MEXICO CITY (AP) – Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has accused the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration of fabricating drug trafficking charges against the country’s former defense secretary, even as his government released hundreds of pages of American archives that sought to show detailed evidence of the man’s close ties to a gang of drug traffickers.
The decision to sue U.S. prosecutors on Friday while clearing charges of a senior official adds to a crisis in security cooperation for the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden.
It follows the Mexican government’s decision to restrict U.S. agents and eliminate their immunity, apparently a slap in the face after U.S. efforts to appease Mexico by releasing retired General Salvador Cienfuegos to be tried in Mexico.
The U.S. Department of Justice said he was “deeply disappointed” by the closure of the case against Cienfuegos. He also said the release of evidence violates a legal aid treaty and calls into question whether the U.S. can continue to share information.
It was also said that the published material demonstrated the strength of the evidence against Cienfuegos.
Lopez Obrador has leaned heavily in the military for a wide range of projects far beyond security. In this case, he said that while many Mexicans see American courts as “good, impeccable judges … in this case, with all due respect, those who did this investigation did not act professionally.”
His administration then published a 751-page file that the US authorities had shared to support what they intended to be the Mexican prosecution of Cienfuegos. Blackberry’s intercepted messaging exchanges between murdered traffickers have since been marked: “Shared by court order, not for further distribution.”
It was not immediately clear whether the publication of the documents would affect other court cases in the US
The U.S. government withdrew its charges against Cienfuegos in November at a diplomatic concession in Mexico and sent him home, where he was immediately released.
Lopez Obrador said Friday that Mexican prosecutors had dropped the case because evidence shared by the United States had no value in proving he committed any crime.
“Why did they do the research like that?” Lopez Obrador said. “No support, no evidence?”
The published documents include alleged text messages intercepted between the leader of the H-2 cartel based in the state of Nayarit, on the Pacific coast, and a senior aide, who allegedly acted as an intermediary with the general, who often it was called “The Godfather.” ”And at a given moment as“ Salvador Sinfuego Sepeda ”.
In an exchange, Daniel Silva Garate told his boss, Juan Francisco Patrón Sánchez, that he had been picked up by men in short military-style cuts and taken to the headquarters of the Department of Defense in Mexico City for a meeting with “The Godfather. ”
Silva-Garate tells his boss that “The Godfather” told him “Now we’re going to do great things with you … that what you’ve done is short-lived.”
Patron Sanchez says he wants trouble-free routes to send drugs from Colombia and Silva Garate replies, “He says as long as he’s here, he’ll be free … they’ll never do heavy operations” or raids.
Silva Garate tells his boss that the “Godfather” told him that “you can sleep peacefully, no operation will touch you.”
Other exchanges describe El Padrí allegedly offering to organize a boat to help transport drugs, introducing traffickers to other officials and acknowledging having helped other traffickers in the past.
Speaking at the daily press conference on Friday, López Obrador, who has made the fight against corruption an issue of his administration, insisted that his government would not cover anyone.
“We will not commit crimes. We will not invent anything, ”he said. “We have to act based on the facts, the evidence, the realities.”
The U.S. Department of Justice issued a statement saying it could still resume Cienfuegos prosecution if Mexico does not. And in a statement Thursday night, Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office went beyond announcing it was closing the case, completely clearing the general.
“General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda never had any meeting with the criminal organization investigated by the US authorities and never had any communication with them, nor did he carry out acts to protect or help these people,” he said. say the office in a statement.
It was said that Cienfuegos was not found to have illicit or abnormal income, nor was any evidence found “that he had issued any order to favor the criminal group in question.”
Gladys McCormick, an associate professor of history at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, said the only surprise was that Mexico didn’t make a better show of watching Cienfuegos.
“One would think that at least they would have followed some similarity of research, even if it was just to put some showcase on the illusion that the rule of law exists,” McCormick said. “From the Mexican side, this points to the deep control of the armies that an institution has in power.”
López Obrador has given the military more responsibility than any president in recent history, relying on him to build huge infrastructure projects and, more recently, to distribute the COVID-19 vaccine, in addition to expanded security responsibilities.
Cienfuegos was arrested after being secretly charged by a grand federal jury in New York in 2019. He was charged with conspiring with the H-2 cartel to smuggle thousands of pounds of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana while he was secretary of defense from 2012 to 2018.
Although the United States sent Cienfuegos home, the Mexican Congress a few weeks later passed a law that would restrict U.S. agents in Mexico and eliminate their diplomatic immunity.
Mike Vigil, former head of international operations at the Drug Control Administration, said cleaning up Cienfuegos “could be the straw that broke the camel’s back to U.S.-Mexico cooperation in anti-drug activities.”
“It was previously ordered that Mexican justice would not move forward in prosecuting General Cienfuegos,” Vigil said. “It will greatly tarnish the integrity of its judicial system and, despite the political rhetoric of wanting to eliminate corruption, this is obviously not the case. The rule of law has been significantly violated.”
__
AP writer E. Eduardo Castillo in Mexico City contributed to this report.