What awaits General Cienfuegos in Mexico after avoiding drug trafficking charges in the US

MEXICO CITY.- He is one of the most powerful soldiers in Mexico, and in the United States he was accused until this Wednesday of collaborating with and protecting drug traffickers when he was Mexican Secretary of Defense.

Now he is free, and the Mexican justice system faces perhaps its greatest challenge to date: to show that, despite a history of unsolved and unpunished cases, it is capable of acting against serious crimes when they weigh against a very high-level former official.

In just one month, Salvador Cienfuegos went from being arrested without the possibility of bail, pending a trial in New York accused of having accepted bribes from drug traffickers to help them traffic drugs, to being free today when the US authorities asked to eliminate that formal accusation, from a pressure never seen before from the Mexican Government.

"It is an unprecedented event," celebrated on Wednesday the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, nicknamed AMLO, referring to the fact that the US government agreed to drop the charges.

But in Mexico,

were expressed

that something had been offered in return, such as the Donald Trump Administration releasing Cienfuegos thanks to López Obrador's refusal to recognize Democrat Joe Biden as president-elect.

López Obrador ruled out that this was the case or that an "impunity pact" had been made.

Although he also gave indications that, now that Cienfuegos is free and will be back in Mexico, he could well avoid an investigation there, because according to AMLO "the prestige of a fundamental institution for the Mexican State is involved," as are the forces armed forces to which AMLO has entrusted his security policy and even new responsibilities such as the review of ports.

The negotiation for freedom

According to Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard, the agreement for the release came after the Mexicans disputed that

and after it was argued that the case should be tried in Mexican territory because of the alleged crimes of the general happened mostly there.

That argument had not been officially made in the dozens of previous cases against governors, former ministers or drug lords of Mexican nationality who were prosecuted on the other side of the border.

[Why does it matter that Salvador Cienfuegos, the alleged "godfather" of Mexican drug traffickers, had not been investigated except by the United States]

“That I feel gives us further proof of the power and scope of military force in this country:

?

Like that of former minister Genaro García Luna, or Édgar Veytia ... the list is very long, ”said Renata Demichelis, a human rights researcher at a conference.

They claim that 'El Chapo' Guzmán handed over General Cienfuegos to the DEA as an act of revenge

Oct. 21, 202002: 04

The Justice Department led by William Barr asked to drop the accusation against Cienfuegos on Tuesday for "sensitive and important foreign policy considerations," according to court documents, something that does not come into play frequently in these types of investigations.

Ebrard suggested today that among those considerations would be the possible

 - "it would become very difficult if not impossible," he said.

and added that the withdrawal of charges responded to the fact that there is confidence from the US justice in the Mexican authorities to investigate the serious crimes that weighed on Cienfuegos.

That supposed trust did not seem to exist, however, just a few months ago

, when US prosecutors began to investigate Cienfuegos, nor when they assembled a file with hundreds of pages of evidence, nor when they requested the arrest of the general, all without informing the Mexican Government of anything. .

[The epicenter of horror is an oven: this is how Mexican mothers look for their children in an extermination camp in Los Zetas]

What's next for the general?

The role of impunity in Mexico

In the indictment, now dismissed, it was said that Cienfuegos had not only accepted bribes from drug traffickers to protect and help them, but

thus suspecting a network with many powerful people in Mexico in which the general was supposedly nicknamed 'The Godfather'.

In the United States, he was even denied bail when he was still facing charges on the grounds that he could easily flee to Mexico and be hidden or supported by some of those authorities who allegedly also received bribes from the cartels.

Now he will return to Mexico in freedom and with his assets of up to 15 million pesos (about 750,000 dollars) intact and accessible.

General Salvador Cienfuegos (second from left to right) during the celebration of Independence in September 2018, along with (from left to right): the current senator Martí Batres;

the then president Enrique Peña Nieto;

the former first lady Angélica Rivera, and Vidal Soberón, former head of the Navy.

The agreement regarding the case says that Cienfuegos will be "investigated and, where appropriate, prosecuted" in Mexican territory, as soon as the Attorney General's Office reviews the almost 800 pages of evidence collected by US investigators who sent them to Mexico on November 11th.

[The secrets of the Sinaloa Cartel bribes, according to his former lieutenant Vicente Zambada]

“There was no extradition request because an arrest warrant is needed and

, said Foreign Minister Ebrard.

"The entire investigation is limited to the evidence that the United States Government sent us," he added.

So everything will depend on how long the proceedings of this investigation by the Mexican Prosecutor's Office advance;

whether the evidence collected by US attorneys is accepted (some are from intercepted communications, for example, which are not always accepted before Mexican courts);

whether the investigation progresses from being a folder to being a case properly in the Mexican system;

whether that case stays in the penal system for civilians or ends up moving to military courts, which are even more opaque in their performance, as Cienfuegos is a general;

And

Mexico also allows protection against arrest for various circumstances. 

“Things have changed in Mexico, there are changes”, declared this Wednesday López Obrador, “the one that continues to think that criminal procedures and foreign authorities are more reliable and better than the Mexican authorities, no longer corresponds to the new reality ”.

But the official figures for Mexico give another impression.

The Mexican justice system has been languishing for years due to lack of resources and training, which has aggravated impunity at rates of between 95% and 98%: that is,

, and 9 out of 10 crimes are not even registered with prosecutors due to mistrust in the authorities, according to official statistics and Transparency International studies.

In recent years in the Mexican courts

, according to researcher Daniela Malpica.

["You taste human flesh".

This is the school of hitmen of the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel]

"It will be necessary to see if a case is made against Cienfuegos, but also to be aware of whether that case does not end up being one so weak or badly argued that it will not be sustained," said political scientist María José Urzúa at a conference.

López Obrador, for his part, said: "Of course we were interested in this matter because it is not only the situation of General Cienfuegos [...] We cannot

."

The elements against Cienfuegos are hundreds of pages of evidence that the man who was in charge of all the Armed Forces, in charge of fighting drug trafficking, had collaborated with drug traffickers.

US prosecutors were confident enough in all the evidence to initiate a trial and

Protest posters outside the New York courthouse where a judge allowed the charges against Salvador Cienfuegos to be dropped.

The protesters denounce that the Armed Forces led by Cienfuegos committed human rights violations.María Vargas-Pion / Telemundo

Furthermore, the accusations in the United States are not the first in which Cienfuegos has been singled out for heavy crimes: when he led the Armed Forces, the military under his command were involved in serious cases of massacres and forced disappearance, for example.

"The motivation of the Government of Mexico to launch such a negotiation is, if we are optimistic, because there is a genuine interest in a very crucial case being resolved here," said Urzúa, "but we must also take the pessimistic view that all this

or other military personnel who are possibly in collusion with organized crime ”.