MEXICO CITY — American regulation enforcement brokers have been listening in as Mexican cartel members chattered on a wiretap, speaking a couple of highly effective, shadowy determine often known as El Padrino, or The Godfather.
Brokers had been closing in on him for months, suspecting that this central determine within the drug commerce was a high-ranking official within the Mexican navy.
Swiftly, one of many individuals below surveillance instructed his fellow cartel members that El Padrino occurred to be on tv at that very second. The brokers shortly checked to see who it was — and located it was the Mexican secretary of protection, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, in line with 4 American officers concerned within the investigation.
In that second, the authorities say, they lastly confirmed that the thriller patron of one of many nation’s most violent drug cartels was really the chief in command of waging Mexico’s struggle in opposition to organized crime.
It was a surprising show of how deep the tendrils of organized crime run in Mexico, and on Thursday night time Basic Cienfuegos was taken into custody by the American authorities on the Los Angeles airport whereas touring along with his household.
Even for Mexico, a rustic typically inured to the unrelenting violence and corruption which have gripped it for years, the arrest was nothing lower than extraordinary, piercing the veil of invincibility that the nation’s armed forces have lengthy loved.
Mr. Cienfuegos, Mexico’s protection minister from 2012 to 2018, is being charged with laundering cash and trafficking heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines and marijuana from late 2015 by early 2017, in line with an indictment unsealed within the Japanese District of New York on Friday.
The fees are the results of a multi-year sting that investigators known as Operation Padrino. Officers say that Basic Cienfuegos helped the H-2 cartel, a legal group that dedicated horrific acts of violence as a part of its drug smuggling enterprise, with its maritime shipments. In change for profitable payouts, officers say, Basic Cienfuegos additionally directed navy operations away from the cartel and towards its rivals.
The information not solely casts a pall over Mexico’s struggle in opposition to organized crime, but in addition underscores the extent of corruption on the highest ranges of presidency. Basic Cienfuegos was protection minister all through the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who left workplace two years in the past.
The harm to Mexico is tough to overstate. The final’s arrest comes solely 10 months after one other prime Mexican official — who as soon as led the Mexican equal of the F.B.I. — was indicted in New York on fees of taking bribes whereas in workplace to guard the Sinaloa drug cartel, one in all Mexico’s strongest legal mafias.
That official, Genaro García Luna, served as the pinnacle of Mexico’s Federal Investigation Company from 2001 to 2005, and for the subsequent six years was Mexico’s secretary of public safety, a cabinet-level place. In that position, he had the duty of serving to the president on the time, Felipe Calderón, create the nation’s technique to battle drug cartels.
If the boys are convicted, it signifies that two of the highest-ranking and most generally revered commanders ever to supervise the struggle on medication in Mexico have been working with organized crime — serving to the very cartels that proceed to kill file numbers of Mexicans.
The 2 circumstances name into query the American position within the drug struggle as effectively. For years, American officers have helped form and fund Mexico’s methods, they usually have relied on their Mexican counterparts for operations, intelligence and broad safety cooperation. If the allegations maintain up, a few of those self same Mexican leaders have been taking part in a double sport.
“The problem in working in Mexico the place you’ve this degree of corruption is that you just by no means actually know who you’re working with,” stated Mike Vigil, a former chief of worldwide operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Company. “There’s at all times a priority that Mexican regulation enforcement may compromise you, or compromise an informant, or compromise an investigation.”
Each Mr. García Luna and Basic Cienfuegos served on the prime of the federal government when homicides spiked to historic ranges, drug cartels waged struggle and navy operations have been expanded.
A mercurial presence, Basic Cienfuegos symbolized the outstanding position the navy performs in Mexico. Commanders are granted a rare quantity of autonomy, seldom bowing to political pressures and sometimes having fun with safety by the president.
“There has by no means been a minister of protection in Mexico arrested,” stated Jorge Castañeda, a former Mexican international minister. “The minister of protection in Mexico is a man that not solely runs the military and is a navy man, however he studies on to the president. There isn’t any one above him besides the president.”
Due to that energy and autonomy, analysts and others have lengthy suspected some prime leaders of corruption. However with their elevated standing, nobody dared examine — at the least not in Mexico.
“It is a enormous deal,” stated Alejandro Madrazo, a professor at CIDE, a college in Mexico. “The navy has grow to be far more corrupt and far more abusive for the reason that struggle on medication was declared, and for the primary time they is probably not untouchable — however not by the Mexican authorities, by the American authorities.”
On Friday, responding to the arrest, Mexico’s present president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, each defended the navy and decried the unhealthy actors in it. However it was unclear whether or not Mr. López Obrador would step again from his heavy reliance on the navy, whose position has expanded throughout his administration to incorporate every little thing from development to public safety.
Mexico’s navy has been a central a part of the nation’s home safety for the reason that crackdown on drug cartels started in 2006, with troopers deployed to areas overrun by organized crime. The secretary of protection oversees that effort.
The usage of troopers educated in fight however not in policing has introduced issues effectively past corruption. With the navy entrance and middle within the struggle in opposition to narcotics trafficking, the Mexican authorities has by no means constructed an efficient police drive.
In December 2017, Mexico handed a safety regulation cementing the navy’s position in preventing the drug struggle, outraging the United Nations and human rights teams. They warned that the measure would result in abuses, go away troops on the streets indefinitely and militarize police actions for the foreseeable future.
Basic Cienfuegos performed an important position in convincing politicians to move the regulation, which gave the navy authorized permission to do what it had been doing for a decade with out express authorization. At one level, he threatened to withdraw his troops from the streets, arguing they weren’t educated for home safety and have been uncovered legally.
However Basic Cienfuegos additionally defended the navy, saying it was the one establishment successfully confronting organized crime. As drug violence rocketed, he requested time and again that the federal authorities present a authorized framework to guard the forces.
“At this time the crimes we’re coping with are of one other degree and significance; they contain lots of people, generally whole households, and we’re appearing with no authorized body,” Basic Cienfuegos stated in March 2018. “With out it, our assistance is impeded.”
The navy has repeatedly been singled out for human rights abuses and the usage of extreme drive, together with accusations of extrajudicial killings that dogged the armed forces all through Basic Cienfuegos’s tenure as protection minister.
His arrest doesn’t seem to have been a joint operation with the Mexican authorities. It reaches again to an American-led investigation in late 2013 of a Mexican drug cartel run by Fausto Isidro Meza Flores, a successor to the as soon as highly effective Beltran-Leyva drug group, in line with two American regulation enforcement officers.
Though a bunch of American brokers was in a position on the time to determine Basic Cienfuegos as a corrupt companion within the Meza Flores group, there was pushback from different American and Mexican regulation enforcement companies, and Basic Cienfuegos was by no means absolutely investigated, one of many officers stated.
However by 2015, the official stated, stress to do one thing about Basic Cienfuegos elevated. A minimum of two separate American wiretaps started to choose up chatter a couple of highly effective underworld determine who was known as “Padrino” and was believed to be Basic Cienfuegos.
The wiretaps had focused the Sinaloa cartel and the H-2 cartel, a smaller legal group linked to Mr. Meza Flores’s group, the previous official stated.
The U.S. lawyer’s workplace in Brooklyn has in latest months grow to be floor zero for circumstances associated to official corruption in Mexico.
Prosecutors there haven’t solely charged Mr. García Luna and two of his former associates, Ramon Pequeno and Luis Cardenas Palomino, however have additionally prosecuted Edgar Veytia, the previous lawyer common of the state of Nayarit. He was sentenced to 20 years in jail final October for conspiring with the H-2 cartel.
The case in opposition to Basic Cienfuegos helps illustrate in some methods why it has been so tough for Mexico to take the lead in these investigations.
Among the many findings by U.S. authorities: Basic Cienfuegos was actively corrupting different Mexican officers by introducing high-level cartel members to these keen to swap bribes for favors.
At one level, court docket information say, he alerted the cartel that there was a U.S. investigation into their actions, prompting them to kill a fellow member they falsely believed to be sharing info with the authorities.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting from Washington.
