Abel Barajas / Reform Agency
Saturday, January 21, 2023 | 17:04
Mexico City.- Three former heads of the Science and Technology Advisory Forum (FCCyT), among them Julia Tagüeña Parga, and two other academics finally released the case of organized crime and money laundering for the alleged illegal contributions of Conacyt by 244 million pesos.
Gregorio Salazar Hernández, control judge of the Almoloya de Juárez Federal Criminal Justice Center, in the State of Mexico, dismissed the criminal case against the five scientists, a ruling that has the scope of an acquittal.
The foregoing, because the Attorney General of the Republic can no longer continue to investigate them or accuse them of the same facts, and the judges cannot link them to proceedings for those crimes, one of them with pre-trial detention ex officio.
In a hearing held on January 13, the judge canceled the investigation in favor of Tagüeña, the main one pointed out in this matter, as well as José de Jesús Franco López and Gabriela Dutrénit Bielous, also former coordinators of the FCCyT.
He also issued the same determination for Teresa de León Zamora, director of Technology Marketing at Conacyt, and Marcial Bonilla Marín, former academic secretary of the Potosí Institute for Scientific Research.
Jesús Moreno de Leija and Alberto del Río Azuara, lawyers for the three former heads of the Forum, said that the judge argued that the facts charged by the FGR did not constitute a crime and that they did not correspond to the criminal conduct that they tried to commit.
“Judge Gregorio Salazar ordered the dismissal, based on what he himself determined on September 21, 2021, when he denied the arrest warrants; that is, for the judge, the facts charged by the FGR do not constitute a crime” they explained.
“In other words: the persecution that existed against them ends permanently for these five scientists after almost 16 months since that federal judge denied issuing the arrest warrants against 31 researchers.”
This hearing was not carried out by order of a judicial authority, but because the defense requested to carry it out, since at the end of last year a court ordered the cancellation of this investigation for four of those involved.
Now there are nine scientists, of the 31 against whom the arrest warrant was denied, who have achieved the final cancellation of the most serious criminal charges against them.
Between last August and November, the First Criminal Collegiate Court in Mexico City ordered the cancellation of the criminal case against Regina María Alarcón Contreras, Inocencio Higuera Ciapara and Luis Mier and Terán Casanueva,
Regina María Alarcón Contreras was director of Science Planning at Conacyt; Inocencio Higuera Ciapara, Deputy Director of Scientific Development; Luis Mier y Terán, former member of the Exact Sciences Committee for the evaluation of postgraduate scholarships abroad; and Patricia Zúñiga Cendejas, former coordinator and founder of the FCCyT.
imputation
According to the FGR’s accusation, from January 2013 to June 2019, Conacyt illegally transferred 244 million pesos to the FCCyT.
The illegality would consist in the fact that the Forum, having been created as a civil association three months before the statute that allowed its constitution was published, could not exercise acts of administration over the Conacyt resources.
The FGR prosecuted this file on two occasions, but on August 25 and then on September 21, 2021, the control judge Gregorio Salazar Hernández denied the arrest warrants for organized crime and money laundering against 31 Conacyt scientists and academics.
Despite the fact that there are already nine scientists who have achieved the cancellation of the criminal case for organized crime and money laundering, their legal problem has not ended.
According to a report from the FGR, in 2021, after the second refusal to arrest, the Organized Crime Investigation Prosecutor’s Office made a breakdown of the Competence Control Prosecutor’s Office, headed by Juan Ramos, to investigate embezzlement crimes. and illicit use of powers and faculties. That second inquiry is ongoing.
The big difference is that the latter is an investigation whose crimes do not warrant ex officio preventive detention, that is, it does not endanger the personal freedom of the accused automatically. Much less puts them at risk of ending up in the Altiplano Prison, as could happen with the organized crime file.
