Guilty plea from former Mexican governor
Money laundering case lasted years
The former governor of a Mexican border state who U.S. prosecutors alleged cut deals with drug cartels, took kickbacks from government contractors and laundered millions of dollars in Texas pleaded guilty Thursday to a single count of money laundering.
It was an anticlimactic end to a saga that has dragged on for nearly a decade.
Tomás Yarrington Ruvalcaba, who was governor of Tamaulipas from 1999 to 2005, initially faced up to life in prison if he’d been convicted of racketeering or drug trafficking conspiracy charges the U.S. government leveled against him eight years ago.
A 53-page indictment that federal prosecutors filed in Brownsville in 2013 accused Yarrington, 64, of not only taking bribes from the notorious Zetas drug cartel, whose turf wars wracked Tamaulipas and its border from Brownsville to Nuevo Laredo, but of actively participating in its drug trafficking enterprise.
Yarrington was accused of laundering money by purchasing homes across Texas and investing in real estate developments in San Antonio and South Padre Island.
During Thursday’s court hearing in Houston, prosecutors walked away from the drug trafficking allegations, dismissing the most serious charges and allowing the former governor to plead guilty to one money laundering conspiracy count.
Yarrington will face up to 20 years in prison when he’s sentenced at a later date, but prosecutors said in court they’ll recommend a prison sentence of less than a year. Yarrington remains in detention, where he has been since 2017, and will get credit for time served. He also faces a fine and has agreed to give up a waterside residence in Port Isabel.
Yarrington admitted to using Texas real estate transactions to launder money from bribes paid while he was governor, but not to taking bribes from drug traffickers.
“Yarrington received illegal proceeds from individuals and private companies seeking business with the state of Tamaulipas,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Karen Betancourt said in court Thursday. “These commercial bribes were made in exchange
for favorable treatment by Yarrington and others for these individuals and companies through the award of contracts with the state of Tamaulipas.”
She said the amount of bribe money Yarrington admitted to moving into the U.S. was between $3.5 million and $9.4 million. Prosecutors had initially said his money laundering scheme involved $23 million.
Among the real estate that prosecutors alleged Yarrington purchased with the stolen money was 46 acres on La Cantera Parkway that was slated to be turned into a mixed-use development. That property was eventually sold, and $1 million was turned over to the U.S. The government also seized homes in Kyle and Mcallen that prosecutors alleged he purchased through a nominee.
Yarrington, a charismatic figure in Mexican politics who was once viewed as a
potential presidential candidate, spoke Spanish at Thursday’s hearing but occasionally broke into English to gently correct the interpreter.
Afterward, his attorney Chris Flood said prosecutors “obviously don’t believe that what others are saying about his involvement in the cartels is true.”
“Governor Yarrington’s happy to put this part of the case behind him,” Flood said.
The Homeland Security Investigations-led case, dubbed Operation Green Tide, has dragged on for years.
For more than a year before Yarrington was indicted in 2013, federal prosecutors in Texas had accused him in court documents of taking bribes from the Zetas.
A year later, the U.S. finally charged Yarrington, unveiling the lengthy indictment that accused him of being at the head of a racketeering enterprise that brought drugs and dirty money to Texas.
Despite the weighty allegations in the U.S. and criminal proceedings against him in Mexico, Yarrington avoided arrest for four years.
In 2017, Italian authorities arrested him while he was living in that country under a false name. The next year, after a brief spat between the U.S. and Mexico over who would get to prosecute him, he was extradited to the United States.
The damning allegations of drug trafficking went unmentioned at Thursday’s hearing, prompting some drug war observers to draw connections to Salvador Cienfuegos, a former Mexican defense minister whose prosecution the Justice Department abandoned last year.
“What is the signal that you’re giving to Mexico? That you’re not serious about this,” said Guadalupe Correa Cabrera, a government and policy professor at George Mason University. “It really makes us believe that there’s no justice in the United States, either.”