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General Salvador Cienfuegos, who was Secretary of Defense from 2012 to 2018, was detained at the Los Angeles airport. The US authorities accuse him of having protected the Beltrán-Leyva drug cartel, of having organized operations against rival cartels and of having been involved in drug trafficking and money laundering.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Cienfuegos, 72, was arrested after landing on a scheduled flight from Mexico City with several family members. His case is being heard by a court in Brooklyn, New York. The court claims to have evidence of “thousands of messages” showing how the general came into contact with a high-ranking representative of the cartel.
A conviction could, according to prosecutors the Los Angeles Times spoke to, result in at least 30 years in prison.
The arrest came as a complete surprise to Mexico, and the US authorities had deliberately kept all information about the operation secret.
The Mexican newspaper El Universal has read the US legal documents. According to these, the crimes attributed to Cienfuegos in the United States were committed between December 2015 and February 2017. The types of drugs that are said to have been heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana.
The consequences are likely to be great for Mexico’s protracted and partly unsuccessful attempts to stop drug trafficking, mainly in the northern part of the country. The operations, called the war on drugs, have been led largely by the Mexican military. It is considered to have been less corrupt than the local police forces.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said this Friday that all those who hold leadership positions that could be linked to the alleged crimes will be suspended.
-We will not protect anyone, said the president, adding that the accusations indicate that political representatives have been criminalized.
– If we are not talking about a drug state, then at least we can talk about a drug regime, and without a doubt about a government that has been a “mobster”.
There have been suspicions For a long time the military has been corrupted in the fight against drugs. Among other places in the state of Sinaloa, where it was rumored that parts of the army had ties to the cartel formerly led by drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is imprisoned in the United States.
The war against the cartels has also been criticized for contributing to a worsening of the spiral of violence. Under Cienfuego’s leadership, the army was charged with a series of murders, including a 2014 massacre in Tlatlaya in which 22 gang members were killed.
“The military has become much more corrupt and committed many more abuses since the war on drugs began,” Alejandro Madrazo, a professor at Cide University in Mexico City, told The New York Times, adding:
– Now, for the first time, it seems that they can render accounts, but not before the Mexican authorities, but in the United States.
President López Obrador has been harsh in his criticism of his representatives in the past and went to the polls to clean up corruption. When he took office in 2018, he promised a new anti-gang strategy with less focus on tough approaches and more on tackling the roots of the problem, poverty and unemployment. Since then, however, he has increasingly relied on the military in the fight against cartel violence, which kills thousands of people every year.
More information: Mexico recognizes: the son of “El Chapo” was released
