For the least of his outings in the streets of Barcelona, he used the big game: escort vehicles, bodyguards Men in Black who, once at their destination, engaged in a careful inspection of the premises. “Herrera moved like a sheriff in the city”, tells a police officer assigned to his surveillance upon his arrival on Spanish soil in October 2015.
Appointed Mexican consul in Barcelona by ex-president Peña Nieto, Fidel Herrera Beltran is the former governor of the state of Veracruz, in eastern Mexico, which journalist Regina Martinez was investigating at the time of her assassination, the April 28, 2012 in Xalapa, the state capital, for its supposed links with the Los Zetas cartel, one of the most violent in Mexico. The assignment in Spain of this alleged “narco-consul” questions the activism of the Mexican cartels in Europe.
Remained in office for sixteen months in the Catalan capital, until his resignation in January 2017, this cacique of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), bombarded in a post hitherto reserved for career diplomats, was the subject, during his mandate, oversight of the regional police of Catalonia (the Mossos d’Esquadra) and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA, the American federal anti-drug agency), as learned by the “Cartel Project”, the new survey of the Forbidden Stories network, in which twenty-five media participated, including The world, le Washington post, El Pais and The Guardian.
Catalan police investigators have reconstructed the network in which Fidel Herrera has gravitated. They drew up the diagram of his professional and personal contacts – consulted by the “Cartel Project” – in the center of which appear several figures of drug trafficking and money laundering. Enough to feed suspicion about the real contours of its mission at the heart of the European Union.
Not welcome at diplomatic receptions
The story, therefore, begins in 2015. When the ex-governor of Veracruz arrives in Barcelona, it is indignation in Spain. Two years earlier, the relationship between Fidel Herrera and the Los Zetas cartel, an open secret in Veracruz, turned into a question of public order, during the trial of the cartel launderer in Texas. The accountant of the criminal gang claimed that the drug traffickers had spent 12 million dollars (10 million euros) to finance Fidel Herrera’s campaign and bring him to power. American magazine Forbes places the ex-governor on his 2013 list of Mexico’s ten most corrupt politicians.
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