The former leader of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico City Cuauhtémoc Gutiérrez de la Torre, known as the Garbage Czar, was arrested in the last hours accused of human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
“After a search warrant requested and obtained by the Public Ministry of the Coordination of Investigation of Gender Crimes, agents of the Investigative Police apprehended Cuauhtémoc ‘N’,” the Attorney General’s Office of the City reported on Twitter this Thursday of Mexico (FJCDMX).
Gutiérrez de la Torre was wanted “for his probable participation in the crime of human trafficking, in its form of sexual exploitation.”
The capital’s Prosecutor’s Office assures that the arrest was carried out with “intelligence work” coordinated between the Prosecutor’s Office for the Investigation of Trafficking in Persons, the National Intelligence Center, and the Special Response and Intervention Group.
According to local media, the man was detained in a building of the mayor’s office of Tlalpan, south of the capital, and in the early hours of this Thursday, he was transferred to an agency of the Public Ministry and later to the East Prison of Mexico City.
INVESTIGATED BY THE AUTHORITIES
Gutiérrez de la Torre, born in 1968, studied Law and was linked to the PRI from a young age, a party for which he became a local deputy in Mexico City and even assumed the leadership of this group in the capital between 2011 and 2014.
In 2014, he was removed from his post after being involved in an alleged prostitution ring on the Executive Committee.
In April 2014, the local station MVS presented an investigation, with direct testimonies, in which it was denounced that PRI personnel were recruiting young people to serve Gutiérrez, paid with party funds, whose functions included giving him favors sexual.
Gutiérrez, an heir to an empire forged in the garbage industry, had at his service, at that time, between 12 and 15 women, as calculated by the report released by MVS.
The investigative work included a journalist who posed as one of the applicants to fill the position and who recorded an engaged conversation.
In October 2018, a federal judge ordered the capital’s attorney general’s office to reopen the criminal complaint filed by three women against Gutiérrez for operating a prostitution network within the capital’s PRI, and the investigation began a few months later.
In addition, the capital’s Prosecutor’s Office reported in March 2021 that it requested Interpol to issue a red card for the search, location, and apprehension of Gutiérrez de la Torre and four other people.