Port of San Antonio, Chile.Santiago de Chile / Mexico CityOn October 2, 2020, Jalisco citizens Leonardo Figueroa Gómez and Francisco Germán Ventura Centeno appeared at notary number 1 of Poncitlán, Jalisco, to carry out an unusual procedure: to grant a special power of attorney to Chilean lawyers Ignacio Antonio Méndez Letelier and Francisco Eugenio Duque Motta so that they can represent them before judicial, administrative and economic organizations of Mexico and Chile.The power granted to them was so broad that it also empowered them, on behalf of their "principals", to receive payments, buy and sell goods and set up business companies.Exactly two months later, on December 2, 2020, the Chilean lawyers incorporated the company Mexstone SpA (stock company) in a notary located in downtown Santiago.They did so on behalf of Figueroa Gómez, from Jalisco, in whose possession all the shares remained.The initial capital of the company was one million Chilean pesos (about a thousand dollars) and the lawyer Duque Motta remained as administrator and representative of the company.Thus, he began an operation that, through the use of paper companies or "ghosts", organized maritime shipments to transport drugs hidden in decorative stones on the facades of buildings from Mexico to Chile.A joint investigation by the Mexican weekly Proceso and the Chilean Center for Journalistic Investigation (CIPER) – which involved the review of notarial acts, commercial records and maritime dispatches, as well as the comparison of places and people – determined the modus operandi used in at least two of these shipments: the first departed from Manzanillo, Colima, on April 21, 2021 and arrived at the port of San Antonio, Chile, on the following May 11;The second was scheduled to leave at the end of July 2021 from Manzanillo to Valparaiso, but on August 4, agents from the Secretary of the Mexican Navy seized it after they found 1,700 kilos of marijuana in hidden boxes in the containers that They carried the decorative stones.The boxes seized on August 4 in Manzanillo, in which it was intended to transport 1,718 kilos of marijuana to Santiago de Chile.The shipment that arrived at the port of San Antonio on May 11 was identified with the Cargo Guide or BL (from the English term Bill of Lading) No. H-21/0291PCM.According to that document, the container was carrying quarried stone that could be used to decorate building facades.Sources consulted for this investigation indicate that the shipment, reception and storage of this shipment was coordinated from Chile by the lawyer Duque Motta, legal representative of Mexstone SpA, and by a person who did not identify himself from Mexico, on behalf of the Spade Riggle company. .Once the cargo touched Chilean soil, it was temporarily stored at the Seaport extraport terminal, located in San Antonio.He remained there until May 20, when he was removed at five in the afternoon by a truck belonging to the company that provided services as a carrier, Truck y Cía.The vehicle was driven by Eduardo Escobar Figueroa and his patent was JXSG-88.According to the original plan, the cargo was to be deposited in a warehouse belonging to the Ergo company, located in Santiago.However, Ergo did not receive the receipt because it was the weekend and he only worked on business days.The shipment was then transported to a warehouse leased by Truck y Cía, located in the commune of San Joaquín (Santiago).Finally, the load was carried by the same driver and the same Truck y Cía.to the Ergo warehouse on May 24, around nine in the morning.Three hours later, at 12:47, Lorena Godoy, an Ergo employee, sent an email to spaderiggle@gmail.com informing that she had received 10 pallets from "Piedra Laja".In that message, addressed to a person she identified as Leandro, she reported that "all complete pallets are destroyed."Godoy sent a copy of the e-mail to the company Pollmann, who acted as a customs agent and coordinated with Truck y Cía.to coordinate the transport of the cargo.The Ergo Warehouse in Santiago where the cargo was abandoned.The load of stones used to decorate the facades was abandoned in the Ergo warehouse.There were no claims from Mexico for its destruction and abandonment.When the Chilean Maritime Police entered the warehouse last March, they found that inside the pallets there was a sealed but empty box;if there was anything inside, it had already been removed.The second shipment – ​​whose destination was Valparaíso – also transported decorative stone.It was seized in Manzanillo by personnel from the sixth naval regional office of the Secretary of the Navy (Semar).According to statement 071/2021 from this unit, "the agents carried out a routine inspection when they noticed that inside the warehouses there were manufactured boxes that did not correspond to the design of the container" and in which they found 30 pallets containing 1,716 packages that totaled 1,700 kilos of marijuana.A valuable drug load if one takes into account that a gram of marijuana is sold in Chile for between 5 and 10 dollars, so the drug from that shipment would have meant a business of between 8.5 and 17 million dollars.In one of the photographs that accompany the Semar statement, the drug is shown inside one of the "manufactured boxes", which is identical to the empty box found in the Ergo warehouse in Santiago de Chile.But the matches go beyond the boxes.Also in this case, the company that sent the shipment was Spade Riggle and the consignee in Chile was Mexstone SpA. Leandro Duarte Castellanos is registered as the contact of the first firm, while in the case of Mexstone SpA, Duque & Méndez appears, the Lawyer Duque Motta's office, as stated in a shipment Pre-Alert.According to this document, the customs agent for this shipment would again be Pollmann and the freight would be transported to the South American country by Pluscargo Chile.Distributed in five containers, the Prealert indicates that the total weight of the shipment was 99 thousand kilos, supposedly of decorative stones.As in the first shipment, Duque Motta, as Mexstone's legal representative, contacted Pollmann and Transportes Truck to manage the reception and mobilization of the shipment within Chile, reported Hugo Goncalves, Head of Operations at Transportes Truck.According to Goncalves, Spade Riggle also contacted a person identified as Leandro, who put them in contact with Ergo to coordinate the transport of the first shipment to the company's warehouse.The name coincides with the one recorded as a contact in the Pre-alert of the second shipment, Leandro Duarte Castellanos, and with the recipient of the email sent by the Ergo employee, Lorena Godoy, to the email address spaderiggle@gmail.com, informing of the damage that the contents of the first shipment would have suffered.Goncalves added that after the shipment of the second shipment was thwarted by Mexican authorities, no one on behalf of Mexstone contacted them again.Contacted by WhatsApp, Figueroa Gómez – who currently presents himself as the commercial director of Alfa AV, a company that offers "audio, security, video and network technology services" – denied having any business in Chile, but when he was sent a copy of his voter ID that appears in the notarial documents of Mexstone SpA, wrote "jajajaja" and blocked the communication.Spade Riggle, the company that shipped decorative stone to Chile, was created in Zapopan, Jalisco, on November 18, 2020, two weeks before Mexstone SpA was registered in Chile.In accordance with its articles of incorporation, Spade Riggle is engaged in all things construction and civil engineering.Its shareholders are María Juana Arreguín Villegas and Carolina Alcocer Castañeda.The first was also "sole general administrator" of the company and the second "general manager".This changed in the "ordinary and extraordinary general assembly" held on January 20, 2021 when Arreguín Villegas resigned as sole general administrator and Leandro Duarte Castellanos took her place, assuming broad powers to represent, administer and manage the company.In that same meeting, the company expanded its corporate purpose to include, among other aspects, "the import, export and marketing of materials for the construction industry."A search of civil registries revealed that the shareholders and general manager of Spade Riggle are actually humble people who live in poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Guadalajara;that is, they are people used as a front or "foremen" to hide the true owners of the business.Leandro Duarte Castellanos – who supposedly managed from Mexico and on behalf of Spade Riggle the shipping operations to Chile and the transfer and storage of merchandise in that country – is an "employee" and lives in a modest apartment located above a gym in the Jalisco neighborhood, one of the poorest and most insecure in Guadalajara.He appears registered as a beneficiary of the "Mano a Mano" social program that gave temporary employment to low-income people.This program existed until 2018 and paid an average of 160 pesos a day (about 8 dollars) to sweep and clean streets and public parks.María Juana Arreguín Villegas, shareholder and sole general manager of Spade Riggle until January 20, 2021, is a "self-employed worker" and lives in a narrow masonry house in the Santa Isabel neighborhood, one of the poorest and most insecure in the country. municipality of Tonala.In fact, she barely has basic water and electricity services.Her streets have no sidewalks and are unpaved.One of the streets of the Santa Isabel neighborhood in Tonalá, Jalisco.Carolina Alcocer Castañeda, shareholder and general manager of Spade Riggle, is a "worker" and is a neighbor of María Juana: she also lives in the Santa Isabel neighborhood.In February 2015, Carolina asked the authorities of the municipality of Tonalá for an alignment license and number for her house – two-story, with a non-flattened brick facade – in order to regularize her property, since her neighborhood began as an irregular settlement. .The three – Duarte Castellanos, Arreguín Villegas and Alcocer Castañeda – also appear as shareholders and/or directors of several more registered companies in Guadalajara, as detected on its platform by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).Thus, Duarte Castellanos is also a shareholder of Butconex (human resources, tax consultancy and "senior management of companies") Servan FL (machinery and electrical and electronic equipment) and Gimnaher (equipment for gymnasium and sports activities);while Arreguín Villegas and Alcocer Castañeda are partners in Forvik Consultores (business consulting), Industrias Maniffer (legal and accounting services) and Magno Obras Kahoutek (construction and real estate).The mysterious Jaime RodríguezInterviewed by CIPER and Proceso, the Chilean lawyers Duque Motta and Méndez Letelier, representatives of Mexstone SpA, assure that they were victims of a deception and their own lack of precaution.They place the origin of these operations in mid-2020, when Duque Motta met and strengthened ties with Alligare LLC, a law firm based in Peru and led by a lawyer from that country, Luis Fuentes.This firm defines itself as "an international network of first-rate legal and tax offices dedicated to the internationalization of companies";that is, open companies and companies for foreign clients in South American countries.And with that objective they contacted Duque: so that the network would settle in Chile through his office.Among the clients referred by Alligare, Fuentes gave them the contact information of a Mexican person who wanted to open a company in Chile.His name was Jaime Rodríguez.But Chilean lawyers are not certain that Rodríguez ever existed.Duke says that he never knew him or heard his voice.He only exchanged messages with him to coordinate the constitution of the Chilean society, which they would call Mexstone, and the transfer of powers and representation of him.Between the end of September and the beginning of October 2020, Duque and Méndez sent Rodríguez the document that establishes the conditions to represent him in his commercial operations.In this step they made the first error or omission, both admit, because the document that was notarized before the Jalisco notary on October 2 of that year granted them a much broader power of attorney than, they affirm, was established in the original document that made and shipped.They maintain that they did not realize this until, in an interview with the reporters of this investigation, they showed them the protocolized document.In retrospect, the jurists say, it could have been a mistake that they agreed to acquire powers of attorney from people they did not know (Figueroa Gómez and Ventura Centeno), and that they did not investigate more information about Rodríguez, who wrote to them from the email moctezumaenterprice@gmail.com .They affirm that since the Mexican client had been referred by the Peruvian law firm, they trusted him.The Chilean lawyers assure that they received about 3 thousand 100 dollars for the services rendered to "Rodríguez".They received it in three payments, which covered the incorporation service of the company in Chile, the assistance of a lawyer for three months and providing a tax domicile, which in this case was the office of the Duque & Méndez law firm.One of the payments came from a Wachovia Bank account in New York and was sent by Winter LF Consultores SC.The transfer bank document indicates that said company is domiciled in Guadalajara.However, it does not appear in the Public Registry of Commerce.Documents maritime shipments, shows Winter LF Consultores has made five exports to the United States.The address of the company registered there is Guadalupe 4109, Zapopan, Jalisco.In the bank document that recorded one of the payments to the Chilean law firm, another address for the company appears: Calle Río Ometepec 1419, El Rosario, Guadalajara.At that address, at least until June 2022, there is a house that offers the "laboratory coat" rental service.Another payment was made by Spade Riggle.He did it from an account in his name at BBVA.It was for 1,200 dollars and was destined for the Chilean company Plus Cargo for the maritime transport of the cargo that arrived in San Antonio in May 2021.Regarding the versions that place him as the main person in charge of the logistics of the first shipment, Duque says that he only contacted the Pollmann customs agency to receive the shipment, and that this company coordinated with Transportes Truck to move the load once to arrive in Chile.The head of operations of that company, Hugo Goncalves, said that, to fine-tune logistical details, he wrote to him from a person from Mexico who did not identify himself, but said he did so on behalf of Duque.When asked about it, the lawyer says that he was never aware of those communications and that they only used his name in those messages.Duque and Méndez affirm that they made another mistake by not worrying about the destination and content of the first shipment, which they did not learn about until August 11, 2021, a week after Semar seized a ton and a half of marijuana in Manzanillo.Duque says that he found out about it because Pollmann's manager, Luis Santander, told him by phone.The news was devastating for the Chilean partners.In the midst of the crisis, they cut all ties with their Mexican counterparts, who had stopped answering internal communications on August 4, the same day the drug was seized in Manzanillo by Semar.They then decided to leave Mexstone.For this, they made a modification that was registered in the Official Gazette of Chile as a dissolution of the company.Through the lawyer Felipe Barruel, Duque and Méndez filed a complaint and a lawsuit before the Chilean justice system to clarify these facts.In them, they maintain the line of defense explained to CIPER and Proceso: that they never found out about the true intentions behind the creation of Mexstone and that they were used by a criminal organization to try to bring drugs into Chile.DR © Editora DEMAR SA de CVMatías Canales Street 504 Col. Ribereña Cd. Reynosa, Tamaulipas CP.88620. Phone (899) 921-9950