Chihuahua, Chih.- “The crime of fraud is almost impossible to punish,” said specialized lawyer Hugo Acosta yesterday, who explained that with the 2006 reform to the Code of Criminal Procedures, preventive detention is not applied and judges only establish precautionary measures such as deposit of a guarantee and go to sign every month in court. “There is a significant degree of impunity,” he said.
According to statistics from the State Attorney General’s Office (FGE), during 2022, 7,326 investigation folders were opened, but only 446 reached a judicial process, that is, around 7 percent.
Last year, Chihuahua was the municipality with the most files started with 4,647, followed by Ciudad Juárez with 1,277; Cuauhtémoc with 411; Parral with 268 and Delicias with 262, the rest of the cities had less than 100.
Of these files, they are at some stage of a judicial process: in Chihuahua 370, Parral 25, Juárez 12. Delicias 12 and Cuauhtémoc with 10. In the rest of the cities there are less than 5.
In this sense, the litigant explained that this situation is largely due to the workload that exists in the FGE, which has as a priority crimes that affect other legal assets and in which informal preventive detention does exist.
He gave the example of Alfonso Arzate Torres who, despite having been convicted of the crime of fraud in October 2019, for an amount greater than 3.7 million pesos under criminal case 1263/2018, has not set foot in jail thanks to a series of injunctions, which ran out last month.
On October 22, 2019, in an oral trial, the District Attorney for the Central Zone confirmed the criminal responsibility of Juan Alfonso Arzate Torres, in a million-dollar fraud committed in September 2017; offense for which he was sentenced to six years in prison.
He explained that there is also the case of Aras Investment Business Group, where three of the original partners of the company are linked to proceedings for seven criminal cases and are detained in the Cereso de Aquiles Serdán; However, the arrest was achieved thanks to the fact that they are also accused of criminal association, since if it were simple fraud, they would not be in jail.
“Many times the agents themselves point out that (the cases) do not fall into a criminal matter, so they ask that they go through civil proceedings, which takes years to resolve… this is because there is no longer a way to guarantee reparation for the damage during the process,” he said.
