Among the impoverished towns on the border between Coahuila and Durango, an unusual sight could sometimes be seen: a cloud of dust kicked up by the speeding tires of a luxurious Lamborghini, whizzing past half-built houses, abandoned businesses, and ranches with scrawny cattle.
And it wasn’t just any Lamborghini, but a Urus model in a garish green. Specifically, a lime green.
The body had been repainted so that the luxury vehicle would be easily recognizable from the impoverished hills of La Laguna and to match the nickname of its owner: ‘Limones,’ Édgar Rodríguez Ortiz, who was arrested this Wednesday in an operation led by Secretary Omar García Harfuch for extorting merchants and ranchers, money laundering, and fraud—a criminal spree that was an open secret in the region.
The newspaper MILENIO obtained two photographs of the alleged financial operator for the Cabrera Sarabia clan, close associates of Mayo Zambada, inside a garage showing off an exclusive car worth close to seven million pesos: a super-luxury SUV that accelerates from 0 to 100 kilometers per hour in four seconds and has a top speed of approximately 305 kilometers per hour.
In one image, El Limones poses next to the car wearing a shirt that identifies him as a high-ranking member in the Laguna Region of the Autonomous Confederation of Workers and Employees of Mexico (CATEM), a labor union founded and headed by Morena party federal deputy Pedro Haces.
In the second photograph, he is dressed casually in jeans and a green sweatshirt—his favorite color—between his lemon-colored “Lambo” and a red Ferrari Portofino, valued at around six million pesos.
Those who saw the Ferrari up close say it had a sticker on the trunk that made it even more unmistakable: a lemon cut with a knife or scalpel, a veiled threat from its owner and a testament to his capacity for harm.
“He had a green Lamborghini and a Ferrari with stickers out of pure vanity: so people would know it was him from afar. He even ordered that no one could paint his car, even an old one, the same color, or he would have them killed,” says the source who shared the image with this journalist.
“He liked people to see a lemon color and feel terror.”
