LONGTIME MEXICAN TRAFFICKER PLEADS GUILTY TO COCAINE CONSPIRACY

‘El Tio’ worked with Sinaloa cartel to move drugs into U.S.

A longtime Mexican drug trafficker who worked for rival cartels and kept a low public profile until 2017, when authorities alleged he had ties to a Mexican soccer star and singer, pleaded guilty to a cocaine trafficking conspiracy Wednesday.

Raúl “El Tio” Flores Hernández, 70, admitted that he was an intermediary between cocaine suppliers in

South America and the Mexican trafficking organizations that moved the drugs through Mexico and into the United States. His guilty plea came in a case in Washington, D.C., though he is also under indictment in San Diego.

Though his plea agreement covers conduct dating back to 2007, authorities allege that Flores Hernández, a well-known businessman in Guadalajara, was involved in the drug trade as early as 1983, and that he’d worked with both the Sinaloa cartel, and more recently its main rival, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación.

Just before his arrest, federal grand juries in both San Diego and Washington handed down indictments against Flores Hernández, which prompted the arrest warrant that led to his July 2017 capture by Mexican authorities.

The next month, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control designated Flores Hernández a significant foreign narcotics trafficker under the Kingpin Act. That designation allows Treasury officials to freeze a person’s U.S. assets and prohibits U.S. citizens and entities from doing business with them.

Among the 21 other Mexican citizens and 42 entities also designated the same day for allegedly providing support to Flores Hernández’s drug-trafficking organization were Rafael Marquez, a decorated defender who captained Mexico in five World Cups, and singer Julión Álvarez. Both men were barred from entering the U.S., which forced Marquez to miss a match played in Los Angeles in preparation for the 2018 World Cup and prompted Álvarez to cancel a U.S. music tour.

Treasury officials removed Marquez’s designation in 2021 and removed Álvarez’s designation last year.

According to a statement of facts as part of his guilty plea, Flores Hernández admitted to helping coordinate shipments of cocaine to Mexico from Bolivia, Brazil and Peru by acting as an intermediary and making introductions between groups in Mexico and the South American countries. He also admitted to personally investing in “several loads of cocaine” shipped to Mexico from Bolivia and Peru.

Flores Hernández’s San Diego indictment remains under seal. But last year one of his co-defendants, an alleged Bolivian trafficker named Victor “Chi Chi” Hugo Anez Vaca Diez, was extradited to San Diego from Argentina. An indictment unsealed against him showed there are likely 12 or more defendants in that case charged with drug trafficking and money laundering offenses that allegedly occurred in Colombia and Ecuador as well as Bolivia, Mexico and Peru.

Flores Hernández is expected to be sentenced in June.