In reality, the swarm operation undertaken by federal authorities in the State of Mexico, and using, like them, an analogy to describe the problem of corruption and the infiltration of organized crime in the Mexican governmental structure, of any order, these actions are seen as just the tip of a colossal iceberg.
It is well known that the structures of drug cartels and organized crime could not survive without the complicity of a large part of the Mexican State. And such a premise is not a novelty nor an unproven case. In the past, for example, upon the capture of Benjamin Arellano Felix in 2002, it was revealed that within the investigation it was established that the Arellano Felix cartel allocated a million dollars a month to bribe public officials, mainly in police, municipal, state and federal corporations, but that has not been exclusive to such security infrastructure.
It is assumed that, if this revelation was confirmed and taken as true to exemplify the corrupting arm of the CAF, the investigating authorities, the prosecutors, did not want to continue the investigation to find out the names of those in the government, from the sphere of corruption, who used that million dollars both in Baja California, where the brothers’ mafia was based, and in Mexico City where the Federal Police had their bunker.
In 2016 it was revealed that Joaquín Guzmán Loera, El Chapo, being a fugitive since he had escaped for the second time from the bars of a maximum security prison, held a meeting in Sinaloa with two actors; the Mexican Kate del Castillo, the American Sean Penn, as well as a film production team, because the capo referred to the filming of a movie with him as the protagonist.
On January 10, 2016, two days after Guzmán Loera was recaptured, actor Sean Penn published an opinion piece in Rolling Stones magazine where, among other revelations, he wrote that, on the way to meet the drug lord, a military checkpoint stopped them, but that when he saw that one of the drug lord’s sons was traveling in the vehicle, he let them pass freely. Although this version, as it is, was denied by actress Kate del Castillo, who declared that she did not remember having passed through a military checkpoint, she did acknowledge that during a seven-hour journey through the mountains, “I saw several military trucks, but we never had a checkpoint.”
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In this case, the military checkpoint described by Penn or the military trucks observed by Castillo were not investigated by the Mexican authorities to determine responsibility for military personnel close to or colluding with the protection of Chapo Guzmán.
A few days ago, in Baja California, relatives of inmates at the medium-security El Hongo prison revealed how authorities at the social rehabilitation center charged inmates for a bed, clean clothes, better conditions inside the prison, possession of a cell phone, and distribution of drugs. In fact, in the investigation file of a murder, it was noted that the order to kill a man was given by an inmate from that prison via cell phone. However, the authorities of the state prosecutor’s office, who, by the way, previously held the leadership of the penitentiary system, have not conducted investigations to determine who are the officials who allow access to cell phones and drugs to the prison.
One more example. When Ismael Zambada García, known as El Mayo, co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel, wrote a letter from a prison in the United States to give his version of how he was kidnapped by a son of El Chapo Guzmán and handed over against his will to the United States authorities, he specified that he had attended a meeting called by the son of the drug trafficker where they would meet with two other people: Héctor Melesio Cuen, a PRI politician and former Rector of the University of Sinaloa, and Rubén Rocha Moya, governor of the State of Sinaloa. And that, for such purposes, he was accompanied by two bodyguards, among them, someone he identified as José Rosario Heras López, who he said was commander of the Judicial Police of Sinaloa.
To this day, the commander of the Judicial Police of Sinaloa has not been located, either alive or dead. Melesio Cuen was murdered that same day and Governor Rubén Rocha has not been touched with the well-founded doubt of an official investigation, despite the fact that recently, in a verbal gibberish, he declared that “there have been meetings between criminal groups, directly with the authorities.”
The web of corruption is woven throughout the length and breadth of the Mexican Republic and few authorities escape such a tangle, whether municipal, state or federal, because, it must be reiterated, criminal networks could not survive, develop and grow without official support, whether to avoid capture, to apprehend their enemies, as escorts, to process construction permits, to extort merchants, to acquire services and products, to kidnap, to threaten, to locate victims, to keep trafficking routes free of checkpoints, so that their illicit shipments are not confiscated, and a long list that seems endless.
Therefore, in this context, the swarm operation to dismantle the collusion of public servants with criminals in the State of Mexico is a trifle compared to the high-impact and uninvestigated crimes committed by members of the armed forces, officials appointed or elected by popular mandate. The tip of the iceberg in the State of Mexico is this: the security director of Ixtapaluca arrested for extorting five thousand pesos from a local market vendor. The municipal police officer of the same municipality arrested for an express kidnapping, the husband of the mayor of Tonatico, arrested for extorting a vendor supposedly in the name of the Michoacan family, two deputy security directors, from Tejupico and Naucalpan, accused of having links with criminals, without specifying which group. The “biggest” case is that of the mayor of Amanalco arrested for qualified homicide, together with an alleged accomplice, the security director, for ordering the murder of the Syndic, and allegedly giving bribes to the Family cartel, it is not known how or why the illicit gift in the opposite direction (from official to criminal and not vice versa).
That is to say, deeper cases of corruption rooted in elements of the National Guard who favor cartel cells with their services, or commanders at the service of bosses, have been systematically exposed in the country, either by the media, by affected criminals, or their misdeeds have been videotaped, so that they are not investigated with the “severity” of the swarm operation in the State of Mexico.
There is therefore a lot of material, political interests too, opportunism abounds, and scientific and intelligence investigation is scarce, which generates the cold of impunity of this increasingly solid iceberg to which a swarm of corruption at the national level will do nothing.
Source: sinembargo
