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Of: TT
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Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell / AP / TT
Former Mexican Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos during a meeting with then-US colleague Jim Mattis in Mexico City 2017. File photo
He was a key figure in Mexico’s war against the drug cartels during his time as Defense Minister. Now General Salvador Cienfuegos has been arrested by the US drug police DEA at Los Angeles International Airport.
“This arrest will have great repercussions in Mexico,” military analyst Raúl Benítez told Reuters.
The suspicions concern drug trafficking and money laundering, a source told The New York Times.
Cienfuegos is the first high-ranking military officer to be arrested in the United States in a drug-related corruption case, the newspaper writes.
“The consul in Los Angeles will inform me of the complaints in the next few hours. We will offer him the consular assistance to which he is entitled,” tweeted the Mexican Secretary of State, Marcelo Ebrard.
“Incomparable”
President Andrés Manuel López Obrado says that the situation is “incomparable” and that the Mexican government will not protect anyone suspected of having committed a crime. However, he emphasizes that evidence is needed.
– That a former defense minister has been arrested, suspected of having links with drug trafficking, is a very regrettable fact, he says.
Salvador Cienfuegos was Minister of Defense 2012-2018 under then-President Enrique Peña Nieto.
The Mexican army has played an important role in the fight against organized crime in the country since the so-called war against the drug cartels began in 2006. This has been justified, among other things, by the fact that the forces of security would be less susceptible to bribery than ordinary police.
“For the first time”
But there have long been suspicions that the military has also become corrupted. 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.
New strategy promised
Several people from Enrique Peña Nieto’s government at the time are charged in various corruption cases, in some cases with alleged links to organized crime, Reuters writes.
In December 2019, Genaro García Luna, Security Minister for Peña Nieto’s representative Felipe Calderón, was arrested in the United States on suspicion of receiving millions in bribes from the drug cartel “El Chapos.”
The current president López Obrador has been harsh in his criticism of his representatives 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.
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