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NEW YORK (AP) – US prosecutors on Wednesday officially dropped a drug trafficking and money laundering case against a former Mexican defense secretary, a move after Mexico threatened to cut cooperation with authorities Americans unless the general is sent home.
A New York judge approved the dismissal of the charges, ending a swift turnaround in the case of former General Salvador Cienfuegos, who was arrested a few weeks ago in Los Angeles but will be returned to Mexico as part an unusual diplomatic agreement between the two countries.
“The United States has determined that the broader interest in maintaining this relationship in a cooperative fashion outweighs the department’s interest and the public interest in pursuing this particular case,” said Seth DuCharme, the US Attorney. acting in Brooklyn, to the judge at a hearing.
He said the decision to drop the charges was made by Attorney General William Barr.
Mexican officials complained that the United States had not shared evidence against Cienfuegos and that his arrest came as a surprise. It also sounded alarm bells within the Mexican military, which has played a crucial role in operations against the drug cartels.
Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said on Wednesday he told Barr the United States must choose between trying Cienfuegos and continuing to cooperate.
“It’s in your hands. You can’t have both, ”Ebrard told Barr. “You cannot have close cooperation with all Mexican institutions and do it at the same time.”
While Ebrard said he was not threatening any “specific action”, like limiting US agents in Mexico, he said of Barr: “I imagine that worried him.” He also said he called US Ambassador Christopher Landau to express Mexico’s displeasure.
It is rare that a high-profile defendant in an American case is arrested and then released on short notice for diplomatic reasons. But this is not unprecedented, although historically it has been more likely to happen in spy cases than in drug trafficking.
The arrest threatened to seriously damage a delicate relationship between American and Mexican investigators that had resulted in the convictions of many drug pioneers over the past quarter century. The dropping of the case, however, was an embarrassment to US authorities who had promoted his arrest as a major step forward.
U.S. prosecutors in Manhattan recently resisted diplomatic efforts by another U.S. ally, Turkey, to drop charges against a major state-owned bank accused of violating sanctions against Iran.
Cienfuegos, a general who headed the Mexican military department for six years under then-president Enrique Peña Nieto, was the former senior Mexican cabinet official arrested since senior security official Genaro Garcia Luna , was arrested in Texas in 2019.
Cienfuegos was secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in New York in 2019. He was charged with conspiring with the H-2 cartel in Mexico to smuggle thousands of pounds of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana while he was Secretary of Defense from 2012 to 2018..
Prosecutors said the intercepted messages showed Cienfuegos had accepted bribes in return for assurances that the military was not taking action against the cartel and that operations had been launched against its rivals. He has also been accused of introducing cartel leaders to other corrupt Mexican officials.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said Mexico’s attorney general’s office will decide whether Cienfuegos is taken into custody once he is returned. But since there are no charges in Mexico yet, he is likely to be released. “It doesn’t mean impunity; this means that an investigation will be opened, ”said López Obrador.
“Gen. Cienfuegos returns to Mexico as a free man, ”said Ebrard.
Analysts said Cienfuegos is unlikely to face charges in Mexico.
“It won’t happen, we all know that,” columnist Carlos Loret de Mola wrote in El Universal newspaper. “He will return to Mexico and be released, because that is the promise that President López Obrador made to the military.”
Under an agreement signed by prosecutors and the general, Cienfuegos would leave the United States for Mexico “promptly in the custody of the United States marshals,” Justice Carol Bagley Amon said. He could not challenge his removal or seek asylum in the United States
Outside the Brooklyn courthouse, defense attorney Edward Sapone said he expected Cienfuegos to be returned to Mexico on Wednesday, with a cell phone and tablet computer seized during his arrest which left him was later sent by his lawyers. He noted that Cienfuegos had pleaded not guilty and planned to prove his innocence.
“We are very happy that justice has been served today,” Sapone said as people protesting his client’s release carried signs and chanted nearby.
Cienfuegos spoke little in court, answering a few questions from the judge through an interpreter.
Barr said in a statement Tuesday that the Justice Department would drop his case so that Cienfuegos, who was arrested in Los Angeles last month, can be investigated under Mexican law.
“I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of the government’s position,” Amon said, accepting the request to drop the case.
In a joint statement with Mexican Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero, Barr said the US Department of Justice made the decision to drop the US case in recognition of “the strong partnership between Mexico and the United States in law enforcement, and in the interest of protesting. our united front against all forms of crime.
The Justice Department said it had provided Mexico with the evidence gathered in the case.
López Obrador gave the Mexican Army and Navy a wider range of tasks than most previous Mexican presidents, and he faced pressure to win Cienfuegos’ return.
The former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, to which Peña Nieto belongs, previously called on the Mexican government to pay Cienfuegos’ legal fees and on Tuesday celebrated the decision to drop the charges. Party leader Alejandro Moreno wrote in his Twitter account that the party “resolutely supports General Salvador Cienfuegos. … We must all congratulate ourselves and always support our armed forces.
On Tuesday, Ebrard denied that the decision was linked to the US election or López Obrador’s inability to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden. Ebrard said he spoke to Barr on October 26, a week before the U.S. election.
Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, said the decision “is nothing more than a gift, a huge gift” from President Donald Trump to López Obrador, probably given in favor of a past help on immigration matters.
He said the chances of Cienfuegos being sentenced in Mexico are “slim to none,” noting the former defense secretary’s political connections to Mexico and the country’s idolization of the military.
Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope said any decision not to try Cienfuegos would further damage the already torn reputation of the Mexican justice system.
“No one who knows the Mexican justice system really believes that it will be tried in Mexico,” Hope said, adding that “the external commitment to the autonomy of the (Mexican) attorney general’s office has always been a fiction. . “
Yet, Hope said, a trial could have been an opportunity to revise the traditional untouchable status of the military in Mexico: “This is a missed opportunity to reformulate civil-military relations” in Mexico.
Obrador, who initially appeared to celebrate Cienfuegos’ arrest, denied on Wednesday that the Mexican military had pressured him to release the general.
Military analyst Juan Ibarrola, who often reflects the Mexican military’s point of view, agreed that there was no pressure, but added: “I consider it highly unlikely that the government Mexican issues arrest warrant. ”
Sapone said defense lawyers always knew there would be a “termination or some kind of justification.”
He added that his client’s plans “for the immediate future are to stay with his family as a free man.”
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