MEXICO CITY, Oct 16 — Mexico’s president today castigated the previous government as corrupt after the arrest of a former Mexican defence minister on drugs charges in the United States yesterday, and gave his full backing to the current chiefs of the rattled military.
The morning after the stunning detention in Los Angeles of Salvador Cienfuegos, defence minister from 2012 to 2018, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador pledged to suspend anyone inside his government found to be implicated in the charges.
“We won’t cover up for anybody,” Lopez Obrador said, before voicing fulsome support for Cienfuegos’ successor at the head of the army and his counterpart in the navy, two of the most powerful anchors of national security in Mexico.
Some officials inside the government were shocked at the news of Cienfuegos’ arrest in Los Angeles airport, which Lopez Obrador said he only learned about after the event.
But Lopez Obrador quickly incorporated the incident into his narrative that his predecessors had presided over a steady increase in corruption.
As defence minister Cienfuegos was a key figure in Mexico’s drug war in which the army battled cartels across the country. Several of Mexico’s former top-ranking ‘drug war’ officials have been implicated in narcotics.
The arrest comes less than three weeks before the US presidential election. President Donald Trump, seeking a second term, has made clamping down on drug cartels a priority, though with little major progress since he took office in 2017. — Reuters
