The office of the Attorney General confirmed the veracity of the video showing the leader of the Templar Knights Cartel, Servando Gómez Martínez, La Tuta, meeting with two politicians from Michoacán, one of them former government secretary Jesús Reyna García.

The government said that the recording, lasting just about a minute and published on April 21 on Youtube, clearly shows a meeting between the drug dealer, Reyna and former legislator José Trinidad Martínez Pasalagua from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

“This is very important evidence, but it is not the only one supporting this investigation”, said the authorities, pointing out that the Assistant Attorney General's Office for Special Investigations on Organized Crime (SEIDO) has another video of such meetings.

“There is evidence that they met not just in one occasion, but several and somebody recorded them”, said the sources, which did not provide details on the other recordings now in the hands of the prosecutor’s office.

In some of their meetings, most of them in 2011, the late ideological leader of the group, Nazario Moreno González, El Chayo, met with them in order to establish a political-electoral alliance. More political figures of Michoacán participated in the encounters, according to intelligence reports.