It was a strange and surprising thing that Mexico’s most wanted drug lord landed on a runway near El Paso, Texas, in July, but the story of how he got there is turning into a scandal that threatens senior figures in Mexico’s ruling party.
At issue is whether Ruben Rocha, the governor of Sinaloa state and a close ally of the president, might have met with senior leaders of the so-called Sinaloa Cartel, the leading producer of fentanyl, which kills 70,000 Americans a year.
The saga has twists and turns worthy of a 1940s crime movie, but it threatens to undermine Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s most important claim, that while he avoids confronting Mexico’s drug cartels, he doesn’t make deals with them either.
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On Thursday, Mexico’s federal prosecutor’s office said Sinaloa authorities mishandled evidence in an apparent attempt to cover up the July 25 killing of Hector Cuen, a politician who allegedly invited drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada to a house where he hoped to meet with Gov. Rocha. Instead, Zambada was kidnapped by another drug lord and flown to the United States, where he was arrested.
Zambada said in a letter released by his lawyer that Cuen was killed at the house where the kidnapping occurred. Gov. Rocha has maintained that Cuen was killed by gunmen in a botched gas station robbery later that day, and even provided video of the alleged attack taken by a security camera.
But federal prosecutors immediately noticed something was wrong: Post-mortem records showed Cuen’s body had four gunshot wounds, while only one shot can be heard on the security camera footage, and gas station employees say they heard none.
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In addition, federal officials say Sinaloa authorities violated all murder investigation rules by allowing Cuen’s body to be cremated. Gov. Rocha denies planning a meeting with Zambada, but in the dispute over the events of that day, the kingpin’s version now seems more credible. The head of the Sinaloa Attorney General’s Office resigned on Friday.
“It seems to me that in Sinaloa, as they do very often, what they did was cover up the murder,” said Mexican security analyst David Saucedo.
López Obrador acknowledged on Friday that “we are already aware of these contradictions, which (…) began from the first moment,” and promised to get to the bottom of the matter. The federal prosecutor’s office has taken up the case and the president said that “the prosecutor’s office is also making it known that there are things that do not match up.”
Governor Rocha has been a kind of key man in López Obrador’s policy of “hugs, not bullets,” which consists of not confronting drug cartels; his state is home to the most powerful gang in Mexico.
At one point, López Obrador even stopped to chat with Guzmán’s late mother. Governor Rocha was also born in Badiraguato.
The Mexican president’s drug policy is based on a series of unconvincing propositions: There is no point in arresting kingpins, because new ones will emerge. López Obrador claims that arrests of cartel leaders were a policy imposed on Mexico by the United States; refusing to continue it is a victory for national sovereignty.
The president claims that Mexican cartels do not manufacture fentanyl (they do, and high-level Mexican officials have admitted as much), and that social problems in the United States, not Mexican cartels, are responsible for the fentanyl crisis.
Source: latimes
