“Socalj” for Borderland Beat
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The President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, presented a decoration to General Salvador Cienfuegos who was the Secretary of National Defense in the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018). Cienfuegos was accused of drug trafficking by the United States in 2021. He was arrested and eventually released back to Mexico following political negotiations. The US believed he would be prosecuted in Mexico. However, he was exonerated by the Mexican Government due to a lack of evidence.
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Accusations Against Cienfuegos
López Obrador defended Cienfuegos’ reputation to the end when he was arrested on October 15, 2021, at the Los Angeles airport in front of his family. The DEA accused him of drug trafficking and money laundering in collaboration with the H-2 Cartel, a split from the Beltrán Leyva Organization. The López Obrador Government pressured, through the Foreign Ministry and the Attorney General’s Office (FGR), for the United States to hand over the general to Mexico, with the promise of prosecuting him in the country. Shortly after entering national territory, the FGR finally dropped the charges.
The then-Donald Trump Administration accused Cienfuegos based on thousands of Blackberry messages supposedly exchanged between the general and members of the H-2 Cartel, which operated on the northern Pacific coast of Mexico. According to the indictment, Cienfuegos supported “H-2,” Juan Francisco Patrón Sánchez, at least between December 2015 and February 2017, giving protection to his illicit operations in exchange for bribes. The DEA pointed out that, thanks to the general’s collaboration, “H-2” was able to traffic thousands of kilos of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, and marijuana to the United States.
The López Obrador government protested the fact that US agencies had not informed it that an investigation into a prominent former official was underway. Furthermore, he was none other than the former head of the Army, an institution for which López Obrador has deep respect. “I am going to ask for all the information on this issue because it is an institution of institutions, it is a pillar of the Mexican State,” said the president in one of his conferences. “It is a very delicate matter and I want to follow up and inform it so that it does not lend itself to an unfair attack against the institution.”
Mexico considered that it was a violation of national sovereignty and applied pressure in the same way: it threatened to expel US agents who were working in national territory and to modify the law to make cooperation in intelligence operations more transparent. Washington relented and sent the evidence supporting the investigation to Mexico. Diplomatic pressures were successful and finally, the United States withdrew the accusations from Cienfuegos and handed him over to Mexico to be tried.
The FGR began its own investigation and discovered that the Blackberry messages attributed to the former Secretary of Defense were written with spelling errors such that they raised doubts about the solidity of the file.