War Dogs
General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, Mexico’s former defense minister. Photo courtesy Mexico News Daily
AFTER SEVERAL DECADES OF MISTRUST AND CORRUPTION ALLEGATIONS, THE UNITED STATES AND MEXICO APPEAR TO BE SHOOTING BLANKS IN THE WAR ON DRUGS
No skirmish has quite as publicly exposed the tenuous position of the United States in the war on drugs than the saga of Salvador Cienfuegos.
Here’s a reminder of who he is, and why his arrest and subsequent release is so important: The U.S. arrested Cienfuegos, a former Mexican defense minister in October, claiming that he’d not only protected Mexican drug traffickers, allowing them to operate unimpeded in that country, but also used military resources to help them. According to prosecutors, Mexico’s traffickers called Cienfuegos “El Padrino” — the Godfather.
But a month later, federal prosecutors in New York City dismissed the charges against Cienfuegos, promising that Mexico would investigate him instead. The decision was made to preserve the two countries’ longstanding cooperation in the war on drugs, officials said.
Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador (left) and Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard make the case for exonerating former defense minister Salvador Cienfuegos. Photo courtesy of El Universal
Then in January, the Mexican government announced it had exonerated Cienfuegos. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obredor claimed the U.S. had “fabricated” evidence. To rub it in, the Mexican government proceeded to make public a 751-page “summary” that outlined the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s evidence against the former cabinet minister.
This sequence of events has prompted endless leaks and speculation about what really drove Cienfuegos’s indictment and release. Regardless of what happened behind the scenes, it’s hard to look at public statements made by U.S. officials and not see deep contradictions in claims about this country’s attempt to prosecute one of the most important figures in the drug war. Countervailing arguments laid out in court documents and press releases conjure up an endless chess game. The U.S. Department of Justice can knock off all the pawns, the knights and the bishops, even an occasional rook. But every time the king is in check, the game is halted and the board is reset.
A costly (and unsuccessful) war
For half a century, the U.S. has waged an aggressive counternarcotics strategy sold to the public as a “war.” An estimated $1 trillion has been spent, including billions of dollars in aid to Mexico. Mexico, for its part, has been a somewhat reluctant partner. But its economy is deeply tied to its northern neighbor.
The Mexican security apparatus benefits immensely from U.S. aid. So, most Mexican leaders have, at least in the 21st century, proclaimed themselves dedicated fighters against trafficking. Dozens of U.S. agents operate in Mexico, liaising with their counterparts, conducting surveillance and meeting with informants. One key component of the binational strategy has been to use Mexico’s military, rather than civilian police forces, against organized crime.
The results: hundreds of thousands dead in Mexico and millions of people, a disproportionate number of whom are Black and Latino, incarcerated in the U.S. And, few tangible victories.
Despite the aid and promises of working together, Mexico’s collaboration in the U.S.-led war has always been fraught. As far back as 1985, Mexican officials were accused of protecting traffickers who tortured and murdered DEA Agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena. In 1997, Mexican officials arrested a general and head of anti-narcotics operations and charged him with taking bribes from drug traffickers.
More recently, 2011 was a year of scandals for the drug war. Early in the year, attention focused on revelations the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had “walked” guns into Mexico. In Operation Fast and Furious, U.S. agents allowed weapons to reach buyers who worked for drug Cartels. Guns smuggled into Mexico while ATF stood by were found at the scenes of two U.S. agents’ killings. Then, in March 2011, corrupt Mexican officials leaked information about U.S. informants to members of the Zetas Cartel. That intelligence had come from U.S. agents and was shared with Mexico. In retaliation, cartel leaders had hundreds of people in and around the border city of Piedras Negras rounded up and executed. Later that year, lawyers for a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa Cartel accused the U.S. government of protecting his bosses in exchange for information about their rivals.
“They have gone after narcos in Colombia. They have gone after narcos in Mexico. They increase the levels and violence and murder, but the drugs continue to enter the United States,” Guadalupe Correa Cabrera, a George Mason University political science professor living in Mexico City, told me. “It’s all games they are playing. And spectacle.”
The Cienfuegos debacle does little to contradict Correa Cabrera’s position.
For more than two decades, Mexico’s military has held a major role in anti-drug operations in Mexico. Photo by Roberto Galan/Shutterstock
The case against Cienfuegos
While the allegations against the former minister followed well-worn tropes about corruption in Mexico, his arrest was nonetheless a bombshell. Despite officials in both countries claiming to be on the same page about counternarcotics operations, U.S. agents had long complained that top-ranking Mexican officials were propping up drug traffickers. When U.S. pressure grew too intense — an FBI agent once told me each scandal, each killing, each headline was like a drop in a bucket that eventually overflowed — Mexico would make an arrest. But a new trafficker would emerge and the flow of drugs to the U.S., and money and guns to Mexico, would continue.
The U.S. accused Cienfuegos of conducting the same scheme with the H-2 Cartel, a splinter organization in Mexico's increasingly balkanized underworld. In an October filing, federal prosecutors said Cienfuegos had warned “the H-2 Cartel about the ongoing U.S. law enforcement investigation into the H-2 Cartel and its use of cooperating witnesses and informants — which ultimately resulted in the murder of a member of the H-2 Cartel that the H-2 Cartel senior leadership incorrectly believed was assisting U.S. law enforcement authorities."
The allegations in the indictment against Cienfuegos span from December 2015 to February 2017, the same month H-2 Cartel leader Juan Francisco Patrón Sánchez was killed by Mexican marines.
The arrest immediately raised questions. In 2018 the U.S. awarded Cienfuegos, still in office, one of its highest military honors, the Legion of Merit, and the Department of Defense approved the sale of military equipment, including missiles and helicopters, to Mexico. By that time, Mexico’s military had received hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid. Yet, according to the summary released by the Mexican government, the DEA had for three years been gathering evidence he was communicating with drug traffickers.
The U.S. had, quite publicly, caught itself in a deep contradiction. Was Cienfuegos a dedicated anti-trafficking crusader to be trusted with U.S. instruments of war and worthy of recognition by this country’s top military brass? Or was he a corrupt facilitator for the criminals he was supposed to be fighting?
U.S. government statements in court, and public statements by officials in both countries, raised more questions. The whole reason Cienfuegos faced drug trafficking charges in the U.S., according to a filing by prosecutors who opposed his release on bail, was that the investigators believed he was not only helping drug traffickers but actively interfering with U.S investigations. Releasing him to Mexico was impossible, prosecutors argued, because Cienfuegos "would likely seek to leverage his connections to high level H-2 Cartel members in Mexico, as well as former high-level corrupt government officials, to assist him in fleeing from U.S. law enforcement and shelter him in Mexico."
Former defense minister Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda and former Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto . Photo courtesy of Alamy Stock Photo.
A stream of contradictions
A month later, the U.S. changed its tune completely. In a joint statement, then U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Mexican justice minister Alejandro Gertz Manero said the U.S. charges against Cienfuegos were dropped “In recognition of the strong law enforcement partnership between Mexico and the United States, and in the interests of demonstrating our united front against all forms of criminality ... so that he may be investigated and, if appropriate, charged, under Mexican law.”
Again, the U.S. government had contradicted itself. Was Mexico so deeply incompetent and corrupt that a former defense minister could flee there to escape justice? Or would the Mexican government investigate him and thus live up to its stated role as an indispensable partner in the war on drugs?
In court, U.S. prosecutors were more clear about why Cienfuegos was being released. Seth DuCharme, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, told the judge overseeing the case that the move was “in recognition of the close cooperation between the United States and Mexico on bilateral law enforcement investigations ... which increases the security of the citizens of both countries."
Cienfuegos used his power to prevent the U.S. from arresting narcos, the DOJ alleges. But if he’s prosecuted, officials all but acknowledged, Mexico won’t help the U.S. arrest narcos.
A flag posted in front of the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, during a protest over Cienfuegos’ release. Photo by Brendan McDermid/Reuters, via Alamy Stock Photo.
Cienfuegos has maintained his innocence. The U.S. has not said it erred in charging him. Instead, justice department officials insisted that its investigation was righteous and that Mexico would take up the case. That claim begat more embarrassment with López Obrador’s invective against the investigation and the Mexican government’s public release of the massive DEA case summary.
Is the ‘war’ over?
If Cienfuegos's release was intended to let the drug war return to business as usual, that may not be possible. Since his election in 2018, López Obrador has promised a less confrontational enforcement strategy to reduce violence. After the Cienfuegos debacle, many Mexican lawmakers now want to severely curtail U.S. operations in that country.
The election of President Joe Biden has put wind in the sails of those who want to end drug prohibition, or at least reduce the penalties for many drug crimes. Even some of the most ardent drug warriors say it’s time to rethink how the U.S. works with countries like Mexico.
“Right now the relationship is totally frayed between the U.S. and Mexico in terms of counterdrug efforts,” Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of international operations, told me. “I think the time has come for the U.S. to sit down with a lot of its partners, like Mexico ... and develop a more comprehensive and elaborate plan.”
But López Obrador hasn’t been able to reduce Mexico’s homicide rate, and the Biden administration has a pile of crises already on its plate. The new president is scrambling to undo much of the former President Donald Trump administration’s agenda, including draconian immigration policies in which Mexico was a key partner. The big question is if the new White House team has the will, or the ability, to redirect a counternarcotics strategy driven by decades of momentum, and a $1 trillion investment.
Shortly after Cienfuegos’s release, I spoke with a former official in Mexico's justice department who scoffed at the idea the general would have, as the U.S. alleged, taken bribes from a figure as unimportant as the head of the H-2 Cartel, one of a rotating cast of petty underworld warlords who are arrested or killed before the public even learns their names. The former official also predicted Mexico would not seriously investigate Cienfuegos. But he expressed discomfort at the U.S.’s flip-flop on the former general. "Justice is not an instrument of negotiation," he told me.
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Jason Buch is a freelance investigative reporter based in Austin, Texas, where he writes about criminal justice, immigration and the environment. For more than a decade he’s covered the U.S-Mexico border for print and digital news organizations.