A Mexican soccer icon entered politics. Prosecutors say narcos followed
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Loading... - Jiminez Faustina
- 06 Feb 2023
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Scandal has dogged former football great Cuauhtémoc Blanco, now a rising political star in Mexico. His alleged ties to drug traffickers might have sunk a lesser candidate. But he has a powerful backer: President Andrés Manuel López Obrador
It was supposed to be a festive occasion. Regional politicians, officials and military officers gathered in the Morelos state capital of Cuernavaca for breakfast in February 2022 to mark Mexico’s annual Army day. Cuauhtémoc Blanco, a former Mexican soccer star and the state’s governor, celebrated with red wine. But he wasn’t happy.
Among those in attendance was state Attorney General Uriel Carmona – who had recently been asked by state legislators to investigate the governor’s suspected ties to drug traffickers. As Carmona moved to shake Blanco’s hand and bid him goodbye, the attorney general alleges, the governor grabbed his arm. Blanco said he’d been tipped off that another prosecutor was sniffing around his eldest son’s financial accounts.
A line had been crossed, the barrel-chested Blanco said, and warned: “Now I’m going to mess with your families, and I’m not going to hold back.”
Carmona told the governor that he was leveling threats against law enforcement – a potential felony. He described the encounter in a criminal complaint, viewed by Reuters, filed two days later against Blanco with an independent state anti-corruption prosecutorial body.
The breakfast confrontation and the criminal complaint, which haven’t been previously reported, add to a cloud of scandal over one of Mexico’s most famous men – a legend on the soccer pitch, working-class hero and a rising star in politics. The dust-up came just six weeks after Mexican newspaper El Sol de México published a photo of the governor posing with three alleged drug traffickers in Morelos. The headline on that front-page photo: “Blanco met with narco leaders in Morelos.” The newspaper said the photo was found on the phone of a drug trafficker arrested by the military in November 2021. The news outlet did not explain how it obtained the photo, and it’s not clear who shot it. Read More…
