General Salvador Cienfuegos asks the judge for time to negotiate with the United States attorney

Cienfuegos and Peña Nieto in January 2018 in Mexico.OMAR TORRES / AFP

The United States Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of New York and the defense of General Salvador Cienfuegos have asked the judge to extend the deadline prior to the opening of the trial.

The parties have argued that "negotiations may result in the case being resolved without trial."

The prosecution accuses the general, former Secretary of Defense during the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), of drug trafficking and money laundering.

The prosecution and defense of Cienfuegos also argue that the case is very complex and they need additional time to prepare.

The former Army chief is being held in a prison on the US east coast, awaiting the next hearing, to be held on November 18.

The last time he was before the judge, virtually, was on November 6, when he pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

Cienfuegos was detained on October 15 at the Los Angeles airport.

The US justice had been looking for him since August of the previous year, when the judge had ordered his capture.

The news fell like a bomb in Mexico.

Cienfuegos was the second first-level official detained in a few months in the neighboring country, after the capture, in December 2019, of Felipe Calderón's chief of police (2006-2012).

The

also exploded in the midst of one of the most relevant corruption processes in recent years in Mexico, the case against the former director of Pemex, Emilio Lozoya, accused of receiving bribes from the Odebrecht company.

If the

puts the magnifying glass on the operations of the technocratic branch of the Peña Nieto government, the matter about Cienfuegos points to the security apparatus.

With violence shaking Mexico from north to south, the head of the Army, the spearhead of the government's strategy against crime, would have dedicated himself to organizing drug shipments to the United States.

That is at least the thesis of the prosecution, which claims to have thousands of phone messages, among other evidence, that show the corruption of Cienfuegos, whom they nickname The Godfather.

According to the prosecution, the general collaborated with a criminal group to send marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamines to the United States, at least from December 2015 to February 2017. Investigators call that group the H-2 cartel, a spin-off of the criminal network of the Beltrán Leyva brothers.

According to the prosecution, “the defendant made sure, in exchange for bribes, that no military operations were carried out against this cartel, initiated operations against rival drug trafficking organizations, located boats for drug shipments, helped the cartel expand to Mazatlán and the rest of Sinaloa, presented members of the criminal network with Mexican government officials willing to collaborate and alerted to the investigations that the United States agencies were carrying out on the H-2 network.

The request of the prosecution and the defense of the general is relatively common.

In the case of García Luna, both parties went to the judge for the same reason.

Then it was speculated that García Luna considered pleading guilty, something that has not happened at the moment.