Despite a career filled with accusations and sentences for crime and corruption, the infamous Dominican Army military best known as “Pepe Goico” was promoted and retired as a general in 2019. This week, former Minister of Defense Ruben Dario Paulino Sem confirmed that in 2019, Pepe Goico was promoted to general and then placed in retirement during the Danilo Medina administration. Goico received all the wages and benefits that would have been due to him, regardless of the previous criminal charges.
In 1996, when he was a mayor in the Army, Pedro Julio (Pepe) Goico Guerero was accused of fraud to the state lottery for RD$90 million. He spent a year in Najayo Jail. In 2000, he was reinstated to the Army and promoted to colonel and became the security chief for then President Hipolito Mejía. In 2002, he was accused of having ties to a RD$400 million fraud with the subsequently collapsed Baninter bank. He was accused of misusing an unlimited credit card the bank had extended to him for expenses related to then President Hipolito Mejia. The card would be notoriously known as the Pepe Card. In 2004, he was retired by then President Leonel Fernandez. In 2006, Goico was sent to jail accused of ties to drug trafficking and the purchase of a helicopter in coordination with sentenced drug trafficker Quirino Ernesto Paulino Castillo.
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