Rosario Martínez De la Vega is an investigative journalist, lawyer, and activist, who graduated from the Universidad de la Salle Bajío, her work covers education, promotion, and defense of human rights. This is one of her latest articles published on the independent news outlet Los Ángeles Press.
Under the management of PRI member Mauricio Trejo Pureco, the family of Joanna Romina Hernández, director of Citizen Assistance and candidate for local representative for the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), has been favored with contracts worth several million pesos, in the middle of a simulated competition.
Despite article 42 of the Contracting Law for the state of Guanajuato, prohibits contracts from being assigned to relatives of public officials, the company SAMEVI SA de CV, owned by the relatives of the candidate for local deputy, director of Citizen Assistance and current president of the municipal Committee of the PRI, in San Miguel de Allende, Joanna Romina Hernández, received a contract during 2023 from the Sanmiguelense administration.
The Hernández family, to which the official belongs, is originally from a modest community in San Miguel de Allende called La Talega. Nine days before Mauricio Trejo Pureco entered the mayor’s office of San Miguel de Allende, the shareholder partners went to the Dolores Hidalgo municipality with Notary number 6, Gerardo González Téllez to establish a construction company which they called SAMEVI SA. CV.
SAMEVI CONSTRUCTURA SA de CV has as partners Vicente Hernández Valle, María Micaela Hernández Valle, and Juan Hernández Aguado, all relatives of the public official and PRI candidate. In the same company, they declared that Vicente Hernández Valle, father of Joanna Romina, would be the sole administrator.
Five months after being registered with the Public Registry of Commerce of the Ministry of Economy, the SAMEVI company received an invitation from the administration of Mauricio Trejo Pureco, to participate in the acquisition of construction materials that would be used in several works for the street rehabilitation program within the urban and rural area of the municipality of San Miguel de Allende.
Without transparency in the contracting, it was registered under file AD3P-05-03-2023, and in a cost range of between $300 thousand to 1 million pesos, the company sponsored by the same PRI mayor began its operations. In addition to this, competition was simulated when the family company SAMEVI applied, against its own shareholder: Juan Hernández Aguado, as JVS Materials.
Thus, the government of San Miguel Allende issued a ruling document for the direct award process to SAMEVI, on March 17, 2023, signed by the municipal treasurer Raúl Vallejo Solís and Senior Official Hugo Díaz Elizárraga.
Less than a year after it was established, a contract was awarded to a company that was created exclusively to simulate competition between relatives of the director of Citizen Assistance and candidate for local deputy, to obtain contracts in the municipal public administration.
From the same family, José Rutilio Hernández Valle, uncle of the director of Citizen Assistance and who until the beginning of last year served as municipal president of the PRI in San Miguel de Allende, received at least 13 contracts between 2022 and 2023, in his name and as Talego Materials, for the acquisition of construction materials, which represented up to 17 million 488 thousand 709 pesos, according to the contracts that appear in the National Transparency Platform.
by Rosario Martínez De la Vega for Los Ángeles Press.
San Miguel Times
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