Mexican president decorates general accused by US of drug trafficking

The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has decorated General Salvador Cienfuegos, who served as secretary of national defense between 2012-2018 and was accused by the U.S. of drug trafficking in 2020 but exonerated by the Mexican government due to lack of evidence. López Obrador presented him on Wednesday, October 10, with the Bicentenary of the Heroic Military College award, which pays tribute to army commanders for their contributions to the military training school.

Director of the school from 1997 to 2000 some years before joining Enrique Peña Nieto’s administration, Cienfuegos had a privileged place on the podium alongside López Obrador and his cabinet officials, including the current heads of the army and navy.

After receiving the award in a protocol event in the state of Veracruz, the former head of defense saluted the president, who is the supreme commander of the Mexican Armed Forces. The two men then shook hands and exchanged words that could only be heard by nearby officials. General Enrique Cervantes, who was secretary of defense in Ernesto Zedillo’s government between 1994-2000, was similarly decorated.

López Obrador defended Cienfuegos when he was arrested by the U.S. anti-drug agency, the DEA, on October 15, 2020, at Los Angeles airport in front of his family, accused of drug trafficking and money laundering in collaboration with the H-2 Cartel, a splinter group of the Beltran Leyva criminal organization. Through the Foreign Ministry and the Attorney General’s Office (FGR), the López Obrador government pushed for extradition, promising to prosecute Cienfuegos at home. Shortly after he set foot on national territory, the FGR dropped the charges against him.

The Donald Trump administration in office at the time based the indictment on thousands of Blackberry messages allegedly exchanged between Cienfuegos and members of the H-2 Cartel, operating on Mexico’s northern Pacific coast. According to the indictment, Cienfuegos was in touch with H-2′s Juan Francisco Patrón Sánchez, at least between December 2015 and February 2017, receiving bribes in return for protection for the crime gang’s illicit operations. The DEA maintained that, due to Cienfuegos’ complicity, H-2 was able to traffic thousands of kilos of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana to the U.S.

But López Obrador’s government stated that U.S. agencies had failed to inform them that an investigation of a prominent former official was underway – no less than the former head of the army, an institution to which López Obrador has a profound attachment. “I am going to ask for all the information on this issue, because the institution is a pillar of the Mexican State,” the president said in one of his speeches. “It is a very delicate matter and I want to follow it up to avoid an unjust attack on the institution.”

Mexico considered the arrest a violation of national sovereignty and threatened to expel U.S. agents found working in Mexico while reforming the law to make cooperation regarding intelligence operations more transparent. Washington caved and agreed to send Mexico the evidence supporting the investigation as well as Cienfuegos for trial.

Meanwhile, the Attorney General’s Office embarked on its own investigation and discovered that the Blackberry messages attributed to the former Secretary of Defense contained spelling mistakes that raised doubts about their validity. Shortly thereafter, the Attorney General’s Office concluded that Cienfuegos had “never had any meeting with the members of the criminal organization investigated by the U.S. authorities, nor did he have any communication with them, nor did he carry out any acts to protect or help said individuals.”

López Obrador applauded the FGR’s resolution and stated that the DEA had “fabricated” the charges against the former secretary of defense.

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