Tlaxcala, the safest state? Lorena Cuéllar and the narco: eight drug labs, four criminal organizations and zero sanctions

The best hiding place is not a mountain range. It is a statistic.

Tlaxcala closed 2023 with 3,882 criminal case files. The lowest number in the country. With that figure, Lorena Cuéllar's government built a brand: nothing happens here.

But organized crime is not measured in state case files. It is measured in what turns up when forces that do not answer to the state government go in. And when they went in, they found meth kitchens, warehouses full of stolen trailers, taps on the pipelines and operators from four organizations sleeping in towns that appear on no risk map.

A small state, wedged between Puebla, Hidalgo and the State of Mexico, crossed by the two highways that connect the Gulf to the capital. Few police, little press, zero attention from Washington. The perfect place to produce, store and hide.

This investigation follows a single thread. What was found. Where. Who governs that territory. What the audits of those governments say. And which document is still missing to take it to a U.S. court.

December 2022. Lorena Cuéllar's interior secretary says in an interview that organized crime has not reached Tlaxcala.

That same year, emails from Mexico's Defense Ministry were leaked, the so-called Guacamaya Leaks. On the map of criminal groups rebuilt from those files, Tlaxcala has at least 23 municipalities with recorded presence: CJNG, Pura Gente Nueva of Los Zetas, La Familia Michoacana, the Sinaloa Cartel and local gangs focused mainly on fuel theft.

It was not the first time the state government denied the obvious. In 2010 a cell working for a Los Zetas plaza boss was dismantled in Tlaxcala. In 2018 alleged CJNG members were arrested for extorting residents of Chiautempan. In June 2023 a banner signed with the CJNG initials appeared in Zacatelco demanding the mayor hand over the heads of two of his aides. The official answer was the same: there is no CJNG here.

I crossed the list of towns on the military map with everything found afterwards. Six of the eight labs turned up in municipalities the army itself had already flagged. Four in Tlaxco, one in San Pablo del Monte, one in Ixtacuixtla. Calpulalpan and Nanacamilpa were on the list too. So was Huamantla, where El Jarocho was captured in 2026. So was Tenancingo.

The Tlaxcala government cannot say it did not know. Its own army had written it down.

Every card carries its level of proof. They do not all weigh the same, and none is dressed up here.

Two of these organizations, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, were designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the State Department on February 20, 2025. That changes everything: since that date, anyone who gives them material support answers under U.S. anti-terrorism law.

Four in 2023. Four more in the first half of 2025. Not one was found by Lorena Cuéllar's police.

The 2023 dates come from the FGR: May 12 in San Miguel Contla, Santa Cruz Tlaxcala. July 10 in San Isidro Buensuceso, San Pablo del Monte. December 8 in Santa Cruz Tenancingo, Hueyotlipan. December 13 in Santa Rosa de Lima, Ixtacuixtla. One of them held 22 kilos of methamphetamine hydrochloride.

In 2025 the four properties turned up in a single municipality: Tlaxco. Two were tied to the faction of Ismael Zambada Sicairos.

Two towns. Two pipelines. Two federal highways. One business with three service windows.

The Defense Ministry detected 590 illegal taps in Tlaxcala between December 2018 and December 2021. 307 were in Calpulalpan. The other towns on the list: Nativitas, Nanacamilpa and the state capital.

The same town shows up at the other window. The warehouse of 48 vehicles. The toluene trailer. The Arco Norte tractor trailer with a signal jammer. The July Navy raid. The mines and caves between Nanacamilpa and Calpulalpan where local press has reported stolen parts and trucks for years.

Fuel theft, cargo theft and precursors are not three problems. They are the same logistics: someone who knows what passes through the crossing, at what time, and who will not show up.

On April 7, 2026, truckers blocked the road right there, in Francisco I. Madero, Nanacamilpa. They were asking for highway security. The state government's answer was riot police, gas and tow trucks before dawn. The truckers' association ANTAC reported beatings, firearms and missing colleagues. A father and son, Emigdio Taboada, later described detention, beatings and being held incommunicado by state police. The government reported no injuries and zero arrests.

Both versions cannot fit in the same police report. One of them is false, and the arrest-handover records settle it.

The mayor pulled his police off the pipelines

In June 2026 the mayors of Calpulalpan and Nanacamilpa came out to distance themselves from fuel theft. Calpulalpan's mayor, José Manuel Jiménez del Razo, said something nobody underlined: that under previous administrations the town police guarded the pipelines and that he stopped doing it, because that is the job of the National Guard and Pemex. He also said he dismissed 100 officers, now has about 110, and that vehicle theft fell from 28 units a month to one or two.

Those numbers do not match what keeps being pulled out of his town. February 2026: the Navy, the National Guard and state police go into Minas Encantadas, between Nanacamilpa and Calpulalpan. Eight stolen vehicles, three International tractor trailers, a flatbed, four motorcycles, signal jammers and a chop shop inside a mine. June 2026: another mine in Domingo Arenas, full of stolen tractor trailer parts. The pattern goes back years: March 2021, another chop shop on farmland in the Francisco Sarabia neighborhood.

A town that boasts one or two stolen vehicles a month has caves big enough for whole trailers. Caves do not fill up at one or two a month.

On the Nanacamilpa side, Mayor Arón Vargas denied any deal. But the town has spent all of 2026 under Coordinated Command, with state police in charge, extended every three months. At the same press event, the mayor of Nativitas admitted several of his police commanders have not passed vetting.

Fuel theft switched products

September 2025. An illegal tap on a Pemex line releases a cloud of LP gas over the Nanacamilpa forest, the same firefly forest the government sells as a tourist destination. Three thousand people evacuated. That year the state had already logged 61 illegal taps, most of them LP gas.

Gas theft is more dangerous than stolen gasoline and easier to sell: tanker trucks, cylinders and small gas distributors. In July 2026 El Conejo was caught in Hidalgo with two tankers and 40,000 liters; he is accused of moving stolen fuel across Hidalgo, Puebla and Tlaxcala. The network does not recognize state lines. Governments do, and that is where it hides.

Meanwhile, in September 2026 it was reported that Tlaxcala had zero illegal taps reported in the first half of the year, according to a citizen observatory that counts complaints. Twenty days after that half closed, on July 20, the Navy seized fuel in a raid in Calpulalpan. The year before, 61 taps had been counted. Zero in the statistics is not zero on the pipeline. It is zero complaints.

Four audit reports from the Tlaxcala Congress. Downloaded and checked page by page.

Nanacamilpa. Mayor: Arón Vargas Ángel. The 2024 report identifies two cases of nepotism. One is between the mayor's office and the Public Security Directorate. The 2025 report records them again. The same two. Nobody fixed it.

In the town with a pipeline, with the Arco Norte and with a Coordinated Command operation extended by the state in 2026, the local police is run by someone the auditor places in a nepotism relationship with the mayor's office. The report does not publish the name or the family tie. That is the first missing document.

That same town hall bought three patrol cars for 1.2 million pesos without bidding and paid 4.35 million for fair concerts without bidding.

Calpulalpan. Mayor: José Manuel Jiménez del Razo. In his first four months, 2.34 million pesos in probable financial damage and 112 findings. Of that amount, 1.63 million is public works paid for and never built and 668,000 pesos is overpricing. In 2025, another fair lineup: 10.2 million with contracting violations. And a finding almost nobody read: the town water commission collects money and that money never enters the town's accounts or appears in the public accounts.

Own finding. The money these two town halls spent on concerts without competition is 3.3 times all the financial damage their auditor found. Entertainment is the hardest contract there is to audit: it is paid up front, for one night, to a middleman, and leaves no public work to measure. In a corridor with an active criminal economy, that is the line item where every invoice, every contract and every beneficial owner must be requested.

Congress approved all four reports with the findings still open. Approved does not mean resolved.

What exists on paper against the governor is not a pact with a cartel. It is something else, and it can be measured.

Six threads. How her assets grew. Which relatives handle public money. Which surveillance and armoring contracts she hid. What happened to the institute she created to return stolen assets. And what is true in the cash story.

Thread 1 · Square meters from another planet

Her own asset disclosure, reviewed by national press in 2022, tells a story in two halves.

First half, 1986 to 2012: houses and land declared at prices that today would not buy a used car. A 440-square-meter house for 35,000 pesos in August 2012, days before she entered the Senate. Less than 80 pesos per square meter.

Second half, in the Senate and in the lower house: everything changes. In November 2016 she pays cash for a 79-square-meter apartment, 2.24 million pesos. In October 2018, two months after arriving at the Chamber of Deputies, another of 140 square meters for 3.4 million, also in cash. Sixty-one days later, as federal welfare superdelegate, a house on 1,108 square meters of land for 1.13 million, the only purchase she declares on credit.

Own finding. Almost six million pesos in cash or immediate payment in 23 months, with a single declared bank account. Nobody has asked where it came from. It is exactly the question a complete disclosure answers, with income for each year and the source of each payment. The 2012 square meters belong in the same question. Either the house was worth 35,000 pesos, or the disclosure is not telling the truth.

Thread 2 · The family manages more than the women's office

National press documented in April 2026 which members of her circle control budgets. Tap each card.

The offices where her family sits manage more than 1.29 billion pesos. The Women's Secretariat, 30 million. A ratio of 43 to 1. That is how this government decides whom to trust with money.

Thread 3 · The C5i, the cameras and the two notary offices

The government built a C5i command center. Cost announced at the opening: 293 million pesos in construction and another 100 million in cameras. The facial recognition supplier is Grupo Seguritech, which billed 81.69 million pesos in Tlaxcala between 2021 and 2025, according to a journalistic database built from tax records. Nationwide, 97% of that company's contracts were awarded without bidding. The Tlaxcala government sealed its own.

Two documented uses of the system say it all. In March 2026 the C5i cameras located El Callejas, a La Familia Michoacana commander, at El Trébol. In November 2025 the same technology was used to identify feminist activists over graffiti on a monument, and prosecutors opened a case against them. The cameras work. The question is who they point at.

Here is a contradiction no outlet has resolved. One source reports that Notary Office 3 went to the governor's son-in-law in 2021. Another, from September 2026, reports that the official who ran the C5i and hired Seguritech was recently rewarded with Public Notary Office number 3. Both cannot be true at once without a revocation or a reassignment. The state Official Gazette settles it. If the patent changed hands, someone had to take it from someone.

Thread 4 · Armor for the family, sealed until 2030

Fifty-six million pesos for ten armored Suburban SUVs: 5.6 million per unit. According to the September 2025 report, several were assigned to the governor's family and close officials. The supplier named in the report is EPEL S.A. de C.V., which it attributes to a businessman publicly accused in other cases; that attribution has not been verified against incorporation papers. The contract information was sealed until 2030, one year after the administration ends.

Thread 5 · The institute to return stolen assets

In February 2023 Lorena Cuéllar created the Institute to Return Stolen Assets to the People of Tlaxcala. It lasted one year and nine months: she shut it down on December 31, 2024. The state auditor's review of fiscal 2024 found that ten of its employees were drawing a second public salary at the same time: the Interior Secretariat, the Judiciary, the Cecyte school system, the Women's Institute, the Technological University, the state education agency. Paychecks, year-end bonus and vacation pay on both sides. And 15 budget lines overspent by 1,752,077 pesos, which went to raises, bonuses and compensation.

The agency created to return stolen money ended with its own audit finding. It is a state institute and should not be confused with the federal agency of a similar name.

Thread 6 · The cash

The allegation that the governor keeps large amounts of cash in vaults is part of the complaint I filed in the United States, with evidence and testimony. Here is what is already public.

What does exist about cash has a date and a venue. In October 2020, while she was federal superdelegate in Tlaxcala, beneficiaries of the Youth Building the Future program filed a complaint against her with the FGR anti-corruption prosecutor: they said they were required to hand back 3,600 pesos of their stipend each month, in cash, and to campaign for her under threat of being dropped from the program. The complaint named another son-in-law, Rafael Lucio Celis, for embezzlement. It was left pending ratification, and there was a parallel case at the federal comptroller. She called it a smear campaign.

Add the 5.64 million paid in cash in 23 months from thread 1, and the citizen complaint about the arena that speaks of monthly cash payments. Three different stories with one pattern: money that does not go through a bank. All three lead to the same place: the 2020 case file, the full asset disclosures and the arena contract.

And the security circle

Omar N, alias Guerrero, head of the governor's bodyguards, was removed from his post after a car crash on March 22, 2026, allegedly drunk. Former public security secretary Alfredo Álvarez Valenzuela carried an arrest warrant for enforced disappearance over earlier events outside Tlaxcala; in January 2026 he was appointed in Orizaba and that city's mayor said he had been cleared. The ruling is not public.

And Washington. In August 2026 a column included Cuéllar on a list of 17 governors supposedly under investigation, with arrest warrants in New York. It did not present a single case number. The state government replied that the U.S. Embassy denied it. To date there is no public indictment against her in the United States. That is why I filed the complaint. What can already be seen is what the next chapter shows.

Colosal was born in Florida before it was born in Mexico. And before Lorena Cuéllar came to power.

Fernando Alva Arámburo, a businessman from Puebla, runs Servicios Internacionales Colosal. That company, listed in Tlaxcala's supplier registry as a small business, has received public works contracts under this government worth more than 412 million pesos: the rehabilitation center, the sports center and the Administrative City. The fourth stage of the Administrative City alone, contract SI/INFRA/013/26, is worth 210,800,068.35 pesos.

The known version says Colosal was incorporated in Puebla on December 6, 2021, three months after she took office. I checked Florida's corporate registry. Colosal International Services LLC already existed there as of February 22, 2021, with Alva Arámburo as manager. The election was three and a half months away, and Cuéllar's swearing-in six.

It is not the only one. There are six companies in his name in Florida. Four share the same two managers, Alva Arámburo and Ana de Zatarain Rugarcia, and the same registered agent in Pompano Beach. Three were registered on the same day, May 3, 2023.

One of them, ALDEZA LLC, was formed on April 13, 2023. Six weeks later, on May 30, it bought unit 1403 at 18975 Collins Avenue, in Sunny Isles Beach: three bedrooms on the ocean, 2,271 square feet, in a tower completed in 2019. Price: 3,800,000 dollars. It is the address Alva Arámburo himself lists as his personal residence in his newest company, Colosal Luxury Driving LLC, registered in June 2026.

On September 10, the Tlaxcala government said the Miami apartments "are false information." This one exists, it is in the Miami-Dade County registry, and it belongs to the company of the contractor who receives the most public works from Cuéllar's government. The complaint I filed in the United States states that the contractor's Miami apartments are part of the assets of the governor's circle.

The U.S. hook is concrete. Since 2016, Treasury has required a FinCEN report for every residential purchase in Miami-Dade made by a company without a bank loan, naming the beneficial owner. If ALDEZA paid without a mortgage, that report exists. And if a single dollar of that purchase came from Tlaxcala public works, U.S. money laundering law reaches it even though the underlying crime took place in Mexico.

I downloaded the Treasury's full sanctions list and counted it address by address.

OFAC's SDN.XML file, published September 18, 2026. 19,393 entries worldwide. 1,172 have at least one address in Mexico. Only four states have none: Oaxaca, Yucatán, Campeche and Tlaxcala. Of the four, Tlaxcala is the only one with eight seized drug labs and the only one bordering the State of Mexico, Puebla and Hidalgo. Not one of the 1,172 is in Tlaxcala. Not in Apizaco, not in Huamantla, not in Calpulalpan, not in Nanacamilpa, not in Tenancingo, not in Tlaxco.

The word Tlaxcala appears twice in the whole file. One is a street in Cananea, Sonora. The other is the alternate place of birth OFAC records for a Colombian born in Medellín and sanctioned under the SDNT program: Huamantla, Tlaxcala.

A kitchen tied to a Sinaloa Cartel faction. A CJNG cell with its boss captured. A trafficking network with Brooklyn convictions that sent its profits home. Warehouses, tankers, trailers. All of that needs houses, land, companies, front men and accounts. Washington has sanctioned not one of them.

Tlaxcala is not clean. Tlaxcala is simply not on the radar. And territory with no radar is exactly what an organization just designated as terrorist is looking for.

Treasury sanctioned the CJNG's cockfight and concert promoter in 2018. He was killed in 2024. In May 2025, OFAC deleted his company from the list.

A citizen complaint about the Fair's cockfighting arena is circulating in Tlaxcala. It says the company of promoter Jesús Pérez Alvear is on the U.S. blacklist and that nobody can do business with it. That is no longer true. And the fact that it is no longer true is the story.

April 6, 2018. OFAC designates Jesús Pérez Alvear, alias Chucho Pérez, and his company Gallística Diamante, also known as Ticket Premier, under the Kingpin Act. Treasury describes it this way: he launders money for the CJNG and Los Cuinis through concerts at major fairs, uses violence to win concessions and mixes narco money with ticket, drink and parking sales. He has close ties to the family of Abigael González Valencia, brother-in-law of El Mencho.

June 2023. Pérez Alvear is reported to have signed a plea agreement with U.S. prosecutors. December 4, 2024. He is shot dead in a restaurant in Polanco.

May 28, 2025. OFAC publishes a list of removals. Pérez Alvear, Gallística Diamante S.A. de C.V. and Ticket Premier are on it. I checked against today's file: zero entries for Pérez Alvear, zero for Gallística, zero for Ticket Premier.

OFAC routinely removes the dead. But here it also removed the company. Since that day, any fair board, any bank and any artist with a work visa can contract with Gallística Diamante, or with whoever inherited its portfolio, without violating a single sanction. The 50% rule does not apply to a company no longer on the list. The business model Treasury described in 2018 is still legal to run. The only thing that disappeared was the lock.

Now, Tlaxcala

The state government put 400 million public pesos into renovating the Fairgrounds. The rehabilitation went to Grupo Comercial Mira, for 395,551,706 pesos, in a tender that drew a single bid. The centerpiece is a new cockfighting and concert arena for about 5,800 people. It opens on October 23, 2026. Eight concerts. Tickets from 500 to 5,200 pesos. Sales are run by a private ticketing company, TopTickets, which has sold the Tlaxcala arena since at least 2022.

Those are the facts. What is not public is the only thing that matters: who holds the arena concession, under what corporate name, for how many years, in exchange for what, and who signed. I found the contract in no open record.

The citizen complaint fills that gap with names. It points to Salvador Ballesteros Rodríguez, the governor's husband, as the man who handed the arena to the murdered promoter's circle in exchange for monthly cash payments since 2021, and claims a signed receipt exists. That allegation is part of the complaint I filed in the United States, with evidence and testimony.

What is already public is this. In 2018 Treasury spelled out exactly how money is laundered through a fair arena. Tlaxcala just built a 400-million-peso one with public money. And the contract of whoever runs it is locked away. Three documents end the debate, one way or the other.

On September 18 the government spokesman defended the Fair's concession holder. He said it runs other major events and has done good work. And he admitted he does not know when the current contract ends. The government that invested 400 million in the venue does not know when the concession of the company running it expires. He did not name it either. Tickets are already being resold for up to 7,000 pesos.

This is what I filed with United States authorities.

Each element was delivered with evidence and testimony. On the back of each card is the support that is already public and the statute that takes it to a U.S. court. Tap each card.