Here is a collection of information laid out chronologically:
2012-2018: General Salvador Cienfuegos was Mexico’s Minister of Defense. During his tenure, violence hits unprecedented levels and the armed forces committed various human rights violations, including forced disappearances, torture (one incident captured on video), and extrajudicial executions. Seven different military installations were used to commit these crimes. The most notable crimes are the Tlatlaya massacre, where soldiers killed 22 civilians and tried to cover it up, and the disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students, a still unsolved crime in which the latest investigations suggest Cienfuegos’ forces were a key player. Cienfuegos lamented the more public crimes but never personally faced consequences for any of them.
October 15, 2020: General Cienfuegos flies to Los Angeles International Airport to go to Disneyland with his family. He is arrested by American officials at the behest of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). He is charged with various drug trafficking and money laundering crimes. A few available details suggest Cienfuegos worked hand-in-hand with the H-2 cartel (one few had heard of before that is allied with longtime trafficking powerhouse, the Beltrán-Leyva Cartel). He allegedly enabled their maritime trafficking of cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine; received bribes; and directed military efforts against H-2’s rivals. He went by the nickname – a must for any major drug trafficker – “El Padrino”, The Godfather.
October 16, 2020: Mexican authorities are outraged to have not been informed of the investigation into Cienfuegos or the impending arrest order. Reports surface that the investigation into Cienfuegos had been ongoing for 14 months and Mexican authorities were never informed. Days later, Cienfuegos is denied bail by a US judge and sent to New York to await trial.
November 7, 2020: Joe Biden is declared winner of the 2020 US presidential election. Donald Trump refuses to concede. Over the next day, almost all world leaders congratulate Biden. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is one of a handful of leaders not to, and instead lends credence to Trump’s claims of election fraud and suggests US media is censoring and being unfair to Trump, a complaint he frequently makes about Mexican media.
November 16, 2020: Attorney General William Barr – not directly involved with the investigation that led to charges – requests charges against Cienfuegos be dropped so the general can be sent back to Mexico. US and Mexican authorities assure the motive is for Mexico to carry out its own prosecution. A day later, the charges are dropped.
November 18, 2020: Cienfuegos arrives in Mexico, spends 32 minutes in the custody of Mexico’s Attorney General, leaves his home address and a phone number, and goes home.
Everything above is true, as far as we can tell from lots of thorough reporting so far. There is a world – one which is vanishingly hard to imagine – where all this makes sense. In fact, almost all the smart people I know agree: in the long-term, the Mexican government must be able to prosecute high-level organized crime. If it wants to be a functioning country, it cannot indefinitely abdicate this responsibility to US courts.
There is another world – the one that feels like the world you’re currently perceiving with your five senses – where this stinks like a pile of week-old, raw beef. The reality is that Mexico’s justice system is extremely weak, with a tiny fraction of all crimes ever prosecuted – even fewer resulting in a sentence – and it is worse at prosecuting major crimes, like those Cienfuegos was charged with. That’s why Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán was extradited to the US in 2017 (and sent to prison for life in 2019) after having escaped from Mexican prison twice. Almost every successful prosecution of Mexico’s drug war protagonists have happened in the US. It’s an ugly bit of inequality – that’s likely been made worse by the binational war on drugs – but it’s reality.
So, if Mexico is genuinely turning the corner on this and taking justice into its own hands, what about that other guy? Cienfuegos wasn’t the only major Mexican figure recently arrested in the US on drug trafficking-related charges. That would be Genaro García Luna, the head of public security and a key architect of the drug war under President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012). He (allegedly) secretly enabled – you guessed it! – El Chapo’s Sinaloa Cartel’s dominance of the trafficking landscape, while publicly marshaling federal police against it. Don’t Mexican authorities want to prosecute García Luna at home too?
One report from Mexican magazine Eme-equis may have an answer: a secretive group of top brass in the military – calling themselves “The Syndicate” – allegedly pressured Mexico’s Attorney General to bring Cienfuegos back to Mexico. And in surely unrelated news, another report suggests five other Mexican generals may be under investigation in the US like Cienfuegos was.
Others suggest the Mexican government threatened to kick the DEA out of Mexico if Cienfuegos wasn’t released, though they have denied it. Homegrown justice and maintaining a positive US-Mexico relationship are the official stance on both sides of the border.
But given the sequence of events above, does that sound like the strategy here?