The Mexican government unknowingly tapped a former cartel accountant to lead the charge on $30 million in funds for poor people, and he subsequently kept the money, according to Friday reports.
Rodolfo David Dávila Córdova used to be an employee of the Bank of Mexico — the Mexican equivalent of the Federal Reserve — from 1988 to 1990 and was a federal government employee until 2003, according to Insight Crime, a D.C.-based journalism think tank.
Dávila Córdova was nabbed by Mexican authorities in 2005 for being the head financier of the Juarez Cartel, which led to a five-year stint in the maximum security Altiplano prison. Altiplano is the same facility Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera of the Sinaloa Cartel escaped from in July 2015 and was re-incarcerated in January 2016.
Dávila Córdova reemerged in the public eye by bidding to have two companies he worked for get lucrative government contracts worth over $30 million in 2013, according to Aristegui Noticias. The contracts were to play a lead role in the administration of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to run the government-funded “Crusade against Hunger.”
Authorities soon discovered that nothing was being done by the two firms associated with the former drug dealing accountant. The offices listed in the contracts were a doctor’s office and a law firm — Dávila Córdova could not be found at either location.
The bureaucracy of Mexico’s judicial system and security apparatus is such that a judge issued a fine against Dávila Córdova in 2015, and it was delivered to Altiplano prison. However, it was only after a database search that authorities realized the former inmate had already been lawfully released five years earlier.
The business dealings of Dávila Córdova are currently under investigation by Mexican authorities for embezzlement and fraud. At the time of the cartel banker’s 2005 arrest, the Juarez Cartel was responsible for 15 to 20 percent of cocaine being sent into the U.S., which was worth “between $660 million and $1 billion” annually, according to Cartel documents seized by Mexican authorities.
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