Mexico's Drug War - Page 62

CHILPANCINGO, Mexico (Reuters) - For the past 12 years, Mexico has fought violent drug gangs by deploying thousands of police, soldiers and intelligence officers to crack down on cartels and their leaders.

If its new president-elect gets his way, however, negotiation may replace the hard-line strategy that critics say has only perpetuated violence.

Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a leftist who won on Sunday after two previous attempts at the presidency, wants to rewrite the rules of the drug war, aides said, suggesting negotiated peace and amnesties for some of the very people currently being targeted by security forces.

“The failed strategy of combating insecurity and violence will change,” Lopez Obrador said in his victory speech Sunday night, repeating his call to address the socioeconomic ills that push people toward the drug trade and other crimes.

“More than through the use of force, we will tend to the causes that give rise to insecurity and violence,” the president-elect added. He said his team will immediately begin consulting with human rights groups, religious leaders and the United Nations to develop a “plan for reconciliation and peace.”

So far, his proposals remain vague. And any move toward amnesty, while aimed at lesser and non-violent offenders, is sure to face opposition from the general public, rivals in Congress and U.S. allies who helped Mexico orchestrate its force-based approach.

Still, Olga Sanchez, Lopez Obrador’s proposed interior minister, said the new administration would move fast to reconsider drug policies and a militaristic approach that, despite toppling some high-profile kingpins, failed to prevent more than 200,000 murders since first adopted in 2006.

“As soon as we get in, we’re quickly going to take some dramatic decisions,” Sanchez told Reuters in an interview before the election.

She conceded that any shift, like the demobilization of the military troops fighting drug gangs, would need to be gradual. Longer-term goals, Sanchez added, include decriminalizing the recreational use of marijuana and the cultivation of opium for medicinal purposes.

To consider the possibility of negotiated peace, she said, her team has studied Colombia’s peace process with its biggest guerrilla group, which allowed rebel leaders to avoid prison. Aides have also begun planning legislation for “transitional justice.”

Typically, such justice involves leniency for those who admit guilt, truth commissions to investigate atrocities and the granting of reparations for some victims. Any clemency, Sanchez said, would be aimed toward farmers, drug couriers and other non-violent lawbreakers caught up in the trade – not assassins.

Sanchez said any plan for an amnesty would go to a public referendum. If it received public support, she added, the administration would then put it before Congress, where Lopez Obrador’s National Regeneration Movement and allies also gained seats on Sunday.

The mere notion of amnesty disturbs many.

One recent newspaper poll found that seven in 10 Mexicans oppose it. Victims’ rights groups are also opposed.

“I want to see the guilty behind bars,” said Laura Flores, whose husband, Daniel Velasquez, is believed to have been murdered along with 15 other people in 2015.

MEXICO CITY — The governor of Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca is condemning the slaying of a local mayor shortly after he took office.

Gov. Alejandro Murat confirmed the killing of Tlaxiaco Mayor Alejandro Aparicio Santiago via his Twitter account Tuesday. He promised a thorough investigation and said a suspect was already in custody.

The state prosecutor's office said in a statement that Aparicio had just been sworn in and was headed to a meeting at city hall when an unknown number of gunmen opened fire at him. He was taken to a hospital, but died there later.

Four other people were wounded in the attack.

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Mexico’s Senate on Thursday approved President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s plan to create a new national guard, a central plank of the government’s strategy to subdue gang violence that has claimed tens of thousands of lives over the past decade.

The bill was passed unanimously by 127 senators but only after Lopez Obrador’s party agreed to put the new security force, which will be made up of soldiers and police, under civilian instead of military control.

The step caps weeks of wrangling over the so-called Guardia Nacional after initial plans to give the military control of the force met with resistance from human rights groups, opposition lawmakers and some close political allies of Lopez Obrador.

The change to a civilian-led force was part of a compromise from Lopez Obrador to win Senate support after he personally argued that generals should be in charge.

In a first phase, the guard will consist of some 50,000 members transferred from military and federal police forces.

Critics argued that giving control of the guard to generals would increase the militarization of Mexico, whose reputation has been battered in the past few years by notorious rights abuses carried out by security forces.

Lopez Obrador’s leftist National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) opted to modify the legislation, a constitutional change requiring a two-thirds majority in Congress.

“We need the support of the army and the marines to confront the grave problem of safety and violence,” Lopez Obrador said in a regular news conference ahead of the vote. “We’re going to guarantee peace and tranquility in the country because the people are asking for it.”

The legislation will now return to the lower house of Congress, where final approval should be a formality. It must then by ratified by a majority of state legislatures, most of which are controlled by MORENA and its allies.

Successive Mexican governments have tried to overhaul the security forces to tackle gang violence, which has been blamed for more than 250,000 homicides since former President Felipe Calderon sent in the army to take on drug cartels in late 2006.

Previous President Enrique Pena Nieto, who left office on Nov. 30, established a gendarmerie to oversee the fight against gangs, but that force was later massively scaled back.

A federal judge in Brooklyn, N.Y., has sentenced drug kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán to a term of life in prison plus 30 years for his role in leading Mexico's Sinaloa cartel. A life sentence was mandatory; U.S. prosecutors had asked that three decades be added onto Guzman's punishment.

One of the only suspenseful questions that remained Wednesday was whether Guzmán, who did not speak during his long trial, would speak in court in what's expected to be his last public appearance before heading to the Supermax prison in Florence, Colo.

"Guzmán told U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan before he was sentenced Wednesday that he was denied a fair trial," The Associated Press reports, adding, "He said Cogan failed to thoroughly investigate claims of juror misconduct in the case."

Guzmán, 62, was extradited from his native Mexico to the U.S. in January 2017. The terms of his extradition included a pledge that U.S. authorities would not seek the death penalty.

A federal jury convicted Guzmán in February, finding him guilty of a raft of serious charges, from 26 drug-related violations to a murder conspiracy. His conviction included crimes such as narcotics trafficking, using a firearm in drug crimes and money laundering.

At Wednesday's sentencing, Guzmán's attorneys reiterated their call for a new trial, asking for a hearing to go over their complaints about the jury.

"This case was simply an inquisition. It was a show trial, and how it ended is exactly perfect for that description," attorney Jeffrey Lichtman said. He said the government's witnesses had included "lunatics and sociopaths and psychopaths" and that "up to five jurors broke the law — violated the law while they were judging Mr. Guzmán for crimes."

After Guzmán was convicted, his defense team said the trial was tainted, claiming that members of the jury had ignored the judge's orders not to read about the trial outside of the court proceedings.

Guzmán plans to appeal, Lichtman said.

"I'm not here to tell you that Joaquín Guzmán is a saint," he said, speaking to journalists outside the courthouse. "All we asked for was fairness. And no matter what you think of Joaquín Guzmán, he still deserves a fair trial."

The U.S. sentence was announced 18 years after President George W. Bush formally declared Guzmán a drug lord, imposing U.S. sanctions on him under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Act.

The drug kingpin has repeatedly made headlines during his criminal career — first for the vast power he ruthlessly amassed and later for his seeming ability to break out of any prison in Mexico. In 2015, he escaped from a maximum security prison for the second time, after spending more than a decade eluding Mexican authorities. He lived outside the law for an additional six months, before he was captured in a high-profile operation in early 2016.

Guzmán's lucrative and extensive criminal network extended well beyond Mexico's borders. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency says his Sinaloa cartel put an exceptionally potent methamphetamine into illegal drug markets in "virtually every corner of Colorado, Utah, Montana, and Wyoming." During his trial, prosecutors presented evidence that Guzman sent methamphetamine to numerous U.S. locations, from Los Angeles to Minneapolis and from Ohio to Tucson, Ariz.

The agency also said the cartel supplied cocaine and fentanyl in the U.S. "through sophisticated and efficient transportation and distribution networks."

To elude detection, Guzmán paid $1 million to an information technology engineer to set up what authorities called an encrypted communications network to operate his global drug-trafficking operation. By using encrypted cellphones and encrypted apps, prosecutors said, the drug lord could communicate freely with his partners in Colombia, Ecuador, Canada and the U.S.

In the bloody churn of the global drug trade, there are no fixed, permanent characters. Cartel leaders are seldom more than temporary players, rising and falling with unfailing predictability as a new cast rushes in to replace them.

So it goes even with Joaquin Guzman Loera, the infamous drug lord known as El Chapo, who was sentenced to life in prison on Wednesday in New York for smuggling tons of drugs into the United States and leaving a trail of death in his wake.

The sentencing was the final act for Mr. Guzman, a poor farm boy who turned a small-time drug racket into one of the largest, and most violent, criminal enterprises in history. His trajectory was one of Houdini-like escapes from prison, mountains of cash and bottomless blood lust.

For nearly 20 years, his story loomed large in Mexico and around the world, a remarkable stretch of time for him to bask in the dubious glow of being the most recognized drug lord in the world.

Now, Mr. Guzman’s legacy will fade behind the walls of a maximum-security prison, along with the dozens of other cartel leaders already confined to history.

But for all the public fanfare of his downfall — the pursuit through the mountains of the Sierra Madre, the narrow escapes under the noses of federal authorities, the jubilation at his final made-for-TV capture — the larger narrative of the drug war remains unbroken.

Many here in Mexico would argue, in fact, that the war has only grown worse since his extradition. And judging by the staggering homicide figures of the last few years, which continue to set records, it is easy to see why.

“We are experiencing so much violence,” said José Luis Córdoba, 47, who works at a private security company in Mexico City. “So, no, it definitely won’t stop or change because he got sentenced to life in prison.”

Kingpins fall, new ones rise, and the traffic of drugs to the United States continues uninterrupted. Through it all, the death toll mounts, especially in Mexico, where the majority of the blood is spilled.

The lives lost in the violence have now surpassed the levels reached when Mr. Guzman was on the street, overseeing a vast empire of killers.

Taking out the drug trade’s most dangerous leaders has not ended the trafficking. It has been all but proven that the so-called Kingpin Strategy pushed by the United States — in which the authorities try to cripple drug cartels by going after their leaders — has failed.

Instead of destroying the cartels by cutting off their heads, the policy has spawned multi-headed hydras, smaller, less disciplined and often-deadlier spinoffs.

“Unfortunately, Mexico does not have the capacity to deal with the splintering of the cartel and the vast network that is the Sinaloa Cartel,” said Giovanni Márquez, 27, a Mexican economist, referring to Mr. Guzman’s cartel. “At the end, it’s not great news for us.”

So one of the grand disappointments of Mr. Guzman’s capture is that it has been a major catalyst of the violence consuming Mexico.

Before his capture, his Sinaloa cartel was the dominant player in the drug market. With fewer enemies to kill off, homicides were on a downward glide path until 2014.

But after his capture, the struggle to challenge Sinaloa’s dominance of the business has intensified, helping fuel a war for control.

In Mexico, a new force has emerged in the drug trade, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, and it is in a fight with others for dominance of the trade routes through Mexico into the United States. Homicides are surging in all of the predictable hot spots, including Acapulco, Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez.

But they are also spiking in previously quiet areas, like in the coastal state of Colima.

“It is precisely because he was removed from the game that we are seeing the level of violence we are seeing now,” said David Shirk, a professor at the University of San Diego and director of the Justice in Mexico program there. “Had he remained at large, and the organization continued to dominate the drug trade as they were in 2013 and 2014, we might have seen a decline to some of the lowest levels of violence in Mexico’s history.”

Still, analysts said it was important to jail leaders like Mr. Guzman, who drugged and abused girls as young as 13-years-old while at the helm of his organization, according to trial testimony.

“In the long term, not pursuing leaders sends a message of impunity,” said Jorge Chabat, a security expert at the University of Guadalajara.

But his capture has done nothing to dampen violence, or even reduce the overdose deaths plaguing the United States, experts said.

“It is almost like a Pyrrhic victory,” said Tony Payan, the director of the Mexico Center at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice Unviersity.

“The fundamental underlying dynamics of the war on drugs have remained the same for going on half a century,” Mr. Shirk added. “I don’t want to call it a futile struggle, but what else can you call it?”

Intense fighting has erupted in the Mexican city of Culiacán, where masked gunmen threw up burning barricades and traded gunfire with security forces after authorities arrested one of the sons of the jailed former leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

Mexico’s security minister, Alfonso Durazo, said a patrol by National Guard militarised police first came under attack from within a house in the city, 600 km (370 miles) northwest of Mexico City.

After entering the house, they arrested Ovidio Guzmán López, who is accused of drug trafficking in the United States.

However, the patrol was quickly overpowered by cartel gunmen, and the decision was taken to withdraw to protect the lives of the National Guard and restore calm in the city, where gangsters had set up roadblocks and were unleashing heavy automatic gunfire, Durazo said.

Images shared on social media showed trucks with mounted heavy machine guns patrolling the city streets. Another clip showed a gunman with an assault rifle shooting at an unknown target against a soundtrack of continuous gunfire.

Local media had reported that at least one of the main roads out of the city towards the port of Mazatlán had been blocked by a barricade of burning trucks, while others were closed by the army.

Photographs were circulating on social media purporting to show Ovidio in detention in a light blue shirt, with what appeared to be religious medallions around his neck.

“The decision was taken to retreat from the house, without Guzman to try to avoid more violence in the area and preserve the lives of our personnel and recover calm in the city,” Durazo said.

Thursday’s shootouts initially prompted rumours that they were triggered by the arrest of Iván Archivaldo Guzman Salazar, another of Chapo’s sons. It’s unclear if he was detained.

The 28-year-old Ovidio Guzmán López is one of four children from Chapo’s second marriage. He is named together with his elder brother, Joaquín Guzmán López, in an indictment related to cocaine trafficking released by the US Department of Justice in February this year.

Chapo Guzmán had two other wives and at least six more children.

The murder of 22-year-old Edgar Guzmán López in a Culiacan parking lot May 2008 sparked a major turf war between Chapo and his former allies from the Beltrán Leyva cartel that raged for years.

The Sinaloa public security secretary, Cristóbal Castañeda, told Milenio TV that as well as roving shootouts and barricades, the chaos included a mass jailbreak of between 20 and 30 inmates.

“We are inviting people to get off the streets until we have re-established control of the city,” he said.

Guzmán, whose cartel was once billed as the most powerful drug trafficking organization in the world, was sentenced to life in prison by a US federal court in January.

Over the course of decades in the business, the 62-year-old had been arrested three times – twice in Mexico and once in Guatemala – and managed to make two spectacular escapes from high-security Mexican jails.

Chapo’s second arrest in 2014 took place in the port city of Mazatlán without a shot being fired. He was in the company of his third wife and their two baby daughters at the time.

Two of the drug lord’s eldest sons, Iván and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar, have appeared to lead the family’s bid to retain control of the cartel after his final downfall began with his third arrest in January 2016.

Both sons were reportedly kidnapped in August of that year from a swanky restaurant in the Pacific resort city of Puerto Vallarta by the Sinaloa cartel’s then up and coming rival the New Generation Jalisco Cartel. Officials only ever confirmed the abduction and release a week later of Jesús Alfredo.

MEXICO CITY — A retired Mexican general has openly criticized the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador after the botched attempt to arrest the son of El Chapo — a rare challenge that’s raising concerns about growing discontent in the military.

Gen. Carlos Gaytán blasted the president just days after cartel gunmen swarmed the city of Culiacan to block the arrest of the son of imprisoned former Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Military forces had detained 28-year-old Ovidio Guzmán López but then released him on orders from political leaders who feared a massacre.

The operation has turned into one of the biggest crises for López Obrador since he took office in December.

“We are worried about today’s Mexico,” Gaytán said in a speech on behalf of retired officers at the Defense Ministry. “We feel aggrieved as Mexicans and offended as soldiers.” The transcript was leaked last week to the newspaper La Jornada — an unusual development, given the armed forces’ traditional secrecy.

For decades, Mexico had an unwritten pact with the military that shielded its government from the kinds of coups that rocked Latin America. The military didn’t meddle in politics; in exchange, it received broad autonomy.

That agreement is probably not in danger. But a rift with the armed forces could be problematic for the leftist president, given that he’s relying on the military to confront a surge in violence.

The general’s speech created such a stir that López Obrador declared via Twitter on Saturday that his supporters “will not permit another coup” like the ones that rocked Mexico in the early 20th century.

The López Obrador administration has issued conflicting information about what happened in the Oct. 17 capture of Guzmán, who is wanted in the United States on drug charges. At least 13 people were killed as cartel operatives seized control of Culiacan and took soldiers hostage.

The president has said he wasn’t informed about the raid before it occurred. He has defended the decision to free Guzmán, saying it was necessary to save lives.

Under mounting criticism, López Obrador ordered the defense minister on Thursday to publicly identify the officer who ordered the Culiacan mission. But that only stoked more outrage: Security analysts said the revelation could endanger the officer’s life.

The military “are really upset with that — it was a serious indiscretion,” said Javier Oliva Posada, a political scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico with deep sources in the armed forces.

Authorities later clarified that they had named the Mexico City-based supervisor of the anti-drug unit that carried out the operation — not the commander on the ground.

In his Oct. 22 speech, Gaytán referred to the extraordinary power that López Obrador has amassed after crushing the opposition in the July 2018 elections.

The lack of opposition “has permitted a strengthening of the executive, which has made strategic decisions that haven’t convinced everyone, to put it mildly,” Gaytán said. “Each of us here was formed with solid ethical values, which clash with the way in which the country is being run these days.”

He didn’t mention the Culiacan operation. But the speech was arranged to respond to the failed mission, and reflected the military’s concern about a lack of government strategy for reducing violence, Oliva Posada said.

Ricardo Márquez, a former senior security official, said military officials in the past have sometimes expressed political concerns — “but never like this, with such firmness and clarity and in such a delicate moment.”

López Obrador has promised to address violence through social programs, a policy he dubbed “abrazos, no balazos” — hugs, not bullets. But homicides are up more than 3 percent since he took office.

On Thursday, the president dismissed Gaytán’s speech as an opinion. He emphasized that the general was undersecretary of defense during the term of former president Felipe Calderón, who launched Mexico’s war on narcotraffickers. The conflict has claimed an estimated 200,000 lives since 2006, and the army’s reputation has been tarnished by allegations of human rights abuses.

“If [Gaytán’s] argument is that there’s skepticism in the army about our new policy, it’s understandable,” López Obrador told reporters. “Because for a long time there was a policy of extermination, of repression, that we are not going to continue.”

He added that he had full confidence in the military and its loyalty to him.

But military analysts said Gaytán’s speech was hardly just one man’s opinion. It was delivered in front of the defense minister, Gen. Luis Cresencio Sandoval, and hundreds of active and retired officers. Gaytán was chosen by his peers to make the presentation, noted Guillermo Garduño Valero, a national security analyst at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana.

“This is the way in which they are revealing the disapproval of the group,” he said.

Another retired general, Sergio Aponte, said in an interview published Sunday in the newsmagazine Proceso that military leaders were “frustrated” by the release of Guzmán.

Falko Ernest is senior analyst for Mexico for the International Crisis Group. Under President Enrique Peña Nieto, López Obrador’s predecessor, he said, the military was sometimes unhappy to be thrust to the forefront of the fight against organized crime.

But any criticism was “not in the open, because that’s part of the code of the military,” he said. The current situation “does break that tradition.”

The Culiacan debacle appears to be chipping away at López Obrador’s approval ratings. They have slipped from 63.6 percent to 60.4 percent in two weeks, according to surveys by the Mitofsky Group, a polling firm.

López Obrador is still among the most popular leaders in Latin America. But the Culiacan operation followed major firefights with criminal groups in other parts of the country in which at least 14 security forces died, Campos noted in an interview with Radio Formula.

“People are saying, ‘What world are we in, where the criminals are ruling, the bad guys are winning?’ ”

Mexican drug cartel thugs have hanged bodies from bridges, set fire to crowded buildings and tossed hand grenades into crowds.

But Donald Trump’s decision to designate the cartels as foreign terrorist organisations (FTOs) has been questioned by experts, who argue that the move’s main impact would be cosmetic – although it might provide a pretext for possible US military incursions.

Tom Long, an international relations lecturer at the University of Warwick, argued that although organised crime groups often use terror tactics to impose control, they cannot be conflated with militants who seek political power.

“Their primary motivation is not to achieve political change – it’s to make money,” said Long. “In order to make money, they corrupt and intimidate political actors and political institutions – but it’s a byproduct of their main objective.”

Mexico has been convulsed by violence for more than a dozen years, sending the homicide rate soaring to record levels.

Strategies to establish the rule of law have eluded three presidents since the then president, Felipe Calderón, declared war on drug cartels in December 2006. Attempts at decapitating the cartels by capturing or killing leaders – the so-called “kingpin strategy” – have only unleashed more violence as underlings fight over the spoils.

US attempts at offering assistance have also fallen short.

But after the murder of nine women and children from an isolated Mormon community – all of whom were US citizens – calls for action have escalated, along with the specific demand that drug cartels be designated as terrorist organisations.

After Trump said on Tuesday that he would “absolutely” go ahead with the designation, Mexico’s foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, tweeted: “Mexico will not accept any action that signifies a violation of its national sovereignty. We will act firmly … Mutual respect is the base of cooperation.”

The massacre attracted enormous attention to the binational Mormon communities living in a remote corner of the country, and members of the group were outspoken in their calls for Trump to designate the cartels as terrorist organisations.

“If someone is murdering your family, anybody would accept help from wherever they can get it,” Julian LeBarón, an anticrime activist and relative of some of the victims, told the Guardian. “Once it comes down to life and death, I think the moral thing is to choose life.”

There is no doubt that Mexico is in crisis – and that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” policy has failed to rein in the violence. Over three disastrous weeks in October and November, gunmen from various crime factions massacred 13 policemen, slaughtered the Mormons and besieged an entire city to free the son of the Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

But analysts who study Mexican security express skepticism that the terrorism designation would do much good.

The move makes it illegal to provide material support to designated groups – such as Colombia rebel armies, said Brian Phillips, a terrorism expert at the University of Essex.

“But that doesn’t make sense for criminal groups, because they’re already seen as illegitimate groups,” he said. “It’s already illegal to buy cocaine from the Sinaloa cartel.”

The kingpin strategy has caused the repeated and violent restructuring of Mexico’s criminal underground. Groups fracture and reform at a dizzying rate, re-establishing territorial control through violence and alliances – a scenario in which any individual terrorism designation would be ineffective and hard to apply.

“Organised crime in Mexico is already tremendously fragmented and disparate, so it’s not clear that tools aimed at hierarchical organizations are going to be effective,” Long said.

Trump’s comments reprise a familiar practice of pummelling Mexico for political purposes: the president launched his 2016 election campaign by describing Mexicans as rapists and robbers and once threatened to send US troops over the border to stop “bad hombres”.

But one unintended consequence of the designation could come at that same frontier, where it could bolster the cases of asylum seekers fleeing cartel violence.

US judges routinely reject asylum claims from those fleeing crime, however violent, but they have traditionally been more sympathetic to people fleeing terrorism, said Adam Isacson, an analyst with the Washington Office on Latin America.

“It reinforces the argument that the group threatening you has national reach – and that the government was less likely to be able to protect you,” Isacson said, adding Trump’s move might end up undermining his own efforts to undercut the US asylum system.

A former top law enforcement official in the Mexican government was charged by the U.S. government with accepting millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for providing protection to Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's notorious drug cartel.

Genaro Garcia Luna, 51, who served in a Cabinet post overseeing Mexico's federal police, was indicted by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn last week on three counts of cocaine trafficking conspiracy and one count of making false statements for his role in allowing the Sinaloa cartel to operate "with impunity" in Mexico. He was arrested Monday in Dallas, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York announced Tuesday as it unsealed the indictment.

"Today's arrest demonstrates our resolve to bring to justice those who help cartels inflict devastating harm on the United States and Mexico, regardless of the positions they held while committing their crimes," U.S. Attorney Richard Donoghue said.

Garcia Luna served as Mexico's secretary of public security from 2006 to 2012 and has been living in the United States since 2012. If convicted, he faces a minimum of 10 years in prison and the maximum of a life sentence.

The Sinaloa cartel "obtained safe passage for its drug shipments, sensitive law enforcement information about investigations into the Cartel, and information about rival drug cartels," in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes to Garcia Luna, prosecutors said. This facilitated imports of "multi-ton quantities of cocaine and other drugs into the U.S."

On two occasions, Garcia Luna's bribes arrived by courier — cartel members personally delivered briefcases containing $3 million to $5 million, prosecutors noted. By the time Garcia Luna left government and relocated to Florida, he had amassed a personal fortune worth millions of dollars, they said.

"The government has interviewed numerous other cooperating witnesses who have confirmed that the Cartel paid the defendant tens of millions of dollars over several years, in exchange for the defendant's protection of the Cartel," prosecutors said.

One of the most powerful drug cartels in the world, the Sinaloa cartel is known for its violence and drug trafficking. Over the decades, the cartel has directed a multibillion-dollar narcotics trafficking empire, shipping huge quantities of drugs from Latin America into the U.S., including cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine.

Prosecutors consider Garcia Luna a significant flight risk. "The defendant prioritized his personal greed over his sworn duties as a public servant, and assured the continued success and safety of one of the world's most notorious trafficking organizations", they wrote in a request to block bail.

Garcia Luna's lawyer did not immediately respond to request for comment. He is scheduled to appear in court next Tuesday for a detention hearing.

The body of a missing Mexican congresswoman has been found in a shallow grave more than a month after she was abducted by armed men while raising awareness about the coronavirus pandemic.

Anel Bueno, a 38-year-old lawmaker from the western state of Colima, was snatched on 29 April in Ixtlahuacán, a town on a stretch of Mexico’s Pacific coast that the drug trade has made one of the country’s most murderous regions.

Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador told reporters on Wednesday a suspect had been detained over the killing of Bueno, who was a member of his party, Morena.

During a 2018 interview with the Guardian, Vizcaíno backed one of the key pledges López Obrador made to Mexicans ahead of his election that year – that efforts to combat organised crime would start to tackle the social roots of crime and no longer “just be a matter of fighting fire with fire”.

“Crime rates aren’t going up because the people feel like being bad. Crime rates are going up because people need to eat,” Vizcaíno said at a restaurant in Colima’s capital that was the scene of a 2015 assassination attempt on its ex-governor.

Bueno had been attempting to raise awareness of Covid-19 prevention techniques when armed men swept into the area on pickup trucks and ordered her inside.

During a 2018 interview Tecomán’s mayor, Elías Lozano, blamed the bloodshed blighting the region on “the lack of honest politicians”.

“That’s the root of it all. Politicians had the choice of deciding between staying on the sidelines or getting involved – and many decided to get involved because there were economic benefits,” he said.

Mexico City (CNN) Mexican security forces on Sunday arrested the alleged leader of the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel, José Antonio Yépez Ortiz, commonly known as "El Marro" -- the Sledgehammer.

Federal and state authorities arrested Yépez Ortiz in the central state of Guanajuato, according to a joint statement released by the Guanajuato government and Mexico's Secretariat of Public Security.

At least five other people were detained in the joint operation, and a businesswoman who had been kidnapped was rescued, the statement said.

Mexico's Security Minister, Alfonso Durazo, confirmed Yépez Ortiz's detention via Twitter, adding that he was detained through an arrest warrant for "organized crime and fuel theft."

In a video posted on his Twitter account, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador praised the arrest.

"The Ministry of National Defense, with the local government's support, achieved this very important detention," López Obrador said. "We need to continue attending to the causes that provoke violence. We say no to corruption and impunity."
López Obrador has come under fire for his noncombative approach to organized crime, after campaigning on a strategy he dubbed "abrazos, no balazos," or hugs, not bullets.

Last October, authorities briefly detained Ovidio Guzmán, the son of former Sinaloa Cartel chief Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán. But he was released hours later, after cartel gunmen took several security officers hostage and paralyzed the northern city of Culiacán.

And in March López Obrador was widely criticized for shaking hands -- amid coronavirus restrictions -- with the mother of "El Chapo" during a visit to the state of Sinaloa.

Yépez Ortiz had been sought after for months, with Mexican authorities targeting his family and close circle amid escalating violence in Guanajuato, territory controlled by the cartel.

The Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel has made most of its income from extortion and fuel theft.

A turf war for control of the area between the group and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel has led to a wave of brutal and deadly attacks.

Guanajuato sees an average of about 10 homicides a day. In the first half of this year, the state recorded at least 1,691 homicides, according to government data, making it the deadliest state in Mexico.

Under AMLO's latest plan, customs and port operations would be taken away from the civil servants in the Transportation Ministry and placed into the hands of army personnel. Respective legislation has already cleared a first hurdle in parliament last week and is expected to get final approval from lawmakers.

Attempts to give Mexico's military leaders greater powers in the fight against corruption aren't new to the country's politics. The previous government placed one of Mexico's most important ports, Lazaro Cardenas, under military control in November 2013, as local law enforcement officials had been suspected of collaborating with the drug cartels operating in the port city.

ICG's Falko Ernst notes that securing military control over ports such as Lazaro Cardenas and Veracruz is a crucial step because the maritime infrastructure through which drugs and illegal goods are channeled "is making huge profits" for the cartels.

"Taking control over that [infrastructure] brings the government one step closer to controlling the problem," he said.

However, it would be an illusion to believe that the illegal trade could be stopped, he adds, due to the vast volumes of containers shipped daily to and from those ports. Even stronger administrations in more advanced countries are unable to achieve this, he argued.

But Mexico's president has vowed to crack down on the rampant graft problem: "We will clean up and remodel the entire customs and port administration systems in the country," Lopez Obrador said in mid-July — an all-out call to arms that invited criticism even from within his own government, and prompting Transportation Minister Javier Jimenez Espriu to step down.

Opposition leaders and other critics are also alarmed by what they describe as a "militarization of Mexican ports" that they say is threatening to have negative economic consequences.

"There is a real danger of slowing Mexico's foreign trade because they [the military] have neither the capacities nor the experience and know-how of running the customs and port operations," Marcelino Tuero, head of an advisory panel to Mexico's commercial shippers, told El Sol de Mexico newspaper recently.

The military would become a player in business, he warned, as the legislation was also giving it a "monopoly on procurement for maritime infrastructure."

Benitez Manaut from CISAN shares the criticism, stressing that military leaders shouldn't be allowed to launch tenders for civil infrastructure projects. At the same time, he admits that contractors would actually prefer military over civil procurement because they are saying: "There you have clearer rules, and they are monitoring port operations more efficiently."

MONTERREY, Mexico (Reuters) - Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Friday his government supported a decision by the attorney general not to charge ex-Defense Minister General Salvador Cienfuegos, in a case that has roiled U.S.-Mexico diplomatic relations.

Cienfuegos, a member of former President Enrique Pena Nieto’s government, was arrested in October at Los Angeles international airport on charges he worked with a powerful drug cartel. U.S. prosecutors later dropped the case and returned him to Mexico, citing diplomatic sensitivities.

The Mexican attorney general office’s concluded Thursday that Cienfuegos had no contact with members of the criminal organization. Lopez Obrador backed the move.

“It’s a decision the attorney general’s office makes, but one that the government I represent supports,” said Lopez Obrador in his regular morning news conference.

The fallout from the case has soured relations with Washington ahead of U.S. President-elect Joe Biden’s swearing in next week. Lopez Obrador on Friday said the U.S. investigation had not been conducted with “professionalism.”

Mexico said the failure to alert officials before the arrest marked “a before and after” in bilateral ties. In December it created new rules governing how foreign agents, including the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, operate in the country.

A watered down, final version of those rules was published hours before the decision to drop the Mexican case against the former general, in a sign that security cooperation between the neighboring countries will continue.

Cienfuegos’ arrest in the United States followed a multi-year investigation that used wire taps to track a military figure who traffickers called “El Padrino,” or The Godfather.

Investigators concluded “El Padrino” was Cienfuegos and had helped drug traffickers move tonnes of narcotics.

“The attorney general’s office acted because it considered that the evidence presented by the United States government, in this case by the agency known by its acronym as the DEA, has no evidentiary value,” Lopez Obrador said.

The president added that if evidence surfaces against others mentioned in the U.S. investigation of Cienfuegos, Mexico could pursue cases against them.

A senior Drug Enforcement Administration official told NPR efforts to target drug cartels operating inside Mexico have unraveled because of a breakdown in cooperation between law enforcement agencies and militaries in the two countries.

"We're willing to share [intelligence] with our counterparts in Mexico, but they themselves are too afraid to even engage with us because of repercussions from their own government if they get caught working with DEA," said Matthew Donahue, the DEA's deputy chief of operations.

The collapse of joint drug interdiction efforts has occurred at a time when cartels are manufacturing huge quantities of fentanyl and methamphetamines in illegal labs inside Mexico.

U.S. officials say those illicit drugs are being smuggled into communities across the United States, driving an explosion in overdose deaths that took more than 90,000 American lives last year.

"It's essential that we get [Mexico's] cooperation for the safety of American citizens as well as to stem the flow of violence in Mexico," Donahue said. "We would hope they'd want to sit down at the table and work bilaterally."

In an exclusive interview with NPR, Donahue described the current situation as a national security crisis.

"It's a national health threat, it's a national safety threat," he said, adding that drug gangs and criminal organizations now operate inside Mexico with impunity. "They do not fear any kind of law enforcement ... or military inside of Mexico right now."

According to Donahue, drug interdiction cooperation between the two countries eroded over the last two years when the DEA began to experience a "lack of engagement" on the part of Mexican agencies.

Other experts on U.S.-Mexico relations told NPR a major blow to the partnership came last October when U.S. agents in California did something unprecedented: arresting retired Gen. and former Mexican Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda.

The U.S. accused Cienfuegos of working for one of Mexico's deadliest cartels, the H2, part of the Beltrán-Leyva trafficking organization. Under pressure from Mexico, then-Attorney General William Barr backpedaled, dropping all charges and releasing Cienfuegos, but experts said the diplomatic damage was done.

"Operations have pretty much been paralyzed basically," said Falko Ernst, an analyst with the International Crisis Group based in Mexico City. "So what the U.S. had built up in terms of good relationships with parts of the Mexican state have pretty much been gone."

There was already a high level of suspicion between the two countries before the Cienfuegos arrest. But the U.S. was able to target drug cartels inside Mexico with the help of a handful of agencies within the Mexican military and police.

"They captured many, many, many of these drug trafficking operational heads and midlevel guys, cooperating with special units in the police, special units in the marines and parts of the [Mexican] attorney general's office," said Steven Dudley, an expert on drug interdiction with a think tank called InSight Crime.

Now according to experts in the U.S., those fragile links are broken.

In response to the Cienfuegos arrest, Mexican lawmakers approved a measure sharply restricting U.S. drug operations inside Mexico.

The law also required Mexican officials to begin sharing any intelligence the U.S. provides about the cartels with other agencies, including agencies the U.S. doesn't trust. As a result, joint investigations ground to a halt.

The Mexican government declined NPR's requests for interviews for this story, nor did it reply to questions submitted to multiple agencies within the Mexican government.

This diplomatic row comes at a moment when the Biden administration is also dealing with an escalation in the number of migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border.

During a conference call with reporters last month, Regina LaBelle, acting head of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told NPR that drug interdiction efforts would be on the agenda soon for talks with Mexico.

"I can say right now there is ongoing cooperation [between the two countries], but that's certainly going to be the subject of ongoing negotiations in the near future," LaBelle said.

Donahue too said he hoped joint operations targeting the cartels could be restored: "We would prefer to sit down at the table to work with the Mexican authorities," he told NPR.

But Cecilia Farfán-Méndez, an expert on organized crime and U.S.-Mexico security cooperation at the University of California, San Diego, told NPR restoring trust and cooperation won't be easy. She noted Mexican officials are focused on domestic politics with midterm elections coming next month.

"It's my expectation is that there's not going to be a lot of attention to what the U.S. would like to do and how to enhance that cooperation," she told NPR.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, meanwhile, has voiced skepticism of the old drug war model that targeted cartel kingpins.

While that strategy led to arrests of high-level traffickers and produced splashy headlines, critics in the U.S. and Mexico said it never significantly slowed the flow of drugs into the United States.