Alejandro Gertz Manero, by Luis Grañena.
Behind the recent history of political power in Mexico there are figures who have known how to navigate in all waters.
The current attorney general of the Republic, Alejandro Gertz Manero, is one of them.
This 81-year-old lawyer worked with all the forces in the country, from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to the National Action Party (PAN), the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), the Citizen Movement and now with Morena, the formation that supports the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The president considers him a "righteous" and "incorruptible" official, but at the same time he has been involved in public and private questions.
More information
The case of prosecutor Gertz against his in-laws
Paintings by Diego Rivera and Francisco Toledo, Persian rugs, silver sauce boats: the list of objects that prosecutor Gertz claimed from his in-laws
The prosecutor, who is the head of the investigations of federal crimes, that is, that affect the entire country, has faced criticism in recent months for high-profile corruption cases that have had a controversial development. For example, those that affect Emilio Lozoya, the former director of the state oil company Pemex during Enrique Peña Nieto's term, or those of Alonso Ancira, owner of Altos Hornos, the largest steel company in Mexico. The first, arrested in February 2020 in a luxury development near Malaga, was extradited for his alleged involvement in an offshoot of the Odebrecht bribery scheme. The folder that involves him has not stopped growing, but the former director has not stepped on jail and the investigations are marked by opacity. The second, known as the king of steel,He was released from prison this week after reaching an agreement by which he agrees to repair a crime of money laundering by paying about 180 million euros.
The Gertz Prosecutor's Office made a decision in January that also shaken relations between Mexico and the United States by exonerating General Salvador Cienfuegos, former Minister of Defense of Peña Nieto, accused of collaboration with the drug by the DEA, the Antinarcotics Agency of the neighboring country . The military man had been arrested in California and extradited to Mexico in November after a diplomatic negotiation with Washington. Two months after returning to his country, the justice dropped the charges and Gertz himself claimed that his case had become a "media lynching."
To these episodes a personal plot full of incognito and worthy of a script is added. An investigation by EL PAÍS uncovered at the end of March the dispute that the official maintains with his in-laws as a result of the death of his brother six years ago. The daughter of Gertz's brother's ex-partner was arrested last October accused of her murder and her relatives affirm that they were negotiating with Gertz to achieve her release, paying her 3.5 million pesos (just under 150,000 euros). The in-laws accuse the prosecutor, with a secretly recorded telephone conversation, of also demanding the return of several objects - among them, paintings by Diego Rivera and Persian rugs - in exchange for negotiating the woman's release. Gertz has flatly denied any negotiation.
The prosecutor began to forge his fame as a statesman in the 1970s, when he led Operation Condor, a plan against drug trafficking deployed in northern Mexico. From then on, he held various positions in the Office of the Attorney General, now extinct and replaced by the Office of the Attorney General of the Republic (FGR), which he has directed since January 2019. He was Secretary of Security, first in the Federal District and later in the Government of Vicente Fox, He held a seat in Congress and served as professor and rector of the University of the Americas, a private institution. For decades, he placed a token in each establishment of power. And he managed to stay afloat politically even when, as the head of the penitentiary institutions, Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán escaped from prison in 2001.
Descendant of a German merchant who arrived in Mexico at the end of the 19th century and was an honorary consul, the head of the FGR has the confidence of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a president who has waged an intense battle against the Judiciary and others public bodies considering them as institutions controlled by the opposition. However, López Obrador has invited him to his morning press conferences, the morning ones, to report on matters of interest. And he has always presented him as an honest and faithful man, a servant of the State.
From her mother, Mercedes Manero, screenwriter and poet, she inherited a passion for theater. He has produced works and written a dozen books. In 2016, after a life dedicated to public management, Gertz apparently went out of his way to explore the paths of self-knowledge in Psychoanalysis. La Gran Alternativa, a work in which he tried to explore the territory of psychology in the face of “internal conflicts”. In an interview with the state news agency Notimex, he stated: "The god of religion, the god of politics and the god of money [...] have manipulated our conduct to date." Self-knowledge is, in his opinion, a way to "begin to get at peace with that self with whom we have such a conflictual relationship." Shortly after, with the arrival of López Obrador to power, the official returned to the front line again.