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In a tranquil cul-de-sac, where only residents circulate and seventeen houses are counted in total, lives the family of Guanajuato’s ex-governor, Diego Sinhue Rodríguez Vallejo. The house, valued at a million dollars, is located in The Woodlands, an exclusive residential area in the north of Huston. It is an environment inhabited by athletes, businessmen, entertainers and politicians.

The house is not under his name.

PopLab and CONNECTAS obtained the documents from the latest ownership transfer. The house was bought by the firm DAI LLC, registered in the state of Colorado on March 9th, 2020. In Colorado, information regarding the final beneficiaries of companies is not publicly accessible, but in one of the transaction documents, the manager’s signature appears. It is none other than Daniel Ezquenazi Beraha, a mexican architect from the capital that has represented Seguritech, a company that has contracted security deals with the government of Guanajuato.

The company has been active in the state since 2012, when it sold a technological shielding project for 2 thousand 840 million pesos (188.7 million dollars) to Miguel Márquez’s government. During Sinhue’s six-year term, the contracts continued, but they were first publicly denied and then marked as classified, under the argument that its disclosure “represents a risk to public safety”.

Esquenazi is also a close collaborator and business partner of Ariel Picker Schatz, executive director of Seguritech and its subsidiaries. The weekly outlet “Zeta de Tijuana” identified Esquenazi as “Seguritech’s public relations manager” in reports published in 2022, which caused a law firm in Orlando, Florida to ask the publication for the detachment of Esquenazi and Seguritech in their news articles. Seguritech has been named in journalistic investigations for its deficient service, its high costs, the opacity with which it’s handled, and even for financing flights for a high-ranking official of Nayib Bukele’s government in El Salvador. 

The lawyers argued to the weekly that Esquenazi was no longer a part of the company and that such linkage registered in Internet articles “affects his work life and family environment”. 

Nonetheless, in Guanajuato, Esquenazi continues appearing in municipal government offices to advocate for Ariel Picker’s business, as happened in March of this year in Celaya when Morena mayor Juan Miguel Ramírez terminated Seguritech’s contract for maintenance to the Secretary of Security’s Control Center (known in spanish as C-4) inherited from the previous administration.

The relationship between these two businessmen, Picker and Esquenazi, and the ex-governor of Guanajuato is not limited to the hiring of Seguritech. Both entrepreneurs joined forces in 2019 to develop a large rural property of 184 hectares in Dolores Hidalgo, Guanajuato, where they own the Omún Vineyard, which has a luxury hotel and a territorial reserve for future residential development. Piker and his mother have 49,999 shares of this vineyard through the company “Desarrollos Nala y Leira S. de R. L. de C.V.”, which they both own. Esquenazi, however, only has one share.

Laying the first stone of the Omún vineyard, Ariel Picker greets Diego Sinhue, watching in the background in a green shirt is Daniel Esquenazi. Photo: Facebook Turismo del  Gobierno del Estado

On one side of the vineyard is La Venta, a community of 980 with historical remains of being part of the viceregal route of Tierra Adentro. After the purchase of the vineyard by these businessmen and during Diego Sinhue’s administration, the area was renovated with state resources through an express investment of at least 120 million pesos (6.5 million dollars) with the pretension of framing the vineyard.

An investigation by PopLab revealed how resources were allocated without the proper controls a few months before the end of Sinhue’s government. For example, for the bullring, whose remodeling contract for 13 million pesos (709 thousand dollars) had not yet been signed when the construction was nearly complete.

CONNECTAS inquired after Diego Sinhue, Esquenazi and Picker’s position, but as of the date of publication of this investigation, the questions that were sent have not been answered. Esquenazi, the only one to respond to the request, limited himself to asking how the team had obtained the contract.

In an interview with the newscast “En Línea”, on the eve of concluding his term in September 2024, the 44 year old governor recalled that he’d been in politics for more than 20 years and that now he wants to dedicate himself to his family and businesses. “I have an approved business. It’s registered, I pay taxes, don’t worry. But I’m a day away from leaving, I don’t want to give you too much information either.” Even so, in his declaration of assets made in April 2024, he assured he had no participation in any company, association or society. In the Public Commerce Registry, the ex-governor only appears as a partner in the company Dimauri, S.A. de C.V., created in August 2010 and dissolved in September 2016.

Certainly, Sinhue had a meteoric political career with the National Action Party (known as PAN in spanish) as a councillor in the municipality of León, local deputy, federal deputy and Secretary of Social Development in the state government for three years, from where he jumped to the candidacy for governor, a position he held from 2018 to september 2024.

But the ex-governor’s new lifestyle has caused a stir amongst the people of Guanajuato. Because of this, he was questioned on the “En Línea” interview about a possible golden exile in Texas, he affirmed “I rent a normal house” and he clarified that it wasn’t for him, but his wife and daughters, who were going to study English.

A luxurious bond

The house was constructed in 2017 and has five bedrooms and four bathrooms over a built area of 357 square meters on a plot of 1,122 square meters. It has a swimming pool, a multimedia room, a game room and a garage for three cars. Similar houses in the area rent for around 4,200 dollars per month.

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General images of the neighborhood in The Woodlands. Photos: POPLab

According to the “General Warranty Deed with Third-Party Vendor’s Lien”, the previous owners transferred the property to DAI LLC on March 20th, 2025. The act was recorded on March 1st, 2025, in the Public Records of Harris County, before the faith of Notary Karen Murcia-Gonzalez.

The loan application to purchase the house on 34 Winter Thicket Place was signed by Daniel Esquenazi Beraha as manager to DAI LLC.

The property is located on 34 Winter Thicket Place, with registration number 656064, it is free of liens, aside from the mortgage loan with Vantage Bank Texas, for an amount of 899,250.00 dollars.

DAI LLC, represented by its manager, Esquenazi, applied for a loan secured by a mortgage with a term of 30 years for a “Second Home Rider”--meaning it is not the borrower’s primary residence--, amongst his obligations is the prohibition of “timeshares or other shared ownership agreements”. Additionally, it requires the borrower to “maintain the property as a residence for their personal use and enjoyment for at least the first year”.

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Diego Sinhue y su esposa en Texas. Fotos compartidas por la pareja en sus redes sociales.

Shortly after the transaction was finalized, according to two sources consulted by POPLab who requested anonymity, Diego Sinhue and his family arrived at their new home. On May 4th, his wife, Adriana Ramírez, shared an image for her youngest daughter’s birthday. The details of the wall and window behind them show similarities to the photos published for the sale of the house. During a visit to the neighborhood, a neighbor confirmed that a meeting attended by children was recently held there.

POPLab visited the place on several occasions. In the garage, three cars were found: a 2005 Jeep Wrangler with Guanajuato license plates; a 2024 Jeep TJ registered in Guanajuato to Ana Luisa Ramírez Lozano --sister-in-law to the ex-governor--and a 2024 Jeep Gladiator with Texas license plates. These last two with a cost of more than one million mexican pesos each.

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Images used to advertise the sale of the house on the real estate portal har.com. Photo of the facade: POPLab.

Reinforced opacity with Diego Sinhue

In 2013, the subsidiary Seguritech Privada, S.A. de C.V. sold to the government a program called “Shield”, when Miguel Márquez Márquez was governor (2012-2018). The program cost the state 2 thousand 700 million pesos (165 million dollars) of leases added throughout the six-year term to use surveillance cameras, highway arches and a fiber optic network that converges in the control center known as C5i, also operated by the company, located in the Guanajuato Puerto Interior industrial subdivision.

The system justified itself as the path towards building armor for the state against the violence affecting neighboring states such as Michoacán and Jalisco. Even so, it did not work in stopping the growing deterioration of public safety in Guanajuato, and it was during the peak of its operation that the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel surged and consolidated in the state. Fuel theft and intentional homicides also grew exponentially.

Over the course of Diego Sinhue’s administration, 35 thousand 942 homicide investigations were opened. However, despite the wave of violence Guanajuato was experiencing, the ex-governor did not attend any security meetings with the federal government during his first year.

While he was in office, the “Shield” system passed into the hands of the state at the end of its lease and information regarding the new service contracts with Seguritech is marked confidential for security reasons. The argument against providing at minimum the number and cost of the contracts is that “it is equally risky for public interest and safety since providing such information results in criminal groups like those that have entered Guanajuato to carry out their illegal activities to easily assess the magnitude of the contracted infrastructure”.

Publicly available information shows that in nine years Seguritech obtained contracts worth more than 2 thousand 800 million pesos (188 million dollars). From Diego Sinhue’s term, there is only one piece of data in 2019, for a “comprehensive project” and a payment of just 2.2 million pesos (119 thousand dollars).

The contracts for the first three years of Diego Sinhue’s administration remain classified. No information has been provided for the following years.

Their opacity is not limited to legal reserves; it also manifests itself in inconsistencies, as evidenced by the response of the government’s Transparency Unit, dated March 23rd, 2023. It responds differently to a request about “lease invoices of the helicopters contracted by the state government for security purposes”. While the Secretary of Finance recognizes the existence of a contract for aerial surveillance services --whose content is marked confidential--, the Secretary of Security responds crisply: “No lease contract for rotary-wing aircraft and/or helicopters was located during the indicated period”.

The new security services included helicopter overflights for surveillance and the use of drones for monitoring, of which to date no supplier has been revealed.

Seguritech, on the other hand, is a company that continues to grow. It went from selling neighborhood alarms and panic buttons in the 90s, in Mexico City, to becoming a major supplier for public sector video surveillance and security-related data, to the point of taking over the monitoring systems of at least 10 states in the country and dozens of municipalities.

In recent years, it has internationalized its services in countries such as Colombia, where it developed a video surveillance service in Bogotá. According to the information and communications technology services provider Oracle, the Mexican company already has projects in the United States, Israel, China, Ecuador and El Salvador.