US drops charges against former Mexican defense secretary

The Justice Department has dropped drug trafficking and money laundering charges against former Mexican defense secretary General Salvador Cienfuegos, Attorney General William Barr said Tuesday.

Barr said the department will drop the case so that Cienfuegos “can be investigated and, if appropriate, charged, under Mexican law.”

Cienfuegos, who was charged in federal court in Brooklyn, was arrested in Los Angeles last month.

Cienfuegos, who led the Mexican military for six years under former President Enrique Peña Nieto, was the highest-ranking former cabinet official arrested since senior Mexican security official Genaro García Luna was detained in Texas in 2019.

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Cienfuegos was indicted by a federal grand jury in New York in 2019 and charged with conspiring to participate in an international drug distribution and money laundering scheme.

Prosecutors alleged that Cienfuegos helped the H-2 cartel smuggle thousands of kilos of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana while he was secretary of defense from 2012 to 2018.

Prosecutors said intercepted messages showed Cienfuegos working to ensure that the military did not take action against the cartel and that operations were launched against rivals in exchange for bribes. He was also accused of introducing cartel leaders to other corrupt Mexican officials.

In court documents last month, prosecutors had argued that Cienfuegos constituted a significant flight risk and said it would “likely seek to exploit its connections with high-level members of the H-2 cartel in Mexico, as well as corrupt former government officials. of high level, to help him flee from the forces of order of the United States and take refuge in Mexico. “

Had he been convicted of the charges in the US, he would have faced at least 10 years in federal prison.

Under Cienfuegos, the Mexican military was accused of frequent human rights abuses, but that was true for both his predecessors and his successor in office. The worst scandal in the Cienfuegos mandate was the killing of suspects by the army in a grain warehouse in 2014.

The June 2014 massacre involved soldiers killing 22 suspects in the warehouse in the town of Tlatlaya. While some were killed in an initial shootout with the army patrol – in which a soldier was injured – a human rights investigation later showed that at least eight and perhaps as many as a dozen suspects were executed after they surrendered.

Barr said in a joint statement with Mexico’s Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero that the United States Department of Justice had made the decision to drop the US case in recognition “of the strong partnership in law enforcement between Mexico and the United States. United, and in the interest of demonstrating our united front against all forms of criminality. “

The Justice Department said it had provided Mexico with the evidence collected in the case.

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