Mexican Ex-Defense Minister Charged With Helping Cartel Ship Drugs Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos allegedly passed information on investigations to crime bosses:By David Luchnow José de Córdoba
MEXICO CITY—Mexico’s former defense minister received bribes from a drug cartel in exchange for allowing it to ship tons of cocaine and other drugs to the U.S., and used his position to pass along information on investigations to crime bosses, U.S. prosecutors alleged.
The allegations were part of an indictment unsealed Friday against Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, who served as defense minister from 2012 to 2018 in then-President Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration and led the army’s war on drug cartels. U.S. agents arrested the retired general at Los Angeles International Airport on Thursday as he arrived with his family.
Gen. Cienfuegos, 72 years old, is the highest-ranking Mexican official ever charged with drug-related corruption. The arrest is expected to damage bilateral cooperation and trust in the campaign against narcotics trafficking; harm the image of one of the few institutions in Mexico that enjoy broad public support; and raise more doubts about Mexico’s strategy of relying on the army to chase cartels.
“This is a huge scandal,” said Jorge Chabat, a professor at the University of Guadalajara. “It’s a devastating blow to the Mexican army,” which he said is the most important pillar of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s security strategy.
Mexico’s president said the arrest showed that corruption is the country’s biggest problem and reinforced his longstanding claim that past administrations were hopelessly corrupt.
“I always said that it wasn’t just a crisis, but a decadence that we were suffering from,” Mr. López Obrador told a news conference. He won a landslide victory in the 2018 elections, promising to do away with a corrupt “mafia of power.”
Gen. Cienfuegos was unavailable to comment. Mexico’s army declined to comment on the allegations.
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