Neither of the two major businessmen who supported Francisco Cervantes for the presidency of the Business Coordinating Council in 2022 could have anticipated what would happen: his total devotion to former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and even less so that in the process, the darkest part of the regime linked to organized crime would penetrate the so-called CCE and place its people throughout the country.
Cervantes, servile like few others, did not see what was happening before such genuflection when they began to infiltrate businessmen linked to organized crime into the replica councils across the country.
In the business sector, there are those who have detected the presence of businessmen with dubious backing and are hiring companies to help investigate them.
Romo must have thought he could monetize all the years of support for López Obrador, without realizing that the regime was using him to launder money.
Organized crime could not function without its business interfaces for money laundering – through the construction industry –, logistics – mainly through land and maritime transport –, and the financial system – using financial institutions, as happened with Vector, CIBanco, and Intercam last year, and others of greater magnitude, such as the Wachovia bank, which laundered millions of dollars for Mexican cartels and opened the door for them to the financial system in 2004.
What is being seen in Mexico with the businessmen who are targets of U.S. intelligence is the type called “hybrid businessman,” where legal businesses are combined with illicit operations, as happened at the end of last year with the owner of the Miss Universe pageant, Raúl Rocha Cantú, whose empire incorporated a criminal business: fuel smuggling.
The penetration of organized crime into the business sector caught the private sector unprepared, due to the lack of compliance mechanisms in a large number of companies to strengthen corporate governance, have tools to prevent fraud and anti-corruption regulations, as well as adherence to international standards and cybersecurity.
Investigations in the United States are a cold shower and a wake-up call for businessmen about the quality of their leadership, to prevent them, in the immediate future, from serving as a cover for expanding criminal networks right under their noses.
It is also unclear if the CCE, which brings together 14 apex organizations of the private sector representing nearly 80% of the national wealth, have noticed the cancer that is beginning to infect them in the face of the strategy of politicians and criminals willing to dispute their economic power.
Criminal organizations and politicians who are part of their structure – in some cases, their leaders –, which were born as part of the alternative criminal economy built during the López Obrador administration, are another facet of the wild penetration of these mafias that want to seize all productive areas in Mexico, as part of the evolution they have had over the years: first, at the local level, with control of the police, which expanded from municipalities to states in the areas of finance, public works, and water, while they advanced in the imposition of councilors, mayors, deputies, and other popularly elected positions.
Business networks linked to organized crime have served as Trojan horses in the private sector, by opening doors for money laundering, to identify where the vulnerabilities of the guild were for illicit activities and extortion, as well as to control lobbying with authorities at different levels of government.
The relevance of Romo is that for more than a decade he was the liaison between López Obrador and the business sector, and when he became President, he appointed him head of his Office.
There is, as far as is known, no federal investigation into the penetration of organized crime into the business sector, nor how its unfolding from the highest echelons of the CCE was facilitated to find those responsible for it.
However, in the United States, they have begun to follow several leads, and the first intelligence targets of ongoing investigations are:
Iván Antonio Pérez, General Director of Municipal Economic Development in Ciudad Juárez, who handles the business relations of at least one candidate for the governorship of Chihuahua.
Olivaldo Paz Gómez, who presides over the Tijuana branch of the National Chamber of Commerce, Canaco, is backed by Governor Marina del Pilar Ávila – whose visa Washington maintains has been canceled – and has as his main support Fernando Castro Trenti, who aspires to be governor of Baja California and has an open investigation in the United States for allegedly having opened the doors of Argentina to several Mexican criminal organizations when he served as ambassador during the government of Enrique Peña Nieto and brought Kirchnerist capital to Mexico.
Guillermo Romero Rodríguez, who two years ago lost the mayorship of Mazatlán by running in a coalition headed by the PAN, which included the PRI, the PRD, and the Sinaloan Party, founded by Héctor Melesio Cuén, who handled the political relations of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and was assassinated in July 2024, when, together with Governor Rubén Rocha Moya, he was about to have a meeting with then leader of the Sinaloa Cartel.
Guillermo Salgado Mendoza, president of the Canaco in La Paz, Baja California Sur, supported by Alonso Gutiérrez Martínez, state undersecretary of Tourism and Economy.
The business sector as such had not been the subject of any specific investigation in the United States, and the cases in which businessmen were involved were at the individual level, but not as part of a strategy by organized crime to infiltrate its apex organizations and chambers, which is what is happening today.
The most important of all cases, historically speaking, was that of the brokerage house Vector, founded and directed by Alfonso Romo, which, according to U.S. authorities, laundered money for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
There are more delicate aspects, such as managing to impose employer representatives at the negotiation tables with employers at the IMSS and the Infonavit. But there are many more who have not yet realized that their sector has been infiltrated.
