Denver’s Mexican Consul Doubles Down Amid Harassment, Corruption Allegations

Pável Meléndez Cruz, the consul general for Mexico in Denver, was forced to respond to allegations of sexual and workplace harassment, abandoning Mexican citizens detained by ICE in Aurora and accepting bribes in exchange for favorable access to consular services.

“If they were even halfway true, those smears, I would’ve stepped down myself out of decency, dignity and duty,” Meléndez Cruz said in Spanish during his annual update on consul services on Thursday, February 5, calling himself “a man respectful of the law and a soldier of just causes.”

The Mexican Consulate in Denver is responsible for diplomatic services in Colorado and Wyoming, such as issuing passports, visas and voter registration. Although he’s not facing criminal charges in the United States or Mexico, Meléndez Cruz is fighting accusations from Spanish-language media, Mexican oversight agencies, ICE-detained immigrants and a local activist.

Meléndez Cruz called the various accusations “lies and fabricated complaints” at the end of his annual speech, which took place this year at the Parr-Widener room at the Denver City and County Building. The consul general also detailed plans for several new direct flights to Mexico and a new office in Denver.

The audience included Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas, Councilwoman Flor Alvidrez and leaders of local nonprofit and community organizations. However, they were a small sliver of the people who filled the Parr-Widener room and loudly applauded his defense to accusations, which he “wouldn’t wish on any else,” he said. After Meléndez Cruz finished his speech, audience members stood up and started chanting, “no estas solo,” or “you’re not alone.”

However, the supportive chants came despite plenty of media coverage in Mexico about accusations of Meléndez Cruz groping a staffer, retaliating against his opponents and turning a blind eye on his detained compatriots facing deportation.

Harassment Investigation in Mexico

Early last year, Mexican journalists published a redacted copy of a Steamboat Springs police report from February 2024, accusing Meléndez Cruz of drunkenly grabbing a staffer’s butt and then responding with hostility in the workplace after his advances were refused. The Steamboat Springs Police Department verified the police report, but Meléndez Cruz has not faced criminal charges in the U.S.

Mexican journalists and news organizations publish articles directly to social media platforms like X, Facebook and Instagram rather than to websites like U.S. outlets. In March and April of 2025, the Steamboat Springs police report circulated on their accounts before national columnists began highlighting the “diplomatic scandal in Denver” by mid-May.

In a September 5 statement to Westword, Meléndez Cruz wrote that “I categorically deny” the sexual and workplace harassment accusations, calling them “made up” for “personal and political reasons.”

On September 12, an ethics committee for the Mexican Exterior Relations (SRE), the country’s main foreign affairs office, sent a letter to Meléndez Cruz informing him that he was under investigation for a handful of complaints.

However, the SRE ethics committee did say it found evidence of “presumed violations” of federal ethics codes against sexual and workplace harassment, human rights abuses and peddling his influence. The letter stated that the evidence supported allegations that he directed consulate security staff to “monitor personnel’s movements,” gave consulate staff and their relatives special access to consular services and made “violent and discriminatory comments through gender stereotypes.”

The ethics committee concluded that Meléndez Cruz needs to “train and/or update yourself” on sexual and workplace harassment prevention, foreign policy, regulations for Exterior Relations and leadership and human rights.

Meléndez Cruz mentioned the SRE letter on Thursday, emphasizing that “it clearly states ‘presumed’ faults” and called himself a “supporter of the feminist movement” who has “always treated all women and men with impeccable respect.”

“No one has presented a single piece of condemning evidence,” Meléndez Cruz said. “And for the simple and powerful fact that everything is false and fabricated.”

Meléndez Cruz’s harassment accusations resurfaced in Mexican media in January, when Josefa González-Blanco, the Mexican ambassador to the United Kingdom, resigned over sixteen similar SRE ethics complaints. In an opinion piece for adn Noticias, Mexican journalist Monica Garza called Meléndez Cruz and González-Blanco “leftover political trash” that “hopefully [current Mexican president] Claudia Sheinbaum can clean up.”

A January 20 article from El Pais Mexico quotes an anonymous source from the SRE ethics committee saying, “The case of Denver is brutal. Pavel Meléndez has a lot of complaints, and he’s still there.” The same source added that the Denver consulate office had “a dozen complaints for abuse that include yelling, threats, workplace harassment, sexual harassment, hostility and discrimination.”

Mexicans Stuck in Aurora ICE Facility

Last July, Mexican journalists reported that the consulate had abandoned Mexican citizens detained by ICE at an Aurora facility as far back as February, with coverage focused on detainees David Davila, Guillermo Hernandez, Manuel Mendoza and brothers Luis and Fernando Vargas.

“I’ve been here for five months, and I haven’t any support from the consul,” Vargas, who’s been detained in Aurora for seven months, told LatinUS in December. “Not even to see how I am, what I need, nothing like that.'”

Mexican law requires that consulates reach out to Mexican citizens detained abroad to let them know their rights. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum also promised steadfast protection of her citizens last February, a message that Meléndez Cruz relayed to Mexicans in Colorado and Wyoming as President Donald Trump began mass deportations and aggressive immigration enforcement.

In August, Meléndez Cruz posted his first public response to the accusations on X and Facebook, saying that the consulate visits Mexican citizens in ICE detention three times a week and that during those visits, detainees say they were approached by people “pretending” to be attorneys from the Mexican government.

On Thursday, Meléndez Cruz doubled down on his original defense, saying that the accusations were part of a “very dirty political campaign” that is “very well paid for” by people profiting off detained Mexicans as fake attorneys.

“They pretend like I’m the problem, but it remains clear that who’s behind everything is the mafia of appointment sales,” Meléndez Cruz said. “Their greed only reflects the emptiness of their hearts. It doesn’t matter to them the pain of hundreds of families who have been separated.”

Bribery, Corruption Complaints

The most public critic of Meléndez Cruz has been Javier Martinez Calzada, a Denver-based activist whose formal complaint and Mexico City protests against the consul general been covered by dozens of Mexican media outlets.

In August, Martinez Calzada formally accused Meléndez Cruz of bribery and peddling his influence by filing an anti-corruption complaint with the Mexican Attorney’s General office (FGR), which anyone can do against Mexican officials they accuse of federal crimes. He included Miguel Ángel Barradas, the consul’s main legal advisor, and Guilhermo Concha, a deputy legal specialist, in the complaint, as well.

In a written description of his complaint, Martinez Calzada alleged that “certain private immigration attorneys and affiliated organizations have been granted preferential access to consular staff, direct communication lines and expedited service channels not available to the general public” in exchange for payments and gifts to Meléndez Cruz and his legal staff.

“Witnesses and community members have reported that these attorneys and entities appear to receive business referrals, priority scheduling and institutional cooperation that facilitates private financial gain,” Martinez Calzada wrote. “These practices were already entrenched…suggesting a pre-existing network of preferential treatment.”

Martinez Calzada tells Westword his complaint also accused Meléndez Cruz of ordering consul legal staff to visit Mexican detainees at the Aurora ICE facility and at their families’ homes to intimidate them from making public criticisms.

The complaint could lead to criminal charges. However, the FGR reported in 2024 that these complaints can take years to investigate and only about 5 percent land in front of a judge for criminal prosecution.

In September, Martinez Calzada filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Colorado seeking damages for alleged defamation, civil conspiracy and harassment by Meléndez Cruz in response to drawing attention to all the accusations against him. According to the lawsuit, Meléndez Cruz accused Martinez Calzada of “criminal conduct, including drug trafficking” on social media through a “coordinated campaign of defamation.”

The lawsuit’s docket history shows that Martinez Calzada hasn’t been able to serve Meléndez Cruz, with a summons returned unexecuted on September 26. He tells Westword that he couldn’t serve Meléndez Cruz because the consul general is claiming diplomatic immunity, but Martinez Calzada is still looking for a way to move the lawsuit forward.

Martinez Calzada had legal trouble of his own in 2018, when a Denver man seeking a paternity test in a custody case sued him for falsely advertising himself as a lawyer. The Colorado Supreme Court ordered Martinez Calzada to pay $2,500 in restitution after investigators found he wrongfully advertised his legal background. He maintains that “I wasn’t advertising myself as a lawyer, but the courts, they say that the way I presented myself was as a lawyer,” Martinez Calzada says, adding that “the consulate is bringing this up to discredit me, but this has nothing to do with me.”

New DIA Flights to Mexico

Outside of all the drama surrounding his office, Meléndez Cruz’s speech on Thursday had a few notable pieces of good news.

Meléndez Cruz promised that 2026 will see the start of three new direct flights from Denver International Airport to different parts of central Mexico, the most densely populated part of the country. Last year, DIA was supposed to launch a direct flight to Felipe Ángeles International Airport (AIFA), the second largest airport in Mexico, but the budget airline Viva (formerly Viva Aerobus) won’t actually get planes off the ground and en route until 2026, Meléndez Cruz said.

The route was expected to launch in November, but President Donald Trump revoked approval for the Denver to AIFA line, along with a dozen other routes to Mexico, last October as the country was preparing to host World Cup games this June. However, Meléndez Cruz said on Thursday that the DIA-AIFA line “has already been authorized” and “although it was delayed a little bit, I expect it to happen this year.”

A direct flight to the Zacatecas International Airport will also take off from DIA this year, Meléndez Cruz said. The consulate took a public poll last year on which Mexican destination travelers would like to see offered as a direct flight from DIA in 2026, and the answer was Zacatecas, a Mexican state situated between central Mexico and northern states that border the U.S.

But the new flight that got the loudest applause from the audience was a direct route to Queretero International Airport, a gateway to Mexico’s “Pueblos Magicos,” a series of towns known for their colonial heritage and natural landmarks like San Miguel de Allende and Santiago de Queretero. The airline Volaris will begin offering the flight this year, with nonstop routes expected to begin at DIA on June 3.

Meléndez Cruz announced that the consulate will move out of its unassuming office building at 5350 Leetsdale Drive in the year ahead, too. The consulate looked at “almost 25 buildings in 2025, but finally we picked one,” he said, although the location still hasn’t been named.

“The Mexican people deserve a more dignified place,” Meléndez Cruz said. “As we know, the rent is expensive here in Denver, but we found a dignified place for our people.”