Cesar Arellano Garcia
Newspaper La Jornada
Tuesday February 21, 2023, p. 8
A district judge denied protection to Carlos Treviño Medina, former director of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), who sought to order the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) to investigate the alleged acts of torture against Emilio Lozoya Austin.
In July 2022, Treviño Medina, accused of operations with resources of illicit origin and criminal association, accused the head of the FGR, Alejandro Gertz Manero, together with the deputy attorney specializing in Federal Crime Investigation, Juan Ramos López, of torturing Lozoya. Austin, to involve him in the Odebrecht case.
According to the file, the complainant denounced that Lozoya Austin was pressured, threatened, and psychologically tortured, “through coercion, pressure, conditioning, and fragile rewards – taking advantage of a criterion of opportunity -, and with his will expired, he signed a complaint of facts false” that gave rise to the investigation folder against him, as well as forced to withdraw from amparo proceedings promoted in his favor.
However, the Specialized Prosecutor for Human Rights, of the FGR, in charge of Irene Herrerías, determined that the complainant’s references are not suitable to establish that an event relevant to criminal law has occurred, because his statements they do not specify circumstances of time, manner and place of execution, that is, it does not refer to how the threats and/or pressures occurred, as well as the alleged negotiation between the Attorney General of the Republic and Lozoya Austin to agree on a criterion of opportunity in exchange of false declarations, therefore they lack effectiveness to initiate an investigation.
Since November 2021, based on Lozoya’s statements, the FGR obtained from a district judge, based in Almoloya de Juárez, state of Mexico, an arrest warrant against Treviño Medina, which allowed turning over a red Interpol file, for its location and capture in 190 countries.
The authorities accuse him of having received 4 million pesos to approve a multi-year contract with the company Braskem, an Odebrecht affiliate, and with it, ethanol would be transformed into polyethylene products, obtaining the Brazilian company a price 25 percent lower than the of the international market in the main input for the operation of the plant located in Nanchital, Veracruz.
