The United States puts under the magnifying glass the links of the Mexican authorities with drug trafficking

General Salvador Cienfuegos (R), during a military parade in 2016.Rebecca Blackwell / AP

The United States justice has included another key figure in Mexico's war against drug trafficking on its to-do list.

The arrest of General Salvador Cienfuegos, Secretary of Defense in the Enrique Peña Nieto Administration (2012-2018), is the latest blow to a high-profile government commander and has once again brought suspicions of links between the authorities in the spotlight. Mexicans have had with criminal groups.

The name of Cienfuegos joins that of Genaro García Luna, Felipe Calderón's drug czar, and those of two of his subordinates: Luis Cárdenas Palomino and Ramón Pequeno.

While the scandals multiply in the country, the defendants do not answer in the Mexican courts, but in the Court of the Eastern District of New York, 3,000 kilometers from the border.

"It is a serious matter, without a doubt, because the accusation, if proven, will mean that there was no independent government, but that there was, if not a narco-state, a narco-government, that is very serious," said López Obrador on 23 May. September at his morning lecture.

The president of Mexico has capitalized on the trial of García Luna, who pleaded not guilty last week, as a political weapon against Calderón, his main antagonist.

The latest cases show that political scandals are brewing in Mexico and judicial work is taking place in the United States.

The Eastern Court of New York has not only put García Luna in the dock, it also sentenced Joaquín

Guzmán.

It was at the trial against the leader of the Sinaloa cartel that the first lurid details about the bribes, the pacts to turn a blind eye and the consensual drug trafficking rocked Mexico.

The revelations, however, were not anecdotal.

It is considered that several key witnesses in El Chapo's trial will once again collaborate to put Calderón's former Secretary of Security behind bars, in a trial that threatens to splatter the former president.

Ismael El Mayo Zambada's brother, Jesús El Rey Zambada, Guzmán's partner in Sinaloa, stated that the organization had paid him millions of dollars.

The former president declined by ensuring that he had no knowledge of the crimes for which one of his most trusted men was accused.

Furthermore, the investigations revealed the names of Cárdenas Palomino and Pequeno, who have held positions of power in practically all federal security offices, especially during the governments of the conservative National Action Party, first with Vicente Fox (2000-2006) and later with Felipe Calderón (2006-2012).

The Cienfuegos case sets an even more serious precedent.

Mexico does not remember another military man of a similar rank tried in the United States.

This is the most important blow to the Mexican Army since the arrest of Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo in 1997, considered the anti-drug czar of the government of former President Ernesto Zedillo, sentenced in 2007 to 40 years in prison for links to organized crime.