Analee de Jesús Juraidini Silva still has her desk at the Matamoros Customs Office. Her brother, Oscar Guillermo Juraidini Silva, is on a U.S. Treasury sanctions list.
Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI) laid out the family connection in an investigation. On June 30 the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control listed the brother and several shipping companies he managed, calling them part of a “fiscal huachicol” network serving the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, or CJNG. According to MCCI, he trafficked millions of liters of stolen fuel through the very customs office where his sister works.
She has held several key posts there since 2019, MCCI says, among them director of procedures and legal affairs. Carlos Eugenio Benítez Orta had that job until 2022, when it went to her. In the customs office he supervised the supervisors. Early this June he was arrested in Texas on charges of helping smuggle illegal fuel across the border, and he is now held in El Altiplano prison in Mexico.
The method was simple. Fuel from the United States was declared as lubricant, which let it escape taxes, and the money flowed to the CJNG. MCCI says the network used the same customs post Benítez Orta once held.
“Years ago it was an open secret.” Now, the group argues, it is proven that the cartel has infiltrated customs in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, and the sister’s case is the proof.
Official documents show her still working there undisturbed, in what MCCI calls the national epicenter of fuel smuggling. No charge against her has been reported.
The Treasury statement went further than one family. It said Mexican cartels use money from fiscal huachicol to pay for political campaigns, to buy off corrupt politicians, and to secure drug routes and federal jobs for their associates.
