclave and Prodasa are shell companies that do not have real offices or staff.
As previously reported by Breitbart Texas, Carmen Aristegui, the founder of Aristegui Noticias, was a top rated radio journalists in Mexico, however her investigation into properties given to Pena Nieto as bribes led to her news outlet firing her and her staff. Despite being off the air, Aristegui continues reporting through her website.
As part of the investigation Aristegui Noticias also confirmed that Conclave was involved in the trading of soccer players with European soccer clubs.
Breitbart Texas also illuminated the current realities in Pieña Nieto’s Mexico, especially along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Mexican president has allowed paramilitary narco-cartels to control entire Mexican states. We wrote:
Though many politicians, journalists, and pundits have criticized the concept of a physical border barrier while others claimed the border to be safe, the aforementioned groups and individuals are simply ignorant on the topic or engaging in intentional deception. Breitbart Texas and the Cartel Chronicles effort has reported ad nauseum on Mexican cartels that have operational control over entire Mexican border states — including the governors’ offices and newsrooms. Our reporting has shown that U.S. law enforcement encounters with known or suspected terrorists have occurred frequently in remote areas along the U.S.-Mexico border. We’ve shown that there are humanitarian consequences associated with an unsecured border — not just for U.S. citizens, but for foreigners as well.
Our reporting has shown that one of the Mexican cartels, Los Zetas, is currently stockpiling Russian rocket-propelled grenades and their launchers at the Texas border, that they recently forced down a U.S. helicopter by open firing on the aircraft and striking it. Los Zetas are headquartered in Nuevo Laredo, a city that sits immediately across the shallow and narrow Rio Grande from Laredo, Texas. There are no fences or walls in the region and the local police do not have a presence in many of the gang-infested narco-neighborhoods that sit in Texas along the open border.
Along with Los Zetas, the Gulf Cartel is also headquartered immediately south of the Texas border. The Mexican state of Tamaulipas is largely controlled by the two paramilitary groups. All of the news outlets in the region have a “link” who works for the cartel and tells journalists what they can and can’t write about. Journalists and editors who ignore the control of the local cartel faction are brutally murdered. Many concerned citizens in Mexico have taken to anonymous social media accounts to report on the cartels. When the now-citizen-journalists are discovered, they are brutally murdered.
The cartels in this region have also set up metropolitan camera and surveillance systems across the cities they control. Two of the past three governors for the state are currently fugitives from U.S. justice for their roles and relationships with the cartels. One of the former-governor fugitives was being protected by the state government as recently as a few months ago.
Ildefonso Ortiz is an award winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.
Brandon Darby is managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.
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