tuesday, november 12 , 2019. the washington post eZ re A
the warrant was enacted again, he
was outside of mexico; his law-
yers will not say where.
They told The Post that Trau-
witz’s absence was now part of a
strategy.
“Knowing the existence of an
arrest warrant for organized
crime, which would mean staying
in prison for the duration of the
process, the legal strategy is to
combat it through an injunction,
for which it is necessary not to
execute the arrest warrant,”
García González said.
In July, the attorney general’s
office announced it had asked for
Interpol’s help in finding Trau-
witz and bringing him back. But
Trauwitz’s name is still not on
Interpol’s online list of wanted
people. Interpol would not com-
ment on why his name does not
appear, or if that means he is not
currently wanted.
The attorney general’s of-
fice would not comment on the
Trauwitz case.
mexico’s judicial system has
undergone a dramatic transfor-
mation since 2008, when it estab-
lished an open-trial, adversarial
process modeled on the U.S. sys-
tem. But despite those reforms,
the country has rarely waged
high-level anti-corruption prose-
cutions successfully. one early
error in the Trauwitz case, ana-
lysts said, was not detaining him
when the trial began.
“The case is a failure. It’s proof
that corruption is still being toler-
ated, that it’s still being covered
up,” said roberto rock, a colum-
nist for El Universal. “Now we can
see that fight against corruption
is just rhetoric.”
Six of Trauwitz’s employees at
Pemex are in jail as their cases go
through the courts. They include
Brig. Gen. Socrates Herrera, one
of his top deputies. Their lawyers,
too, say there is no evidence
against their clients. Verdicts are
expected this year.
But Trauwitz is still missing.
“López obrador used Trauwitz
as a symbol of corruption and of
oil theft,” rock said. “But here we
see just how hard it will be in
mexico for that to result in any
kind of legal action.”
[email protected]gabriela martínez contributed to this
report.Trauwitz,” the mexican newspa-
per El Universal pronounced.
But at the second hearing, in
April, Trauwitz was nowhere to be
seen. His lawyers cited health
problems. To the third hearing,
his lawyers brought a doctor’s
note, written in English. Court
employees shook their heads
and snickered.
Trauwitz’s lawyers applied for
an injunction and got it, allowing
him to remain free. His bank
accounts were frozen but then
promptly unfrozen.
In June, the attorney general’s
office escalated the prosecu-
tion, publishing an arrest warrant
for Trauwitz on a charge of orga-
nized crime. If convicted, he
could be sentenced to 80 years.
But the warrant was suspend-
ed by another judge. That i s when
Trauwitz vanished. By the timenounced he would dismantle the
oil theft networks.
A journalist asked López obra-
dor about Trauwitz at a January
news conference. López obrador
grinned.
“raise your hand if you know of
this man,” he asked the journal-
ists. only one did.
“Well, he exists,” López obra-
dor said. “He’s on a list of people
being investigated.”
Trauwitz’s lawyers soon re-
ceived a court summons. So did
20 other Pemex officials who
worked for him. Trauwitz attend-
ed his first hearing in April, wear-
ing a military uniform glittering
with medals.
It w as an image López obrador
supporters had clamored for: a
uniformed official, paying the
price for corruption.
“The final Hours of GeneralGonzález said.
merlin and at least three other
former employees now allege a
vast coverup at Pemex, with Trau-
witz at the top. But none say
they received direct orders from
him to steal oil, and none
have any proof of Trauwitz’s al-
leged connections to the car-
tels that were siphoning off oil
and selling it on the black market.
former Pemex employee mario
ogazón Viamonté wrote in a
statement to the attorney gener-
al’s o ffice that Trauwitz’s team did
not seem interested in stopping
oil theft, but enabling it. ogazón
told The P ost he confronted Trau-
witz, but Trauwitz shrugged him
off.
merlin’s initial complaint re-
surfaced not long after López ob-
rador took office in December- The president had an-
pipeline thefts. In 2017, his last
year in the position, the num-
ber was 10,363, worth more than
a billion dollars a year.
In march 2017, a whistleblower
named moises merlin, a Pemex
security officer, filed an internal
complaint against Trauwitz, ac-
cusing him of issuing orders that
were “illegal and illicit,” i ncluding
concealing evidence of oil theft i n
pipelines across the country. Un-
der Peña Nieto, the complaint
was shelved.
After leaving Pemex, Trau-
witz offered himself as an expert
on stopping oil theft.
“We have identified the leaders
of oil theft, but they continue to
steal,” he reported in a paper last
year to the mexican Society of
Geography and Statistics. “No-
body does anything to detain
them.”
“It was a strange speech,” s aid a
member of the Society of Geogra-
phy and Statistics, who spoke on
the condition of anonymity out of
concern for becoming entangled
in the case. “Like this guy was
giving a lecture on something he
didn’t understand.”
meanwhile, a growing number
of Pemex employees said it was
Trauwitz who had failed to inves-
tigate those responsible for oil
theft a nd appeared to be profiting
off the crime.
merlin, in his initial complaint
and in later testimony, said Trau-
witz’s team assigned poorly
equipped, untrained work-
ers to conceal pipelines that had
been broken into. Trauwitz and
his colleagues, merlin said, in-
structed the security team not to
report those intrusions to mexi-
co’s judiciary, as required by law.
merlin also said he was ordered
by officers below Trauwitz to drill
into the pipelines himself, where
oil could later be extracted illegal-
ly.
In some cases, ordinary mexi-
cans swarmed to collect oil in
buckets. At one such theft, in
Hidalgo state in January, the
pipeline exploded, killing 137.
merlin said officers including
Trauwitz “prohibited the workers
from informing other authorities
under the threat of firing them
and threatening to make them
look like they were the ones steal-
ing oil.”
Trauwitz’s lawyers contest that
allegation.
“In the investigation, there are
thousands of notes that show that
legal notice was given by Pemex,
and what was being done is to
combat the theft of oil,” Garcíacountry where the government is
unable or unwilling to exert au-
thority over much of its territory
— as in the northern state of
Sonora, where nine American
mormon women and children
were gunned down in broad day-
light last week.
one of the major questions of
López obrador’s presidency was
if and how he would pursue for-
mer officials for corruption. Do-
ing so would be well received by
his supporters, and by the United
States and other governments.
But it would threaten fragile alli-
ances between López obrador
and some of the country’s most
powerful men and women.
Then there was the other prob-
lem: Was an anti-corruption cam-
paign in a judicial system as
flawed as mexico’s even possible?
“A mLo has to be very careful
about how he goes after corrup-
tion,” s aid University of San Diego
political scientist David Shirk,
who studies mexico’s judicial sys-
tem. Graft “is so pervasive and
entrenched in mexico’s power
elite that if he probes too deeply
among powerful individuals,
there’s certain to be a backlash.”
The case against Trauwitz, a
former director of security for the
state oil company, Pemex,
is among a handful of indict-
ments at the heart of López obra-
dor’s anti-corruption drive. for-
mer Pemex employees say Trau-
witz coordinated a vast effort to
pillage oil from pipelines and re-
fineries. Annually, oil theft costs
Pemex roughly $3.5 billion.
Trauwitz is not the only former
Pemex official wanted by López
obrador. Emilio Lozoya, the for-
mer head of the company, is ac-
cused of accepting millions in
bribes through shell deals. Lozo-
ya, like Trauwitz, has vanished.
The men have something else in
common: They were both top
aides to former president Enrique
Peña Nieto, López obrador’s pre-
decessor, who could become en-
tangled in their cases if they were
to proceed.
Lawyers for Trauwitz and Lo-
zoya say the charges against them
are baseless, and they are inten-
tionally evading warrants they
believe are politically motivated.
“The accusations are false,” ro-
berto García González, Trauwitz’s
attorney, told The Washington
Post. He said Trauwitz fought oil
theft, and his effort is being mis-
represented by the López obra-
dor administration.
López obrador has taken spe-
cial aim at Pemex, the company
he came of age protesting as a
young activist. The government
depends on Pemex for around 15
percent of its tax revenue. López
obrador has argued that the fal-
tering company can be restored to
health by reducing fuel theft and
corruption.
That a pproach leads directly to
the Trauwitz case. only a few
months ago, it seemed an explo-
sive symbol of the new anti-cor-
ruption drive. Now it appears to
reveal the judiciary’s failure to
deliver on the president’s top pri-
ority.
“We are not going to let them
keep pillaging,” López obra-
dor told reporters this month.
But the case was a mess. Not
only is Trauwitz still at large, but
the government’s case appears to
hinge on testimony that offers
little evidence of a vast conspira-
cy.
In 2010, Trauwitz was named
head of security for Peña Nie-
to, then the governor of the state
of mexico. About a year after Peña
Nieto won the presidency in 2012,
Trauwitz received a new assign-
ment: security chief at Pemex.
It was a plum job, one of the
most senior positions in mexico’s
armed forces. Colleagues referred
to him as a “general de dedo,” or
“general of the finger” — a man
who had been given a privileged
rank by the finger of power.
When he took the position in
early 2013, Pemex recorded 186
corruption from A
In a corruption case, a symbol of Mexico’s push for reform
alejandro Cegarra/bloomberg news
Mexican president Andrés Manuel López obrador took office last year after assailing the country’s corruption. the prosecution of Gen.
Eduardo León trauwitz, the former chief of security at the state-run oil company pemex, is seen as a test of his anti-corruption drive.enrique Castro/agenCe FranCe-Presse/getty imagesA view of the scene in tlahuelilpan, Mexico, the day after a massive
blaze caused by a leaky fuel pipeline in January killed 137 people.
ordinary Mexicans had gathered to collect the oil in buckets.
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