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The former Mexican defense secretary was arrested in Los Angeles on drug trafficking and money laundering charges, becoming the latest in a string of senior officials accused of collaborating with the same criminal groups they were supposed to take on. .
General Salvador Cienfuegos was detained at Los Angeles International Airport late Thursday and is expected to appear in court on Friday afternoon. according to the chancellor, Marcelo Ebrard.
Cienfuegos was Mexico’s top military officer during Enrique Peña Nieto’s 2012-2018 presidency, and he played a key role in the militarized “war on drugs.”
Calderón sends in the army
Mexico’s “war on drugs” began in late 2006 when then-President Felipe Calderón ordered thousands of soldiers to take to the streets in response to a terrible outbreak of violence in his home state of Michoacán.
Calderón hoped to crush the drug cartels with his heavily militarized attack, but the approach backfired and came at a catastrophic cost to people. As the Mexican army went on the offensive, the death toll shot to new heights and tens of thousands were forced from their homes, disappeared or were killed.
Kingpin strategy
Simultaneously, Calderón also began to pursue the so-called “capo strategy” by which the authorities sought to decapitate the cartels by targeting their leaders.
That policy resulted in some high-profile scalps, notably Arturo Beltrán Leyva, who was shot and killed by Mexican Marines in 2009, but also did little to bring peace. In fact, many believe that such tactics only served to pulverize the world of organized crime, creating even more violence as new and less predictable factions fought for their share of the pie.
Under Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, the government’s rhetoric on crime was softened as Mexico tried to shed its reputation as the headquarters of some of the world’s most murderous gangster groups.
But Calderón’s policies largely survived, and authorities targeted prominent cartel leaders such as Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán of Sinaloa.
When “El Chapo” was arrested in early 2016, the president of Mexico boasted: “Mission accomplished.” But the violence continued. By the time Peña Nieto left office in 2018, Mexico had suffered another record year of murders, with nearly 36,000 people killed.
“Hugs, not bullets”
Left-wing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power in December and promised a drastic change in tactics. López Obrador, or Amlo as most call him, vowed to attack the social roots of crime, offering vocational training to more than 2.3 million disadvantaged young people at risk of being caught by the cartels.
“It will be practically impossible to achieve peace without justice and [social] welfare, ”Amlo said, promising to reduce the murder rate from an average of 89 murders per day with his“ hugs, not bullets ”doctrine.
Amlo also pledged to chair daily security meetings at 6 am and create a 60,000-strong “National Guard.” But those measures have yet to pay off, as the new security force is used primarily to hunt down Central American migrants.
Mexico now suffers an average of around 96 murders per day, with nearly 29,000 people killed since Amlo took office.
The country’s current leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, used the arrest as confirmation of his account that previous governments were plagued with corruption.
“This is an unmistakable example of the breakdown of the government, of how the civil service, the government service was degraded during the neoliberal period,” López Obrador said on Friday.
But the president, who has kept the military at the center of his strategy against organized crime, was quick to assert that the current generation of military leaders is “incorruptible.”
Cienfuegos, 72, is the second former Mexican cabinet official to be arrested in the United States on drug charges in the past year. Genaro García Luna, a former public safety secretary during the 2006-12 Felipe Calderón administration, was arrested in Texas last year and faces charges of allowing cocaine shipments to go to the United States. He faces trial in New York.
Two of his top lieutenants in the federal police, Luis Cárdenas Palomino and Ramón Pequeno, were also charged in New York with allowing the “Sinaloa Cartel to operate with impunity in Mexico … in exchange for multi-million dollar bribes.”
Cienfuegos was charged with money laundering and conspiracy to distribute drugs in the United States between December 2015 and January 2017, according to an indictment by prosecutors for the Eastern District of New York. The indictment alleges that Cienfuegos allowed the Beltrán Leyva cartel to “operate with impunity,” helping with the arrest and torture of rivals in exchange for the payment of bribes.
In Mexico, Cienfuegos was known for repeatedly refusing to allow investigators to interview soldiers in the city of Iguala about their activities on the night of September 2014 when 43 teachers-in-training were kidnapped and allegedly killed.
Cienfuegos also defended the soldiers accused of massacring civilians in the town of Tlatlaya.
Despite repeated accusations that troops have been involved in human rights abuses and drug trafficking, they remain largely untouched by civil justice, said Falko Ernst, senior analyst for Mexico for the International Crisis Group.
“There is no transparency. The armed forces remain black boxes that continue to successfully defend themselves from independent oversight, ”he said.
Generations of Mexican military personnel have been implicated in drug violence: the country’s first drug czar, General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, was arrested in the late 1990s and convicted of taking bribes from drug cartels.
One of the bloodiest factions in the war on drugs, the Los Zetas cartel, was made up of former members of the special forces.
But the armed forces remain one of the most trusted institutions in the country, “despite its well-known problems of corruption and human rights abuses,” said Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez, a sociologist from Mexico City.
Amlo came to power promising to return troops to barracks, but has increasingly relied on the military. His general policy against crime has been the creation of a militarized “national guard” composed mainly of former soldiers. The force will be under military command until 2024, despite previous promises that it would be led by civilians.
The troops have also been used for a variety of non-military programs, from managing the country’s customs service to building a new airport in Mexico City.
The president has given low priority to upgrading the police force, which “leaves him no one else to lean on except the armed forces,” said Jorge Medellín, a journalist who covers Mexican military affairs.
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