THESSALONIKI, Greece — Greek police say that they have arrested a 35-year-old German citizen who has four outstanding arrest warrants on him for fraud and cybercrime, three from Germany and one international.
The Thessaloniki police’s organized crime and human trafficking division announced Saturday they had found over 1,000 photos and videos of child pornography in the suspect’s cellphone when he was arrested Thursday.
The man, who had settled in Greece since 2019, was jailed pending review of the extradition requests. He also faces a Greek prosecutor next week on charges of impersonating both a German and a Greek police officer.
The suspect, whose mother was Greek, had been showing what proved to be a fake German police officer’s ID on across northern Greece, claiming he was a part of a special unit investigating networks of pedophiles. He also impersonated a Greek policeman, recently checking into a hospital wearing a police uniform, which was found in his home.
Police say they also found in the suspect’s car and home two license plates purporting to be from German state vehicles, at least one of which was fake, as well as fake salary payment statements from German state authorities.
José Irizarry accepts that he’s known as the most corrupt agent in U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration history, admitting he “became another man” in conspiring with Colombian cartels to build a lavish lifestyle of expensive sports cars, Tiffany jewels and paramours around the world.
But as he used his final hours of freedom to tell his story to The Associated Press, Irizarry says he won’t go down for this alone, accusing some long-trusted DEA colleagues of joining him in skimming millions of dollars from drug money laundering stings to fund a decade’s worth of luxury overseas travel, fine dining, top seats at sporting events and frat house-style debauchery.
The way Irizarry tells it, dozens of other federal agents, prosecutors, informants and in some cases cartel smugglers themselves were all in on the three-continent joyride known as “Team America” that chose cities for money laundering pick-ups mostly for party purposes or to coincide with Real Madrid soccer or Rafael Nadal tennis matches. That included stops along the way in VIP rooms of Caribbean strip joints, Amsterdam’s red-light district and aboard a Colombian yacht that launched with plenty of booze and more than a dozen prostitutes.
This photo obtained by The Associated Press shows Jose Irizarry in Cartagena, Colombia, in 2017. Irizarry accepts he is the most corrupt agent in U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration history, admitting he conspired with Colombian cartels to build a lavish lifestyle. But he says he won’t take the rap alone, accusing long-trusted DEA colleagues of joining him in skimming millions from money laundering stings to fund a decade’s worth of high living.
/AP
“We had free access to do whatever we wanted,” the 48-year-old Irizarry told the AP in a series of interviews before beginning a 12-year federal prison sentence. “We would generate money pick-ups in places we wanted to go. And once we got there it was about drinking and girls.”
All this revelry was rooted, Irizarry said, in a crushing realization among DEA agents around the world that there’s nothing they can do to make a dent in the drug war anyway. Only nominal concern was given to actually building cases or stemming a record flow of illegal cocaine and opioids into the United States that has driven more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths a year.
“You can’t win an unwinnable war. DEA knows this and the agents know this,” Irizarry said. “There’s so much dope leaving Colombia. And there’s so much money. We know we’re not making a difference.”
“The drug war is a game. … It was a very fun game that we were playing.”
Irizarry’s story, which some former colleagues have attacked as a fictionalized attempt to reduce his sentence, came in days of contrite, bitter, sometimes tearful interviews with the AP in the historic quarter of his native San Juan. It was much the same account he gave the FBI in lengthy debriefings and sealed court papers obtained by the AP after he pleaded guilty in 2020 to 19 corruption counts, including money laundering and bank fraud.
But after years of portraying Irizarry as a rogue agent who acted alone, U.S. Justice Department investigators have in recent months begun closely following his confessional roadmap, questioning as many as two dozen current and former DEA agents and prosecutors accused by Irizarry of turning a blind eye to his flagrant abuses and sometimes joining in.
With little fanfare, the inquiry has focused on a jet-setting former partner of Irizarry and several other trusted DEA colleagues assigned to international money laundering. And at least three current and former federal prosecutors have faced questioning about Irizarry’s raucous parties, including one still in a senior role in Miami, another who appeared on TV’s “The Bachelorette” and a former Ohio prosecutor who was confirmed to serve as the U.S. attorney in Cleveland this year before abruptly backing out for unspecified family reasons.
The expanding investigation comes as the nation’s premier narcotics law enforcement agency has been rattled by repeated misconduct scandals in its 4,600-agent ranks, from one who took bribes from traffickers to another accused of leaking confidential information to law enforcement targets. But by far the biggest black eye is Irizarry, whose wholesale betrayal of the badge is at the heart of an ongoing external review of the DEA’s sprawling foreign operations in 69 countries.
The once-standout agent has accused some former colleagues in the DEA’s Miami-based Group 4 of lining their pockets and falsifying records to replenish a slush fund used for foreign jaunts over the better part of a decade, until his resignation in 2018. He accused a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent of accepting a $20,000 bribe. And recently, the FBI, Office of Inspector General and a federal prosecutor interviewed Irizarry in prison about other federal employees and allegations he raised about misconduct in maritime interdictions.
Jose Irizarry, a once-standout DEA agent sentenced to more than 12 years in federal prison for conspiring to launder money with a Colombian cartel, speaks during an interview the night before going to a federal detention center, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Wednesday, Jan. 5, 2022. “You can’t win an unwinnable war. DEA knows this and the agents know this,” Irizarry says. “There’s so much dope leaving Colombia. And there’s so much money. We know we’re not making a difference.”
Carlos Giusti / AP
“It was too outlandish for them to believe this is actually happening,” Irizarry said of investigators. “The indictment paints a picture of me, the corrupt agent that did this entire scheme. But it doesn’t talk about the rest of DEA. I wasn’t the mastermind.”
The federal judge in Tampa who sentenced Irizarry last year seemed to agree, saying other agents corrupted by the “allure of easy money” need to be investigated. “This has to stop,” Judge Charlene Honeywell told prosecutors, adding Irizarry was “the one who got caught but it is apparent to this court that there are others.”
The Justice Department declined to comment. A DEA spokesperson said: “José Irizarry is a criminal who violated his oath as a federal law enforcement officer and violated the trust of the American people. Over the past 16 months, DEA has worked vigorously to further strengthen our discipline and hiring policies to ensure the integrity and effectiveness of our essential work.”
AP was able to corroborate some, but not all, of Irizarry’s accusations through thousands of confidential law enforcement records and dozens of interviews with those familiar with his claims and the ongoing investigation, including several who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss them.
The probe is focused in part on George Zoumberos, one of Irizarry’s former partners who traveled overseas extensively for money laundering investigations. Irizarry told AP that Zoumberos enjoyed unfettered access to so-called commission funds and improperly tapped that money for personal purchases and unwarranted trips, using names of people that didn’t exist in DEA reports justifying the excesses.
Zoumberos remained a DEA agent even after he was arrested and briefly detained on allegations of sexual assault during a trip to Madrid in 2018. He resigned only after being stripped of his gun, badge and security clearance for invoking his Fifth Amendment rights to stay silent in late 2019, when the same prosecutor who charged Irizarry summoned him to testify before a federal grand jury in Tampa.
Authorities are so focused on Zoumberos that they also subpoenaed his brother, a Florida wedding photographer who traveled and partied around the world with DEA agents, and even granted him immunity to induce his cooperation. But Michael Zoumberos also refused to testify and has been jailed outside Tampa since March for “civil contempt” — an exceedingly rare pressure tactic that underscores the rising temperature of the investigation.
“I didn’t do anything wrong, but I’m not going to talk about my brother,” Michael Zoumberos told AP in a jailhouse interview. “I’m basically being held as a political prisoner of the FBI. They want to coerce me into cooperating.”
Some current and former DEA agents say Irizarry’s claims are overblown or flat-out fabrications. The former ICE agent scoffed at Irizarry’s accusation he took a $20,000 bribe, saying he raised early red flags about Irizarry. And the lawyer for the Zoumberos brothers says prosecutors are on a “fishing expedition” to bring more indictments because of the embarrassment of the Irizarry scandal.
“Everybody they connect to José is extraneous to his thefts,” said attorney Raymond Mansolillo. “They’re looking to find a crime to fit this case as opposed to a crime that actually took place. But no matter what happens they’re going to charge somebody with something because they don’t want to come out of all of this after five years and have only charged José.”
Making Irizarry’s allegations more egregious is that they came on the heels of a 2015 Inspector General’s report that slammed DEA agents for participating in “sex parties” with prostitutes hired by Colombian cartels. That prompted the suspension of several agents and the retirement of Michele Leonhart, the DEA’s administrator at the time.
Central to the Irizarry investigation are overly cozy relationships developed between agents and informants — strictly forbidden under federal guidelines — and loose controls on the DEA’s undercover drug money laundering operations that few Americans know exist.
Every year, the DEA launders tens of millions of dollars on behalf of the world’s most-violent drug cartels through shell companies, a tactic touted in long-running overseas investigations such as Operation White Wash that resulted in more than 100 arrests and the seizure of more than $100 million and a ton of cocaine.
But the DEA has also faced criticism for allowing huge amounts of money in the operations to go unseized, enabling cartels to continue plying their trade, and for failing to tightly monitor and track the stings, making it difficult to evaluate results.
A 2020 Justice Department Inspector General’s report faulted the DEA for failing since at least 2006 to file annual reports to Congress about these stings, known as Attorney General Exempted Operations. That rebuke, coupled with the embarrassment brought on by Irizarry’s confession, prompted DEA Administrator Anne Milgram to order an outside review of the agency’s foreign operations, which is ongoing.
“In the vast majority of these operations, nobody is watching,” said Bonnie Klapper, a former federal prosecutor in New York and outspoken critic of DEA money laundering. “In the Irizarry operation, nobody cared how much money they were laundering. Nobody cared that they weren’t making any cases. Nobody was minding the house. There were no controls.”
Rob Feitel, another former federal prosecutor, said the DEA’s lax oversight made it easy to divert funds for all kinds of unapproved purposes. And as long as money seizures kept driving stats higher — a low bar given abundant supply — few questions were asked.
“The other agents aren’t stupid. They knew there were no controls and a lot of them could have done what Irizarry did,” said Feitel, who represents a former DEA agent under scrutiny in the inquiry. “The line that separates Irizarry from the others is he did it with both hands and he did it over and over and over. He didn’t just test the waters, he took a full bath in it.”
Irizarry, who speaks in a smooth patter that seamlessly switches between English and Spanish, was a federal air marshal and Border Patrol agent before joining the DEA in 2009. He said he learned the tricks of the trade as a DEA rookie from veteran cops who came up in New York City in the 1990s when cocaine flooded American streets.
But another key part of his education came from Diego Marín, a longtime U.S. informant known to investigators as Colombia’s “Contraband King” for allegedly laundering dope money through imported appliances and other goods. Irizarry said Marín taught him better than any agent ever could the nuances of the black-market peso exchange used by narcotraffickers across the world.
Irizarry parlayed that knowledge into a life of luxury that prosecutors say was bankrolled by $9 million he and his Colombian co-conspirators diverted from money laundering investigations.
To further the scheme, Irizarry filed false reports and ordered DEA staff to wire money slated for undercover stings to international accounts he and associates controlled. Hardened informants who kept a hefty commission from every cash transfer sanctioned by the DEA also stepped in to fund some of the revelry in what amounted to illegal kickbacks.
This photo provided by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration shows U.S. currency confiscated in “Operation White Wash” in 2016. The long-running overseas investigation resulted in more than 100 arrests and the seizure of more than $100 million and more than a ton of cocaine.
AP
Irizarry’s spending habits quickly began to mimic the ostentatious tastes of the narcos he was tasked with targeting, with spoils including a $30,000 Tiffany diamond ring for his wife, luxury sports cars and a $767,000 home in the Colombian resort city of Cartagena. He’d travel first class to Europe with Louis Vuitton luggage and wearing a gold Hublot watch.
“I was very good at what I did but I became somebody I wasn’t. … I became a different man,” Irizarry said. “I got caught up in the lifestyle. I got caught up with the informants and partying.”
Irizarry contends as many as 90% of his group’s work trips were “bogus,” dictated by partying and sporting events, not real work. And he says the U.S. government money that helped pay for it was justified in reports as “case-related — but that’s a very vague term.”
Case in point: an August 2014 trip to Madrid for the Spanish Supercup soccer finals that was charged as an expense to Operation White Wash.
But Irizarry told investigators there was little actual work to be done other than courtesy calls to a few friendly Spanish cops. Instead, he said, agents spent their time dining at pricey restaurants — racking up a 1,000-euro bill at one — and enjoying field-side seats for the championship match between Real and Atletico Madrid.
Joining the posse of agents at the game was Michael J. Garofola, a then-Miami federal prosecutor and erstwhile contestant on “The Bachelorette” who posted a thumbs-up photo on Instagram standing next to Irizarry and another agent — all clad in white Real Madrid jerseys.
“Soaking up the last bit of Spanish culture before saying adios,” he posted a few days later outside a pub.
Irizarry alleged that Garofola also joined agents, cartel informants and others in the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo in 2014 for a night at a strip club called Doll House. In a memo to the court seeking a reduction in his sentence, Irizarry recalled being in the VIP room with another agent and Garofola, racking up a $2,300 bill paid for by a violent emissary of Marín with a menacing nickname to match: Iguana.
Garofola said the trips included official business and he was told everything was being paid for out of DEA funds.
“There were things about those trips that made me question why I was there,” Garofola told AP. “But Irizarry totally used me to ratify this behavior. I was brand new and green and eager to work money laundering cases. He used me just by my being there.”
When Irizarry was awarded with a transfer to Cartagena in 2015, the party followed. The agent’s rooftop pool, with sweeping ocean views, became an obligatory stop for visiting agents and prosecutors from the U.S.
One that Irizarry recalls seeing there was Marisa Darden, a prosecutor from Cleveland who he says traveled to Colombia in September 2017 and was at a gathering where he witnessed two DEA agents taking ecstasy. Irizarry says he didn’t see Darden taking drugs.
Federal authorities have taken a keen interest in that party, quizzing Irizarry about it as recently as this summer. At least one DEA agent who attended has been placed on administrative leave.
Darden went on to become a partner in a high-powered Cleveland law firm and last year was nominated by President Joe Biden to be the first Black woman U.S. attorney in northern Ohio. But soon after she was confirmed, Darden abruptly withdrew in May, citing only “the importance of prioritizing family.”
Darden refused to answer questions from AP but her attorney said in a statement that she “cooperated fully” with the federal investigation into “alleged illegal activity by federal agents,” an inquiry separate from the FBI background check she faced in the confirmation process.
“There is no evidence that she participated in any illegal activity,” Darden’s attorney, James Wooley, wrote in an email to AP.
A White House official said the allegations did not come up in the vetting process. And U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who put Darden’s name up for the post, was also unaware of the allegations in the nomination process, his office said, and had he known “would have withdrawn his support.”
Another federal prosecutor named by Irizarry and questioned by federal agents was Monique Botero, who was recently promoted to head the narcotics division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami. Irizarry told investigators and the AP that Botero joined a group of agents, informants, Colombian police and prostitutes for a party on a luxury yacht.
Botero’s lawyers acknowledge she was on the yacht in September 2015 for what she thought was a cruise organized by local police, but they say “categorically and unequivocally, Monique never saw or participated in anything illegal or unethical.”
“Irizarry has admitted that he lied to everyone around him for various nefarious reasons. These lies about Monique are part of a similar pattern,” said her attorney, Benjamin Greenberg. “It is appalling that Monique is being maligned and defamed by someone as disgraced as Irizarry.”
Irizarry’s downfall was as sudden as it was inevitable — the outgrowth of a lavish lifestyle that raised too many eyebrows, even among colleagues willing to bend the rules themselves. Eventually, he was betrayed by one of his closest confidants, a Venezuelan-American informant who confessed to diverting funds from the undercover stings.
“José’s problem is that he took things to the point of stupidity and trashed the party for everyone else,” said one defense attorney who traveled with Irizarry and other agents. “But there’s no doubt he didn’t act alone.”
Since his arrest, Irizarry has written a self-published book titled “Getting Back on Track,” part of his attempt to own up to his mistakes and pursue a simpler path after bringing so much shame upon himself and his family.
Recently, his Colombian-born wife — who was spared jail time on a money laundering charge in exchange for Irizarry’s confession — told him she was seeking a divorce.
Adding to Irizarry’s despair is that he is still the only one to pay such a heavy price for a pattern of misconduct that he says the DEA allowed to fester. To date, prosecutors have yet to charge any other agents, and several former colleagues have quietly retired rather than endure the disgrace of possibly being fired.
“I’ve told them everything I know,” Irizarry said. “All they have to do is dig.”
Haitian authorities say they have regained control of the main gas terminal in capital city Port-au-Prince, ending a gang stranglehold on the vital energy facility.
The news follows two weeks of negotiation with Haitian gang leader Jimmy Cherizier to relinquish control of the Varreux terminal, according to Haitian politician Dr. Harrison Ernest, who met with both Cherizier and the Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
Chérizier, also known as “Barbecue,” is the leader of G9, a federation of over a dozen Haitian gangs based in Port-au-Prince.
“I talked to Barbeque and told them to leave the terminal because the kids need to go back to school. And we urged the government to do their part to make sure there is fuel and the fuel need to reach the customer,” said Ernest, a Haitian doctor and politician from the country’s Konstwi Lavi party.
Konstwi Lavi has been “playing the role of mediator between the government and the gang who blocked the gas terminal,” Ernest added.
“We’ve been working for two weeks with the government and the gangs to unblock the fuel.”
Haiti’s government has denied that it negotiated with G9 to reopen the gas terminal, though an adviser to Henry told CNN that the Caribbean nation’s leader did meet with Ernest.
“We don’t deal with gangs and we don’t negotiate with gangs, we want schools to reopen and to revive the economic activities as soon as possible. The Prime Minister met with (Ernest) but they did not engage in any negotiations with gangs on our behalf,” said special advisor Jean Junior Joseph.
Haiti National Police spokesperson Gary Desrosiers also confirmed that the Varreux terminal is now under police control. The terminal, located in southwest Port-au-Prince, supplies most of the oil in Haiti. It has been blocked by G9 gang members for the past six weeks, choking off access to fuel in the country.
G9 abandoned Varreux terminal over the weekend, one high-level security source told CNN.
But fuel relief for greater Haiti remains in the distance as terminal access roads are still blocked by shipping containers and other obstacles.
Some Haiti National Police armored vehicles have been seen in the area around Varreux, but so far no movement of trucks and or employee presence at the terminal for operations to resume, the source said.
A Haitian politician has been shot dead outside his home, authorities have said, as international concerns intensify over the gang violence, political turmoil and humanitarian crises that have seized control of the country.
Eric Jean Baptiste was killed on Friday night outside his home in the capital Port-au-Prince, local police told CNN.
He was the leader of the Rally of Progressive National Democrats Party (RNDP), a minor political party in Haiti, and launched a longshot presidential bid in 2016.
A security guard was also killed in the attack, the police spokesperson said. Baptiste survived an earlier attempt on his life in 2018, escaping with a bullet wound.
The assassination is the latest killing in a country overtaken by violent gangs, and comes a year after the nation’s serving President Jovenel Moise was murdered. Port-au-Prince was the site of brutal gang battles this summer that saw whole neighborhoods set aflame, displacing thousands of families and trapping others in their homes, afraid to leave even in search of food and water.
The number of Haitians displaced by recent gang-related violence in the capital has tripled in the past five months, the United Nations International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Friday.
The IOM report said more than 113,000 people were internally displaced from Port-au-Prince between June and August this year, with nearly 90,000 of them due to “urban violence linked to inter-gang, gang-police, and social conflicts.”
Criminals still control or influence parts of the country’s most populous city, and kidnappings for ransom threaten residents’ day-to-day movements. In recent weeks, demonstrators in several cities called for Prime Minister Ariel Henry’s resignation in the face of high fuel prices, soaring inflation and unchecked crime.
Earlier this month, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned what he called an “absolutely nightmarish situation” in Haiti with gangs blocking the movement of fuel and other materials in the Port-au-Prince harbor. The country is facing a humanitarian crisis, while a cholera outbreak has also left dozens dead.
Haiti’s Ambassador to the US Bocchit Edmond told CNN Friday that the government will call democratic elections if the international community intervenes with military assistance in the country.
“It’s very important for all Haitians to work together… and while we are getting help from our international partners, that we make sure to prepare to have free and fair democratic elections. Because it is the most important thing… to have democratic institutions stand up again,” Edmond said, describing Haiti as a country “on the edge of collapse.”
“Before getting to elections, we need to restore law and order. And our national police itself cannot… because the gangs are well armed and their firepower is far more superior… we need international assistance,” the diplomat recently told CNN’s Sara Sidner.
SAN DIEGO — A lawyer who laundered millions of dollars in drug money for a violent Mexican drug cartel was sentenced Friday to 15 years and eight months in federal prison.
Juan Manuel Álvarez Inzunza, 40, told a federal judge in San Diego, California, that he was “deeply remorseful” and thanked the U.S. government for his capture. The Mexican citizen said his 2016 arrest ended his criminal career and helped make sure “my conduct didn’t get any worse,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
Álvarez Inzunza was sentenced on a money-laundering conspiracy charge. In 2016, he was arrested in Mexico, where he was held until his extradition to the U.S. last year.
With credit for time already spent in custody, he was likely to spend nine more years in prison and then will be deported to Mexico, the Union-Tribune said.
In a plea agreement with federal prosecutors, Álvarez Inzunza acknowledged that he laundered money for the Sinaloa Cartel from at least December 2013 to August 2015.
Álvarez Inzunza was orphaned and raised by poor relatives in Culiacán, the capital of Mexico’s Sinaloa state. He had a private law firm there when, about a decade ago, “the wrong client came in, and he listened to them” and began his criminal career, defense attorney Frederick Carroll said at Friday’s hearing.
Álvarez Inzunza would relay orders from cartel bosses to an associate in Colombia who would coordinate couriers to pick up cash in the U.S., the prosecution said.
During an investigation, U.S. federal agents found that Álvarez Inzunza had organized the transfer of millions of dollars from the United States to Mexico and other countries and they were able to seize at least $3.5 million in cash, including large amounts of drug money from Boston, Detroit and New York, authorities said.
Álvarez Inzunza was “trying to provide for his family” but ended up “destroying his family,” his attorney said.
At his sentencing. U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw acknowledged that Álvarez Inzunza was remorseful but said his actions helped fund the violent cartel, which doesn’t “exist without money.”
“You’re complicit in all of this activity — it’s not just the money laundering,” Sabraw said.
LOS ANGELES — A former FBI agent in Northern California who handled national security issues was convicted Tuesday of accepting at least $150,000 in gifts and cash bribes to provide confidential information to a man with organized crime ties, prosecutors said.
Babak Broumand, 56, of Lafayette, was found guilty in Los Angeles of conspiracy, bribery of a public official and monetary transactions in property derived from unlawful activity, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement.
He could face 15 to 45 years in federal prison when he is sentenced in January.
Broumand, who joined the FBI in 1999, worked until 2018 in the bureau’s San Francisco office, where he was responsible for national security investigations, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors said from 2015 to 2018, Broumand accepted “cash, checks, private jet flights, a Ducati motorcycle, hotel stays, escorts, meals, and other items of value” in return for searching law enforcement databases to help a self-proclaimed lawyer and his criminal associates learn if they were under investigation and avoid prosecution.
Court documents refer to the lawyer only as “E.S.” but his name was Edgar Sargsyan, who earlier pleaded guilty to bribing Broumand and another federal agent and testified at his trial.
The two men were introduced at a Beverly Hills cigar club.
Sargsyan has admitted making a fortune by stealing identities, making credit card charges and taking out bank loans in their names, and while he falsely claimed to be an attorney he acknowledged actually paying a friend to take the bar exam under his name, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“To conceal the nature of their corrupt relationship, Broumand made it falsely appear that E.S. was working as an FBI source” and wrote false reports stating he was making legitimate database queries, according to the Department of Justice.
One involved Levon Termendzhyan, whom prosecutors described as an Armenian organized crime figure for whom Sargsyan had worked.
Termendzhyan was convicted in 2020 in a Utah federal court of involvement in a $1 billion fraud scheme involving renewable fuel tax credits, prosecutors said. He awaits sentencing.
VICAM, Mexico — Mexico has become the deadliest place in the world for environmental and land defense activists, according to a global survey released Wednesday, and the Yaqui Indigenous people of northern Mexico are still mourning the killing of water-defense leader Tomás Rojo found dead in June 2021.
The murder of Indigenous land defenders often conjures up images of Amazon activists killed deep in the jungle — and Colombia and Brazil still account for many of the deaths. But according to a report by the nongovernmental group Global Witness, Mexico saw 54 activists killed in 2021, compared to 33 in Colombia and 26 in Brazil. The group recorded the deaths of 200 activists worldwide in 2021.
Latin America accounted for over two-thirds of those slayings — often of the bravest and most well-respected people in their communities.
That was the case with Tómas Rojo, who authorities claim was killed by a local drug gang that wanted the money the Yaquis sometimes earn by collecting tolls at informal highway checkpoints.
Between 2010, when state authorities built a pipeline to siphon off the Yaquis’ water for use in the state capital, Hermosillo, to 2020, Rojo led a series of demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience, including a months-long intermittent blockade of the state’s main highway, which caused millions in losses for businesses and industry.
People who knew Rojo don’t believe the toll money theory: They say he was killed by the powerful interests that stand to profit from the Yaquis’ land and water rights in the northern border state of Sonora, across the border from Arizona.
“Tomás demonstrated his capacity as a natural leader. He was a descendent of warriors,” said Fernando Jiménez, who fought alongside Rojo in a movement to defend the tribe’s water after the government built a dam to divert Yaqui water to rapidly growing Hermosillo in 2010.
Rojo’s body was found half-buried near Vicam, nearly three weeks after he disappeared. He was initially identified by a red neckerchief he had been wearing when he left home.
Rojo was a descendent of Tetabiate, a Yaqui leader killed in a 1901 battle with the government, which deported the surviving Yaquis to work in slave-like conditions on henequen plantations in far-away Yucatan. The last battle against the Yaquis was fought in 1927, and included the government using airplanes against warriors still armed mostly with bows and arrows.
In 2014, Sonora state authorities tried to arrest Rojo and Jiménez on what Yaqui leaders consider trumped-up charges of kidnapping — that were later dismissed; Rojo avoided capture and fled to Mexico City, but Jiménez was jailed in the state capital in Hermosillo. The two kept the movement alive by speaking in Yaqui language in prison telephone calls.
“In prison, they made you speak Spanish,” recalls Jiménez. “They didn’t want me to speak my native language because they wanted to know what I was saying.”
The Yaquis are the legal owners of at least half the water in the river basin that bears their name and which they have defended through nearly five centuries of massacres and extermination. But they have seen much of their water redirected to feed burgeoning industries and projects to plant vineyards and avocados in the desert.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador last month apologized to the Yaquis for past abuses and promised a series of infrastructure programs to improve their lives. But López Obrador has refused to stop the siphoning off of their water, though the director of the local water district, Humberto Borbón, says it is “100% illegal” and court rulings have backed the Yaquis’ position.
The Yaquis find themselves at the center of a perfect storm: Everybody from Mexican drug cartels to water-hungry lithium mines covet their land. But they themselves live in poverty and often don’t even have running water in their homes.
César Cota, a bricklayer and farmer who worked alongside Tomás Rojo, sat beside the Yaqui River — now just a dry gully — and recounted 500 years of Yaqui struggle.
Near his home, in the village of Cocorit, Yaqui warriors confronted Spanish conquistador Diego de Guzman in 1533.
“Our ancestors drew a line in the dirt and said, ‘If you cross this, you’ll be at war with us,’” Cota said. “Since then, we haven’t stopped fighting. By now, in 2022, we shouldn’t have to still be fighting.”
Cota said the river was crucial to the Yaquis. When it flowed regularly, sturdy reeds grew on its banks which the Yaqui used to build everything from houses to funeral biers.
“It’s an injustice, it’s a great sadness to see our river without water,” said Cota. “That river bears our name. That is where animals live, our medical plants, our reeds live. We don’t have reeds anymore,.” When someone dies, relatives have to buy reeds to make their funeral bier.
“If this river were to flow again to the sea (the Gulf of California), that would be the greatest victory we could ever have,” Cota said.
Rojo’s father, Guillermo Rojo, 84, lives in the traditional Yaqui village of Potam. In the family’s humble home, almost everything — the fences, the walls, roofs, the sleeping mats and even the hearths — are made of woven reeds. Because of the semidesert landscape, the trees that grow here are small and twisted, so reed mats packed with mud serve as walls and cooking surfaces.
The elder Rojo recalled Tomás, his son, as “iron-willed ever since he was a young boy.”
“He didn’t forget where he was from, who his ancestors were, and that may be what led him to become a social activist.”
The family’s tradition is impressive: After Tetabiate — the elder Rojo’s grandfather — was killed in battle in 1901, the Mexican government sold the surviving members of his family off as slaves.
“When people ask me who my ancestors were, I tell them I am the descendant of slaves,” he said.
Even today, most Yaquis in Potam live in reed houses; only those wealthy enough to buy and operate small electric pumps have running water.
While some still farm the surrounding fields, most Yaquis work as gardeners, bricklayers or laborers in neighboring cities. They farm corn and wheat on only about 42,000 acres (17,000 hectares), because they don’t have enough water for irrigation, despite a 1930s presidential decree that guarantees them enough water to irrigate more than three times that much land.
That lack of water threatens the survival of Yaqui culture, whose traditional costumed Lenten-season dance performances are portrayed in statues across the state — even as the people themselves and their culture die off.
With little water, widespread poverty and no farm work available, younger Yaquis have begun to migrate to nearby cities and the U.S. border city of Nogales, and seldom return to fulfill their roles in traditional dances. Drug cartels moved in because they view Yaqui territory as a lucrative path to smuggle drugs to the U.S. And lithium deposits lie to the north of the Yaquis, and reportedly into their territory, as well.
“They have already granted about seven mining concessions in our territory, without ever having consulted us,” said Jiménez. “The violence started in our communities, with the rival gangs, abductions and everything led to a decline in Yaqui society. Addiction increased, with the use of methamphetamines undermining our young people.”
Rojo’s father shook his head and added, “Before, they tried to exterminate us with guns. Now they are trying to exterminate us with addiction.”
The drug violence unleashed in Sonora has cost many Yaqui lives. In September 2021, just a few months after Rojo was killed, one of the cartels rounded up five young Yaqui men in the village of Loma de Bacum and massacred them.
The cartel had set up clandestine landing strips for drug flights on Yaqui land. When the Mexican army found and destroyed the landing strips, the cartel blamed the Yaquis for reporting the runways to authorities. The Yaquis say that isn’t true, and that the young men were just innocent victims.
But the Yaquis’ main complaints have gone unanswered by the government, which has defended the use of water for industrialization in Hermosillo, which has a huge Ford automotive plant and rapidly expanding industry and suburbs.
The Yaquis themselves won’t say who they think ordered the killing on Tomás Rojo; they live in a largely lawless state where a drug cartel, corrupt politician or powerful businessman can order such a murder with impunity.
“It’s like it is in every case, here in Mexico and everywhere else in the world,” said Jiménez. “Governments always tend to conquer the strongest leaders, the strongest voices disappear.”
