I do not understand what is the point of reviving, based on a journalistic investigation published by the New York Times with information provided by the group of the DEA and the New York State Attorney’s Office who ordered his arrest, the case of General Salvador Cienfuegos, the arrest of which the former Secretary of Defense was subjected, two years ago, upon arriving in Los Angeles, and his release a month later.
The long report is a detailed version of what was released in early 2021, when the FGR exonerated Cienfuegos and the Prosecutor’s Office released the document sent by the US justice to justify the arrest of the General.
Having disseminated part of the investigation sent by the DEA about him General Cienfuegos may have violated a rule and made it difficult in the short term to bilateral relationship in terms of security (particularly with the DEA) with the United States, but being able to see first-hand what that agency investigated, now expanded and endorsed in the aforementioned report, shows how flimsy the accusations were, the implausible connections that were made to arrest the General, and it served, also, for five other things: first, to confirm the decision of the FGR that there was not the slightest relation of Hundred fires with criminal groups; second, to verify that bungling is not just an attribute of one of our investigative agencies.
Third, that the person who carried out this investigation was neither the DEA nor the Department of Justice as such, but a group from the DEA and another from the New York prosecutor’s office, who came to order the arrest of the General without the full knowledge of their bosses. and even the secretary of justice of the American Union. As we have said since then, those investigators and prosecutors had in their strategy to build a mega process on Mexico, similar to the one that that prosecutor’s office, decades before, had carried out on the five families of the New York mafia.
Fourth, that the information was absolutely flimsy and that only by twisting reality could a case be built. And fifth, the indignation that this arrest generated in the armed forces and in a good part of the Mexican government is verified, as is narrated about the meeting that Marcelo Ebrard had with the then ambassador Landeau.
The truth is that the investigation recounted in such an extensive way by Golden, reaches, even though the intention of the publication was exactly the opposite, implausible levels and confirms what we said about this case since Cienfuegos was arrested: we were not talking about an accusation to a soldier, but to the army and the armed forces and by extension to the Mexican State, an accusation that transcends a six-year term and that, in this case, had no basis.
Whoever deals with reviewing the 750 pages sent at the time, to a large extent repeated in this almost 80-page report, will see that the accusation does not make sense, that they are communications between two second-rate drug traffickers, H2 and H9 , from a local cartel, and when a character called Godfather or Zepeda writes, it is clear that he is not a Secretary of Defense: there are no two words without a serious misspelling, the syntax is sometimes incomprehensible (in the attached translation in English, which was the one that was delivered to the judges of that country, everything is perfectly well written, thus losing a good part of the real meaning of those communications), there is talk of unusual things such as the alleged Zepeda delivering ships to traffickers or meet them in a gap in Nayarit, of amounts delivered in person.
Not even the physical description of Cienfuegos adheres to reality (it is “short and white” the H9 tells the H2). In the report and in the report it is evident that one of the traffickers, H9, is tricking H2 into giving him money that will supposedly go to Zepeda or other politicians and officials, probably in collusion with former prosecutor Edgar Veytia, another criminal now become a protected witness. Any analyst familiar with drug trafficking issues would have ruled out Cienfuegos’ involvement with just a superficial review of the material.
All this can only be understood in one context: the absolute lack of control that existed in the US administration, and especially in the areas of security, during the end of the Trump government, especially in the Department of Justice. Anyone who wants to check it can read the book Fury, by Bob Woodward.
We recommend you read:
This was also part of the struggle between agencies that always occurs at the end of an administration in the United States, but that everything indicates that it continues, even within them. Shortly before his arrest, Cienfuegos had been in Washington, he was received with honors, he was honored and decorated by the US Army itself. According to the NYT report, the DEA had been investigating the General for five years at that time. It doesn’t make sense, just as it wouldn’t make sense to have tried to revive this case when the US authorities are clearly interested in improving Mexico’s collaboration on many security issues.
We were saying this week, speaking of the bilateral and security relationship, that its greatest enemy is ideological dalliances, on both sides of the border, and the mistrust that usually grips institutions and characters from both countries. Having tried to revive the Cienfuegos case feeds those polarizing tendencies.
#revive #Cienfuegos #case