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During a 22-year career in El Salvador’s Attorney General’s Office, Rodolfo Delgado held some of the most critical positions in the country’s judicial system, joining as head of the Organized Crime Unit and as an advisor to the Attorney General’s Office. In 2018, after leaving the government, he defended Jorge Manuel Vega Knight, a man accused of being an MS13 collaborator who was later acquitted. In May 2021, Delgado was appointed Attorney General. Inquiry (Special Commission of Inquiry), an organization of prosecutors that was investigating his former client. His team also assisted Vega Knight at two motels that had been seized on suspicion of being used for money laundering.
Rodolfo Antonio Delgado Montes, El Salvador’s current attorney general, has been designated through President Nayib Bukele as a key component of the country’s ongoing “gang war. “people known to be allies of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS13), El Salvador’s toughest gang.
Jorge Manuel Vega Knight and his wife, Vanesa Beatriz Argüello de Vega, owned and operated two motels, La Pirámide and La Estancia, in Sonsonate, a branch in western El Salvador. The MS13 used them to traffic drugs, for meetings between gang cells. or clics, as they are called, and as a haven for gang members wanted by police, according to official investigations.
This article is the result of a joint investigation by InSight Crime and El Faro. It involved interviews with current and former prosecutors, with key witnesses, adding current and former MS13 members, and a thorough review of legal documents and evidence similar to investigations. by Jorge Manuel Vega Knight. Read the Spanish edition here.
The police’s anti-narcotics department profiled Vega Knight, identifying him as a key member of the San Cocos Locos Salvatruchos clique, an MS13 scheme that operated in several Sonsonate municipalities. According to 3 prosecutors who worked on the investigation, the case is strong. Through informants, tracking banking and real estate transactions, and statements from a gang leader who became a witness to the murder in early 2022, investigators concluded that Vega Knight supplied marijuana, methamphetamine and cocaine to the MS13. The businessman even allowed some gang leaders to invest some of their profits from extortion and drug sales in motels.
After Vega Knight’s arrest on Oct. 27, 2018, Delgado recognized himself as his defense attorney, according to three prosecutors who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Some were surprised to see him in that role. After all, Delgado was gone. The attorney general’s workplace only ten months earlier, having held positions as head of the organized crime unit and advisor to the attorney general.
“The defense lawyer has been Rodolfo Delgado (. . . ) I was worried from the start of the procedure,” one of the appeals said.
El Faro and InSight Crime cross-checked those testimonies with documents from the Specialized Court of Instruction of Santa Ana, the city of El Salvador, the Specialized Sentencing Court of Santa Ana and the Supreme Court of Justice. All proved that Delgado worked as Vega’s defense attorney. Caballero and Argüello de Vega for 28 months.
When the trial took place between August and September 2020, Delgado and another lawyer, Juan Carlos Rodríguez Vásquez, managed to get Vega Knight acquitted by Santa Ana and sentenced Carlos Rodolfo Linares Ascencio, according to a sentence issued on February 15, 2021. The case opposing Argüello de Vega remained open and the motels were seized, despite Delgado’s multiple requests. But Vega’s circle of relatives recovered their homes once Delgado was appointed attorney general in May 2021.
During his confirmation hearings, no legislator questioned the employment relationship between Delgado and Vega Knight or questioned him about suspicious invoices that a business of a circle of relatives had won from ETESAL (Empresa Transmisora de El Salvador), a state electricity company. On May 17, after two weeks of work, Delgado named Linares Ascencio, the sentencer who had acquitted Vega Knight, as his new deputy attorney general, his second-in-command.
In the months that followed, Delgado dismantled the Special Investigative Commission, the organization of prosecutors that followed Vega Knight and scores of gang members between 2014 and 2019. The commission and some prosecutors were transferred to a special anti-money laundering unit. Others have resigned and fled the country.
SEE ALSO: Omnipresent MS13 in El Salvador
This Special Commission of Inquiry was established in 2014 with money from the U. S. Embassy. U. S. The resources were used, inter alia, to fund undercover investigations and the infrastructure necessary to conduct such investigations. “They had bad habits: if the police bought Mazda vehicles, the Attorney General’s Office bought Mazda vehicles. These cars were known without problems through the criminals, so we started operating with rental cars and the embassy deceived us,” one of the prosecutors told InSight. In addition to renting vehicles, the Bureau of International Drug and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL), the State Department’s security cooperation arm, purchased cars, computers, furniture and air conditioners for the now-defunct commission.
The first investigation by the Operation Jaque commission, presented in July 2016 with the aim of disrupting the MS13’s finances in El Salvador. Jaque’s data is so extensive that it led to additional investigations between August 2018 and September 2019, adding Operation Cuscatlan, Operation Tecan, and Operation Pacific. Harpoon.
Five months after Delgado’s appointment as Attorney General and after the dismantling of the Special Investigation Commission, the money laundering case that opposed Argüello de Vega has been provisionally archived. On October 4, 2021, the Court of Instruction of Santa Ana lifted the seizure of the motels. After this long legal process, Argüello de Vega sold La Pirámide to a new corporation run by her husband.
On October 19, 2022, El Faro and InSight Crime called Delgado and left him messages on an email application requesting an interview. On the same day, an email was sent to the Attorney General’s press unit with a series of questions about Delgado’s appointments. with Vega Knight. Al close of this edition, no reaction had been received.
Also on October 19, investigators called Vega Knight on a cell phone registered through El Salvador’s advertising registry five months earlier. The guy who responded said he didn’t know Vega Knight. Maybe it replaced their number,” the user said. Attempts have been made to tap Vega Knight’s phone numbers and social media channels for some of its companies, but none of those requests have gone back.
Vega Knight is a Sonsonate businessman who has been linked to the MS13 clique in San Cocos for more than two decades. According to anti-narcotics police, testimony, an indictment through the Attorney General’s Office, and a series of witnesses inside and outside the MS13, Vega Knight had a nearby business and thieve appointments with several gang leaders. Among them José Luis Peña Cocolín, alias “El Araña”; a gang member deported from the United States to El Salvador in the 1990s known as “Jute”; and Juan Carlos Melgar Montes, alias ‘Veneno’, whom he described as his ‘partner’, according to telephone conversations intercepted through the prosecution, as well as statements from a sworn witness and 3 informants.
The prosecution’s working documents established relationships between Vega Knight and the San Cocos clique, many of which are due to the collaboration of a protected witness known as “Capricorn” to hide his real name. Capricornio belonged to Ranfla, a term that refers to the MS13’s top leadership, however, left the gang in 2014 and began participating with the government as a protected witness. Because of his extensive knowledge of the MS13’s illicit activities, the Attorney General’s Office requested that he not be tried for his crimes in exchange for his revelations at trial. Capricornio has become the main witness in Operation Check, the largest case against the MS13 to date.
According to Capricornio, several drug deals between MS13 cliques founded in western El Salvador took place inside the two motels operated by Vega Knight’s Grupo Pirámide Inversiones: La Pirámide, located on the highway between Sonsonate and the Pacific coast, the city of Acajutla; and La Estancia, north of Sonsonate on the road to Los Naranjos. Capricornio and 3 other witnesses alleged that Vega Knight was not only aware that their homes were being used for those purposes, but that he participated in and benefited from drug deals.
Journalists from El Faro and InSight Crime interviewed Capricornio live, repeatedly, for more than ten hours between 2021 and 2022.
In those interviews, Capricorn claimed that he is one of the founders of the San Cocos clique and that his first contact with Vega Knight dates back to that time in the 1990s. At the time, Vega Knight was a well-to-do 17-year-old. -Elderly resident in Sonsonate. He had a complicated relationship with his circle of relatives, especially with his father, Jorge Antonio Vega Herrera. The latter did not appreciate his son’s restless habit and fondness for drugs, alcohol and nightlife, according to Capricorn and in at least part of a dozen resources, adding contemporaries, neighbors and members of the circle of relatives. Vega Knight was eventually evicted from the family circle home and, around 1995, befriended MS13 gang member El Jute, the resources said. interaction with the MS13, which at the time was a youth gang led by volatile leadership. It is not as complicated as the gang that exists today.
Over time, the courtship between Vega Knight and the MS13 deepened. In 1996, according to Capricornio, Vega Knight asked the gang to do him a favor: murder his father in exchange for money. Capricorn said Vega Knight’s main motivation was to gather an imaginable amount of inheritance and take over some of his father’s business.
These statements were corroborated through a former MS13 gang member and former leader of the clique, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. He belonged to the Locos Salvatruchos del Oeste, a clique that operates in Sonsonate and other Salvadoran decomponents. He was part of the first generation of gang members who started in California in the 80s but were deported to El Salvador in the first component of the 90s. He is originally from Sonsonate and does not belong to the San Cocos, he knew the clique and its operation since its inception.
In interviews with El Faro and InSight Crime in 2021 and 2022 in Mexico, the gang member showed Capricornio’s version of events. He provided more details. According to his account, Vega Knight agreed to give El Jute 300,000 colones (about $34,000 at the time) in various bills for killing his father. “Vega gave 150,000 colones to El Jute the same day. Jute came, and there he gave it to him. The other 150,000 colones were given to him little by little. From then on he kept painting with the clique,” the gang member said.
El Faro and InSight Crime own the court documents certifying that Vega Knight was arrested and investigated for his father’s murder. Vega Knight denied the charges and, in February 1999, filed a writ of habeas corpus with El Salvador’s Constitutional Chamber. In it, he complained that the police continued to harass him, even though the case opposing him had been closed. The Chamber dismissed the request.
When we asked Capricornio about the other gang member’s claims, he replied, “We killed Vega’s father. He asked the clique to kill him so that he would only keep the assets and accounts. “
The gang member also recounted the main points of the killing, adding the nicknames of the killers. According to Capricornio, the former gang members and 3 other people close to Vega Knight whom we consulted, it was this homicide that sealed the courtship between Vega Knight. and MS13.
In 2016, the Attorney General’s Office presented Operation Check. Among his many revelations, there are some who first recounted Vega Knight’s appointments with the gang. “He mentioned, but we weren’t transparent about his role, so we continue to investigate him. “said one of the prosecutors who led the investigation.
Two years later, Operation Pacific Harpoon began. Vega Knight has a figurehead for this new attack on the MS13. In a singles document, his call was discussed 377 times. Experts and prosecutors have described in detail his alleged dating business with the MS13. show dozens of phone calls between Vega Knight and several gang members, adding Juan Carlos Melgar Montes, alias “Veneno,” one of the leaders of the San Cocos clique, who was sentenced to 8 years in prison for money laundering in September 2020.
There was more than just phone calls between Poison and Vega Knight. According to remittances and bank deposits, between September 7, 2011 and July 19, 2013, Vega Knight and one of her immediate family members deposited $3,360 into accounts controlled through Poison en Agricola. and the Cuscatlán banks. The Attorney General’s Office, based on Capricorn’s testimony, interpreted these deposits as a “recovery” for Veneno’s investments in the La Pirámide motel.
Vega Knight has also conducted real estate business with other MS13 executives. These corporations have the difference that Vega Knight has lost money, according to asset records consulted through El Faro and InSight Crime.
On February 10, 2009, Vega Knight purchased an asset for $50,000 in El Sunzal, a beach in the south of the country. Six months later, he sold it for $40,000 to Juan Carlos Ayala Hernández, alias “El Chacal. “Ayala Hernández the leader of Acajutla Locos Salvatruchos, a main clique of cocaine traffickers known for its so-called tumbes, drug robberies committed at sea. Capricornio told prosecutors that El Chacal did not pay the cash to Vega Knight, which he said sparked a dispute between Camarillas de San Cocos and Acajutlas. The jackal murdered in 2010, according to the Attorney General’s Office.
Vega Knight also made genuine real estate deals with people who weren’t gang members, so he also lost money.
For example, on October 26, 2017, he bought a plot of land in Lotificación Santa María del Carmen, in the city of Nahuilingo near Sonsonate, from Elvia Lizeth Saucedo Díaz for $20,000. Four months later, on Feb. 8, 2018, he sold the assets to Saucedo Diaz for just $10,000, according to registration documents.
A month after splurging $10,000, on March 3, 2018, Vega Knight momentarily bought the land from Saucedo Diaz for $20,000. Prosecutors were convinced Vega Knight had committed a crime in those transactions. the bureaucracy of money laundering,” they wrote in an indictment opposing Vega Knight.
Investigators collected Capricorn’s testimony and tracked Vega Knight’s monetary and real estate transactions. However, police received evidence linking him to the MS13 almost by chance.
On November 10, 2016, an officer named Morán and other police officers reported that while patrolling near a basketball court in the Jardines de Sonsonate neighborhood, some gang members fled the domain and left behind a plastic bag. Inside the bag was a 4GB Kingston USB micro SD. Pendrive. It contained data on the inner workings of the MS13, adding two wilas, a term for internal communications within the gang, photographs of two checks and nine audio files that Marvin Eduardo García Castro, nicknamed “Clever,” exchanged with Vega. Knight and Poison. All this was detailed in a technical report prepared by the anti-narcotics department of the police on November 3, 2017, which was annexed to the proceedings opposing Vega Knight.
The wilas revealed discord between the Vatos Locos Salvatruchos clique and the San Cocos clique because a Vega Knight motel refused to pay the annuity, a term used to describe extortion. camarilla) has gathered rents in a hotel called La Estancia that is in our territory. Six months ago the morros (gang members) arrived to collect the money. the partner of the owner Poison, along with some other man, nothing that we do not know because they did not show us any evidence,” the gang’s message read.
San Cocos came to the defense of Vega Knight and Poison.
“With the La Estancia hotel, we say that our friend Poison and one of his affiliates bought it, and we have how to convert it (sic),” they replied. On the USB drive, police also discovered photos of two Scotiabank checks. , one for $13,000 and the other for $38,000, both of which were sent to Clever and illustrate the gang’s business dealings with him. Both checks were issued from an account payable to Vega Knight.
On August 27, 2018, a team of police and prosecutors arrived at a space on Las Magnolias Avenue, in the exclusive community of San Benito in San Salvador. There they intended to capture Vega Knight. He would be charged with money laundering and club in a terrorist organization. (A Salvadoran court declared the MS13 a terrorist organization in 2015. )That morning, Rodolfo Delgado arrived at the scene of the raid and presented himself as Vega Knight’s defense attorney.
“The raids started at about 1 or 2 in the morning. The character (Rodolfo Delgado) arrived at the scene,” said a source from the Attorney General’s Office.
In separate interviews, a source at the time corroborated this account. “When they were going to arrest him (Vega Knight), he (Delgado) arrived at the raid. It was something unusual. We had worked the case very discreetly. What happened is that he had data resources within the Attorney General’s Office. workplace and elsewhere,” the source said at the time. While prosecutors and police were arresting the businessman, another team raided his motels. At the La Pirámide motel, police discovered other documents linking him to MS13. These They come with the judicial ruling on El Araña and Poison for murder and garrote in a terrorist organization [a Salvadoran court declared the MS13 a terrorist organization in 2015]; a copy of the circulation sheet of a vehicle in the summons of Mitchell Barrera, accused of being the leader of Marvin Adaly Ramos Quintanilla, alias “Piwa”, who was called in Operation Check as administrator of the MS13; and proof of sale of a motorcycle sold to Reina Romero, wife of “El Cuete”, another discoverer of Los San Cocos Police also discovered lines of cocaine and an altar to Santa Muerte, a cult symbol of a respected skeleton as a personification of death.
These discoveries coincided with data provided through Capricorn. He told investigators the motels were “safe houses” for the MS13, where they can hide gang members, weapons and drugs or hold clique meetings.
SEE ALSO: Political Relations in El Salvador MS13 Leaders Flee Abroad
In September 2018, the Specialized Court of Santa Ana confirmed Vega Knight’s detention.
At the time, Delgado was a practicing attorney with strong political and business connections. In April 1995, he began running for prosecutor in Sonsonate, then moved to the Anti-Narcotics Prosecutor’s Office and its Organized Crime Unit of the Attorney General’s Office, which he headed since December 2004. as of June 2014. There he participated, among other things, in cases, the investigation to dismantle the organization known as Los Perrones. In October 2017, while serving as an advisor to then-Attorney General Douglas Meléndez, he left the government for paintings in personal practice. He also created a number of Vega Knight-related companies, as we’ll look at in more detail below.
According to an investigation by Infobae, Delgado worked as a representative in 2019 of Alba Petróleos, the company financed by the Venezuelan government, which he then sanctioned through the US government. U. S. corruption charges. In 2019, Delgado continued to protect Vega Knight alongside attorney Juan Carlos Rodríguez Vásquez. According to his curriculum vitae, Vásquez himself is the former legal director of the General Directorate of Revenue and Customs between 2007 and 2009, when this establishment was headed by Gustavo Villatoro, the current Minister of Justice and Public Security.
Prosecutors from the Special Commission of Inquiry came to suspect that they had cornered Vega Knight. “Neither he nor his wife had enough legal source of income to repay the loans with credit funds. However, in February 2021, the Santa Ana Specialized Sentencing Court, then headed by Judge Carlos Rodolfo Linares Ascencio, acquitted Vega Knight, even though he had convicted his gang accomplices.
Poison and Clever were later sentenced to 8 years in prison for laundering cash through small businesses promoting used clothing and poultry at Mega Plaza, a shopping mall in Sonsonate. One prosecutor said the difference between convicted gang members and Vega Knight was that his lawyer had smart connections and his lawyers did not. In other words, he tied everything [to the crimes]. They invented the fact that there is no evidence, but it is a lie because there is enough. Some other people have been sentenced to 40 years for much less than that. It’s not fair,” the prosecutor said.
According to the sentence issued on February 15, 2021, the trial, Delgado attacked Capricorn’s credibility, claiming that he lacked documents to support his testimony. Delgado insisted there was no evidence to prove Vega Knight and Poison were components or that Poison had invested cash. in motels. For its part, the prosecution responded that Vega Knight’s corporations did not have formal accounting and that, according to reports from the Financial Decomposition, neither he nor his wife had the resources to pay the loans of more than one million dollars through which he acquired and operated the motels. Prosecutors argued that Vega Knight’s motels operated as part of a “hidden components partnership” with the MS13.
Linares Ascencio’s ruling tipped the scales in favor of Vega Knight. He claimed that Capricorn had only heard that Vega Knight and Poison were friends and co-owners of other people’s motels. He criticized the fact that the prosecution did not provide Poison as a witness and did not provide any legal documents referring to the association between Vega Knight and Poison. it simply cannot be established that Vega Knight “participated in the crime of money laundering. “
However, Judge Linares Ascencio’s ruling does not appear to take into account messages sent within the MS13 exempting Vega Knight from paying rent for the La Estancia motel because that corporation was partly owned by Poison. does not appear to take into account bank deposits and real estate transactions with gang members; buying and promoting a motorcycle with the father of a gang member; and the documents seized in La Pirámide similar to the judicial processes faced through members of the San Cocos clique. On October 19, 2022, El Faro and InSight Crime called Linares Ascencio, but he did not respond. An attempt was also made to touch him through the press unit of the Attorney General’s Office, however, he did not get any reaction through the date of publication.
Although Vega Knight was acquitted, the motels remained state evidence as his wife, Vanesa Beatriz Argüello de Vega, was the subject of a separate trial for money laundering and use and possession of false documents. Delgado and Rodríguez Vásquez also defended Argüello de Vega, according to several documents such as an appeal before the Criminal Chamber, writings before the Specialized Court of Instruction of Santa Ana and a precautionary measure before the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice, requesting that the motels be returned to him. All these requests were rejected. El Faro and InSight Crime did not do so when Delgado resigned as Argüello de Vega’s defense attorney.
Delgado appointed Attorney General early on May 2, 2021. Some of the first decisions made in his new position had ties to the Vega Knight case. For starters, the Special Investigation, the firm that investigated Vega Knight and many other gang members, “The first thing he (Delgado) did was dismantle the commission,” one of the prosecutors said.
Linares Ascencio, the sentencing dictator on whom he acquitted Vega Knight, also appointed deputy attorney general, and the labor attorney general requested a provisional dismissal in favor of Argüello de Vega. Motels
At that point, Vega Knight was ready to take back one of his motels. On May 11, 2021, Vega Knight was appointed as a director of AVB Cosmetic, a company created in March 2018. Its bylaws state that the company is committed to trading in “all kinds of non-public care products. “But the corporate call, according to the Mercantile Registry of El Salvador, is Auto-Hotel Deseos in Sonsonate.
On May 30, 2022, seven months after the Attorney General’s Office and a court provisionally closed the money laundering case against Argüello de Vega, Argüello de Vega sold the La Pirámide motel to AVB Cosmetic, the company operated through Vega Knight, for $800,800. Mercantile Registry documents showed that AVB Cosmectic’s assets did not exceed $50,000 in 2019, 2020 and 2021. It is not known how he could have paid close to a million dollars. On October 19, 2022, El Faro and InSight Crime called AVB Cosmetic’s workplace to request an interview with the company’s secretary, Juan Ramón Flores Alfaro. The user who answered the call indicated that we had arrived at the AVB Cosmética workplace and said she would ask to touch the secretary. After five minutes of waiting, the woman returned to the phone and said no to AVB Cosmetic’s workplaces.
“You made a mistake. I asked and they don’t know,” he said.
The next day, October 20, 2022, El Faro and InSight Crime AVB Cosmetic’s exchange director, Úrsula Marroquín. “I have nothing to say,” he replied.
Vega Knight owns other structure and hospitality companies, such as Prime Inversiones, Inversiones Inmobiliarias Italia and JV Inversiones. Inversiones Inmobiliarias Italia manages Las Hojas Resort and Beach Club on the Pacific coast of El Salvador, a company of which Vega Knight has been appointed administrator. The Ministry of Tourism has awarded 4 direct contracts to Las Hojas Resort and Beach Club, valued at $60,949 to quarantine other people due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The notary who created some of Vega Knight’s companies, such as JV Inversiones, his former lawyer, Juan Carlos Rodríguez Vásquez. He himself wrote the deeds of Delgado’s societies. In 2015, Rodríguez Vásquez created a company, Delgado Montes, S. A. de C. V. , owned by Delgado and his brother, Erick Antonio Delgado Montes. Last January, Delgado’s brother was hired to head the operations of Bandesal, a state-owned bank. On October 20, 2022, after our team contacted Rodriguez Vasquez to request an interview, he hung up unanswered.
At the same time, some other detail of the investigation collapsed: Capricornio was killed on March 19, 2022, when two hitmen ambushed him outside the El Botanas bar in the El Ángel community of Sonsonate and shot him at least 16 times. Sources inside the MS13 said his murder was carried out by the same clique to which he belonged and of which Vega Knight was an alleged collaborator: the San Cocos. *This article is the result of a joint investigation by Juan José Martínez d’Aubuisson, an InSight Crime investigator, and Efrén Lemus. journalist from El Faro. These involved interviews with existing and former prosecutors, with key witnesses, adding current and former MS13 members, and a thorough review of legal documents and evidence similar to the Jorge Manuel Vega Knight investigations. Read the Spanish edition here.
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