MEXICO CITY — The small American surveillance aircraft took off from a Mexican navy base in Baja California and flew excessive throughout the Sea of Cortez. Charting a course for the Sierra Madre mountains — cartel territory — the plane didn’t seem on any flight trackers or public logs. An orb-shaped system concerning the dimension of a seashore ball was mounted on the fuselage, bristling with sensors and antennas.
U.S. brokers referred to as it “the sniffer.”
The system was an experimental model of a mass spectrometer, used to determine chemical compounds. Because the U.S. plane banked over the forested hills of Sinaloa state, it dipped decrease, sampling the air for wafting fumes.
The sniffer, whose secret use within the skies over Mexico has by no means been reported, had been deployed by the Pentagon and the CIA to focus on heroin manufacturing websites in Afghanistan. By 2018, confronted with lethal artificial narcotics pouring throughout the U.S. border, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs and Border Safety and different U.S. companies tailored it to go after Mexico’s clandestine drug labs, in keeping with present and former American officers.
Ready on the bottom have been the forces of the Individuals’ most trusted ally in Mexico, a person extra useful to the DEA than any novel gadget. Adm. Marco Antonio Ortega Siu, the top of the navy particular operations unit, had labored with america for almost a decade.
Ortega Siu was recognized for his fearlessness — he and his males had taken down dozens of main traffickers, together with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. However the admiral, a brief, taciturn man with a shock of white hair, saved such a low profile that he was virtually a ghost to the Mexican public. The Individuals knew him by his code title, “El Águila.” The Eagle.
Because the aircraft reached the goal that day in August 2018, it confirmed a tip from DEA informants concerning the location of a lab. As soon as the surveillance was full, Águila’s males swooped in.
Beneath dense foliage and plastic tarps, they discovered vats of solvents and barrels of precursor chemical compounds. Burlap sacks filled with methamphetamine stuffed 12-foot-deep pits. In all, they found an estimated 50 metric tons of crystal meth, one of many greatest seizures in Mexican historical past.
LEFT: Technicians from the Mexican navy in August 2018 examine a lab on the outskirts of Culiacán the place an estimated 50 metric tons of meth have been found. (Mexican Secretariat of the Navy) RIGHT: (Excélsior)
“It was unimaginable,” stated Matt Donahue, who ran the DEA workplace in Mexico on the time. “We by no means thought meth might be produced in these quantities.”
The bust was a triumph for the tactical alliance between america and the Mexican navy’s particular forces that for a decade had outlined the nations’ anti-drug struggle. It rested on a fragile division of labor. America supplied know-how and intelligence; Mexico furnished muscle and resolve.
But simply months after the enormous meth haul, that partnership started to unravel. A brand new Mexican chief rejected the $3 billion anti-narcotics settlement that had spanned three U.S. presidencies, often called the Mérida Initiative. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a veteran leftist who took workplace in December 2018, argued that the drug battle technique had despatched homicides spiraling in Mexico whereas failing to curb U.S. demand.
The sniffer flights stopped. Águila was sidelined and his battle-hardened commandos have been reassigned. López Obrador rebuffed U.S. gives for brand spanking new drug-detection know-how. Mexico shut down a pivotal base the place the particular forces had labored with U.S. brokers. It even took away the parking spot for the DEA’s aircraft at an airport outdoors Mexico Metropolis.
The fissure opened simply as Mexico was poised to grow to be the No. 1 provider of fentanyl to america, overtaking China, in keeping with the DEA.
This account, primarily based on interviews with greater than 30 present and former U.S. and Mexican officers, is the untold story of America’s most reliable drug battle ally, and the way the connection with Mexico fell aside simply as a river of artificial medication flooded america.
The Washington Put up adopted the fentanyl epidemic from Mexican labs to U.S. streets.
The Mexican admiral’s work was so delicate that his full résumé stays a state secret. After months of negotiations with The Washington Put up, Águila agreed to supply written solutions to some questions.
He declined to touch upon Mexico’s present safety insurance policies or the circumstances of his departure, saying he took an unpaid depart of absence in July 2019, and has been “serving to my youngsters with their each day lives.”
Within the years since Águila left, traffickers have ruthlessly exploited the breakdown in bilateral cooperation, as they transitioned from plant-based medication resembling marijuana and heroin to deadlier artificial narcotics.
U.S. fatalities from drug overdoses surpassed 107,000 in 2021, the very best ever. Two-thirds of the deaths concerned fentanyl.
U.S. regulation enforcement companies have confiscated greater than 45,300 kilos of fentanyl via the primary 11 months of this 12 months, up from 5,800 kilos in 2018, in keeping with a Put up evaluation of the most recent authorities information. In November, U.S. authorities seized 2,900 kilos on the southern border, the very best month-to-month complete ever.
Biden administration officers aren’t concealing their frustration. “Mexico must do extra. We consider that they will do extra,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram stated in an interview. “We predict it’s vitally vital that Mexico work on these points as tirelessly as we do.”
The quantity of fentanyl seized in Mexico is simply 15 % of what U.S. authorities confiscate, Milgram stated.
“Extraditions from Mexico are down,” she added. “What’s up is fentanyl. And what’s up is fentanyl coming into america.”
Roberto Velasco, a senior Mexican International Ministry official, countered that the earlier technique had “failed within the two principal goals” — to cut back violence in Mexico and curtail drug trafficking in each nations.
“We had a rise in deaths from fentanyl use, we had a rise in violence in Mexico, so this method was evidently not profitable, and clearly we weren’t profitable in dismantling the felony organizations that existed within the two nations,” Velasco stated.
The governments hammered out a brand new settlement, placing extra emphasis on combating dependancy and the unlawful sale of U.S. weapons to cartels. Nevertheless it wasn’t introduced till October 2021 — almost three years after López Obrador grew to become president.
Combating fentanyl would have been daunting beneath the most effective of circumstances, as a result of it’s so low cost to make and really easy to smuggle. However the U.S.-Mexico rupture made a troublesome state of affairs worse. The two governments have been unable to agree on even fundamental info, resembling whether or not Mexico is a significant producer of the opioid or largely a transshipment level. The nippiness in relations has left DEA brokers scrutinizing press releases to determine the kinds of narcotics and precursor chemical compounds the Mexican navy has seized.
Many drug battle veterans blame López Obrador’s insurance policies for the rift. But interviews in each nations reveal a extra sophisticated image.
The U.S.-Mexico safety partnership was in hassle properly earlier than López Obrador took over. For a decade, the nations had promised to deal with two essential sources of the drug disaster: Mexico’s weak justice system and Individuals’ demand for highly effective narcotics. Neither facet met its mandate.
The consequence: The American effort to fight the movement of medication had grow to be increasingly more reliant on one man.
“Águila grew to become the white knight. The favourite son,” stated John Feeley, a former U.S. ambassador who was second-in-command on the U.S. Embassy in Mexico from 2009 to 2012. “Why? He delivered.”
In contrast to many police and armed forces officers, Águila didn’t look like in league with the very cartels he was presupposed to be combating. To the Individuals, he appeared to be fabricated from pure guts. He would typically accompany his males on raids, wielding his UMP45 submachine gun.
“He was the primary man via the door,” stated Joe Evans, a former DEA director in Mexico. “He wasn’t like different forces, the place the ‘jefe’ is sitting again within the workplace.”
But Águila labored in a rustic with a damaged authorized system, the place lower than 2 % of crimes have been ever solved. And by the point López Obrador took workplace, it was a rustic the place 20 % of nationwide territory was beneath cartel management, in keeping with CIA estimates obtained by The Put up.
A rustic the place counting on the navy introduced its personal set of issues.
‘By no means a leak’
The alliance with Águila obtained off to a nasty begin. In December 2009, he went to the DEA workplace in Mexico Metropolis to elucidate how one of many nation’s most infamous drug traffickers had escaped.
“We screwed up,” Águila advised the DEA, in keeping with Evans, the company’s regional chief on the time. “Give us one other shot.”
For years, the DEA had been making an attempt to convey down Arturo Beltrán Leyva, a wily kingpin who gunned down cops and acquired off politicians. Evans had labored with Mexico’s highly effective military in addition to the federal police. However this time he’d taken an opportunity on the much-smaller Mexican navy — particularly, on a promising senior officer often called El Águila.
The DEA had gotten phrase that Beltrán Leyva was at a barbecue in Cuernavaca, south of Mexico Metropolis, Evans advised the Mexican officer. The navy dispatched a closely armed staff, however the “Boss of the Bosses” slipped away.
“So we’re like: ‘Right here we go once more,’” recalled Evans, who assumed there’d been a leak. Águila persuaded Evans to offer his males one other likelihood.
5 days later, on Dec. 16, 2009, commandos rappelling from helicopters surrounded a luxurious apartment complicated in Cuernavaca.
Bullets whizzed via the trafficker’s second-floor condominium, tearing holes the dimensions of golf balls within the partitions. A 30-year-old marine, Melquisedet Angulo, was hit by a grenade blast in a stairwell and slumped to the bottom, fatally wounded. The gun battle lasted 4 hours, and when the struggle was over, Beltrán Leyva and 4 of his bodyguards lay useless.
It was the largest takedown since President Felipe Calderón had gone to battle in opposition to the cartels in 2006, deploying tens of hundreds of troops. Angulo was honored with a extensively publicized hero’s funeral.
LEFT: Melquisedet Angulo’s mom, Josefa Angulo Flores, and aunt Irma Cordova hyperlink arms on the Mexican marine’s funeral. The ladies have been killed by gangsters hours later. (America Rocio/AP) RIGHT: Mexican marines accompany the automobile carrying Angulo’s physique throughout his funeral in Paraíso. (Carlos Sobrino/AP)
Hours later, gangsters hunted down and killed Angulo’s mom, two siblings and aunt. U.S. brokers have been horrified. For the Mexican forces, the incident laid naked that it might be a battle with out navy parades and public honors. They must struggle the cartels from the shadows. “We needed to adapt and regulate,” Águila stated.
Organized-crime teams have been finishing up acts of spectacular violence and rising savagery, ambushing navy and police convoys on rural highways and filling mass graves with vacationers hauled off buses. U.S. officers grew alarmed as violence exploded in Monterrey and different northern Mexico cities the place Fortune 500 corporations had invested closely in vegetation and factories after passage of the North American Free Commerce Settlement.
With the risk to the steadiness of the Mexican authorities worsening, each nations have been hungry for against the law fighter who may stand as much as the cartels.
Utilizing informants, wiretaps and surveillance, U.S. brokers tracked drug bosses and relayed their places to Águila’s commandos for the type of “high-value goal” operations the Individuals used efficiently in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Águila’s forces didn’t maintain again. Mexican commandos in helicopters took out Gulf cartel boss Antonio Cárdenas Guillén, a.ok.a. “Tony Tormenta,” in a wild city gun battle in 2010 that left our bodies scattered within the border metropolis of Matamoros. Two years later, particular forces killed the chief of the Zetas, Heriberto “The Executioner” Lazcano, after a firefight in opposition to cartel gunmen wielding a grenade launcher.
“Tactically, they have been simply superior,” Evans stated. However the particular forces have been educated to kill, to not make arrests and collect proof for felony prosecution. Their targets have been extraordinarily harmful, however Evans would provide a “pleasant reminder” that every now and then “it may be good to convey the man again alive.”
In his response to The Put up, Águila wrote that drug bosses have been killed as a result of they resisted arrest. “We by no means deliberate an operation to eradicate anybody,” he wrote.
To the Individuals, the navy commandos appeared to be the uncommon entity able to rapidly launching complicated, harmful operations. Águila was indefatigable, working 16-hour days. He didn’t drink or smoke. And when U.S. brokers shared delicate data, Águila and his commandos acted quick — not like the military. “There was by no means a leak,” Evans stated.
One DEA agent recalled following Águila, then in his 50s, as he bounded off a helicopter throughout a hunt for a drug kingpin in northern Mexico. “I’m making an attempt to catch as much as him,” recalled the agent, who was not approved to touch upon the report. “I used to be embarrassed. Right here I’m, this youthful buck, fumbling with my stuff.”
Much more startling: The Mexican officer wasn’t carrying a bulletproof vest. He hardly ever did; it was too cumbersome. “He had no concern,” the American agent stated.
The DEA brokers knew little about Águila’s private life or why he didn’t appear tainted by a number of the worst features of Mexican officialdom — the corruption, the timidity, the wariness of foreigners. Possibly, they figured, he was a kindred spirit.
“He’s blue-collar,” stated Donahue, the previous Mexico DEA chief. “Similar to us.”
Certainly, the admiral was the son of a small-town salesman in Mexico’s southern Veracruz state, and the grandson of Chinese language immigrants. “My household fought to get forward every single day,” Águila stated in his written responses.
He entered the Heroic Naval Army Faculty in 1975, a shy, diminutive 15-year-old in a world of “juniors” — sons of high-ranking officers. The academy was so rigorous that half his class of 150 dropped out earlier than commencement, recalled a former classmate, retired Rear Adm. Jesús Canchola Camarena. Águila joined the marines, like different younger males “drawn to journey,” Canchola recalled. However what stood out was the younger cadet’s management; he typically served as coach within the college students’ casual wrestling matches. He ultimately grew to become a embellished helicopter pilot.
Later, beneath Calderón, when the navy sought senior officers to construct a top-flight particular forces corps, many have been reluctant, recalled one other of Águila’s former classmates.
“It was very, very dangerous,” he recalled, talking on the situation of anonymity to be frank. “The navy needed to defend itself from everybody” — each drug traffickers and their allies in authorities.
Águila was undaunted.
“He felt that in the event that they referred to as on him, and he had the flexibility, he ought to do it,” the buddy stated.
Águila’s forces racked up an astonishing report. They dismantled the higher ranks of the Zetas, a vicious group dominated by former military particular forces troopers. In February 2014, they captured El Chapo, working with U.S. brokers who had cracked the drug lord’s encrypted telephone community.
The Sinaloa cartel chief tunneled his approach out of jail the next 12 months, and was hunted down by Águila’s commandos and caught once more in 2016.
Águila declined to touch upon which operations he led personally, citing safety causes. His particular operations power grew to a number of thousand commandos, whom he hand-picked. “The extent of coaching of our groups grew to become the most effective on the earth,” he stated.
In 2017, guided by a U.S. Predator drone, Águila’s particular forces parachuted right into a mountain redoubt to seize a suspect needed within the killing of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry. The late-night operation, executed with expert precision, wowed U.S. officers and cemented Águila’s fame as a heroic ally.
Regardless of the tactical wins, lasting victory within the drug battle was elusive. U.S. demand for narcotics was rising. A DEA crackdown on U.S. opioid producers and distributors left a vacuum that was crammed with Mexican heroin, after which fentanyl. Plans to reform the Mexican justice system had stalled due to an absence of funding, in addition to pushback from politicians and judges.
“The exhausting half is that, after you catch a nasty man, it’s a must to cross him to the authorized system,” stated a retired naval officer who had labored with Águila, talking on the situation of anonymity due to political sensitivities. “And it’s rotten.”
For all of the commandos’ bravado, they have been painfully weak. Once they left their bases, they’d typically hear a whirring sound above: drones, despatched by the narcos to trace their actions. They obtained used to attending funerals for comrades.
“The ache by no means goes away,” Águila stated. “We feature their households on our shoulders.”
At one level, cartel assailants fatally shot a U.S.-trained navy commando nicknamed “Máquina” (Machine). Máquina was a favourite of the DEA brokers, a rising star who spoke glorious English. The American brokers have been desolate.
“We lose individuals on a regular basis,” a former agent recalled Águila saying. He advised everybody to get again to work.
‘A vicious circle’
President Donald Trump didn’t mince phrases when he obtained on the telephone with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Jan. 27, 2017.
Mexico wasn’t doing sufficient about its “powerful hombres,” Trump advised him, in keeping with a transcript of the decision. “Possibly your navy is afraid of them,” he stated, “however our navy isn’t afraid of them.” Mexican media buzzed with experiences that Trump was threatening to ship U.S. troops.
Two weeks later, a Mexican navy helicopter clattered via the humid evening air of Tepic, capital of the western state of Nayarit. It paused over a three-story home, casting a highlight under. Then, as startled neighbors watched, the helicopter’s .50-caliber machine gun opened up with a roar of bullets.
Juan Patrón Sánchez — a protege of the Beltrán Leyva trafficking household — grew to become the most recent kingpin to die by the hands of Águila’s males.
Cellphone movies of the assault pinged round social media, together with questions on why the navy was utilizing a lot power. The navy stated it was obligatory: Patrón Sánchez’s bodyguards had been utilizing the third ground as a sniper’s nest, to select off the particular forces troops on the street. That rationalization didn’t fulfill Mexico’s future president.
“Why did they annihilate them [the bodyguards]? Why, in the event that they examine, and supposedly have international intelligence help, do they bloodbath them?” López Obrador requested in a speech in Nayarit the subsequent day. He demanded to know whether or not the operation was carried out to appease Trump.
The Mexican politician wasn’t the one one asking questions. The U.S. Justice Division investigated an allegation that Águila had got down to kill Patrón Sánchez as a result of the cartel chief had data on military corruption, in keeping with 4 U.S. officers who had direct information of the probe.
The accusation got here from Edgar Veytia, a former Nayarit state lawyer common arrested on the U.S. border in March 2017 on drug-trafficking costs. The investigation into Águila was in the end closed due to questions on Veytia’s credibility, stated the officers, most of whom spoke on the situation of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the problem. Veytia’s allegations have been reported final week in a ProPublica-New York Occasions investigation.
“We by no means noticed any direct data or proof” that Águila had dedicated abuses within the operation, stated Paul Craine, who led the DEA workplace in Mexico till 2017.
Veytia is serving a 20-year sentence in U.S. federal jail.
The Nayarit episode added to the issues of politicians, human rights activists and lecturers concerning the U.S.-backed safety technique. Greater than 100,000 individuals had been killed in drug-related violence because the begin of Calderón’s time period in 2006. Human rights complaints had soared. Most targeted on the military. However the navy had its scandals, too.
Then, in early 2018, individuals began disappearing in Nuevo Laredo, a gritty commerce hub throughout from Laredo, Tex.
A father of two was hauled out of a mechanic’s store on Feb. 3. His physique was present in a subject the subsequent day. A number of weeks later, two younger males went out for a nighttime drive, then vanished after being detained. In late Might, U.N. human rights chief Zeid Ra’advert Al Hussein went public together with his alarm. His investigators had documented 23 disappearances in simply 4 months. The culprits, he stated, appeared to belong to a “federal safety power.”
He didn’t elaborate, however everybody knew who had been deployed to Nuevo Laredo: Águila’s commandos.
The navy responded by reassigning a few of its forces whereas a number of investigations have been launched. The case would hang-out Águila for years.
The DEA had different worries. Methamphetamine seizures on the U.S. border have been hovering. U.S. brokers had recognized a second, extra ominous pattern: Traffickers have been urgent fentanyl into drugs resembling in style oxycodone tablets, fairly than merely promoting the powder as a booster for heroin. And the potential market of individuals misusing prescription medicines was “nearly 10 occasions that of the heroin consumer inhabitants,” the DEA warned.
Fentanyl’s lethal surge
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Because the movement of artificial medication intensified, DEA brokers in Mexico obtained a fortunate break. Informants turned up at a DEA workplace in america, providing the places of quite a few meth labs in Mexico.
U.S. brokers working with Águila obtained a inexperienced gentle from the Mexican navy to run the sniffer flights and drone surveillance, in keeping with two former U.S. officers who spoke on the situation of anonymity to debate the operations.
The navy particular forces blitzed a string of superlabs, uncovering the 50-ton cache on Aug. 16 and an extra 36 tons inside days, in keeping with navy press releases. Figures maintained by the DEA have been even larger: 128 metric tons — greater than what U.S. authorities sometimes confiscate alongside the Mexico border in a complete 12 months.
U.S. and Mexican officers celebrated as they considered movies and pictures of the seizure.
But, on nearer inspection, the raids underscored the bounds of the partnership. The operations didn’t result in a single arrest. The mega-busts by no means appeared within the Mexican authorities’s drug seizure statistics, in keeping with information obtained via Mexico’s freedom-of-information system.
The explanation? Nobody from the Mexican lawyer common’s workplace was ever summoned to weigh and analyze the medication and open an investigation, two navy officers confirmed. Ultimately, Águila’s males merely destroyed the methamphetamines.
The shortage of follow-up from the justice system was a standard downside. “What are the repercussions of this?” requested Josué Ángel González Torres, a former Mexican safety official. “What we’ve got every single day: Greater than 90 % of crimes are by no means punished.”
With little concern of arrest, he stated, drug traffickers merely construct new labs and shrug off their losses. “It’s a vicious circle.”
‘Hugs, not bullets’
By late 2018, Águila was one of many navy’s most embellished admirals, honored with quite a few awards from each america and Mexico. But his place was more and more tenuous.
López Obrador had gained the presidency that July. As his aides thought of candidates for navy secretary, they heard issues about Águila and his power’s aggressive techniques.
“Ortega Siu was relentless. However he made errors,” stated Raúl Benítez, a nationwide safety skilled with deep ties to the navy who teaches on the Nationwide Autonomous College of Mexico. That was very true in Nuevo Laredo, the place egregious human rights violations occurred, he stated.
There was a second strike in opposition to Águila. The incoming president didn’t need the armed forces “subordinated” to international nations, he advised the leftist each day La Jornada.
“That is an error that the navy dedicated lately,” López Obrador stated. “We’re going to repair that.”
The period of spectacular kingpin busts was over, he pledged. As an alternative, Mexico would give attention to combating the federal government corruption that enabled organized crime to thrive. Individuals could be lured from crime by jobs and academic alternatives. He dubbed his coverage “hugs, not bullets.”
Navy particular forces troops have been reassigned to the coasts. Águila was changed as particular operations chief.
Mexico’s presidential spokesman, Jesús Ramírez, stated the transfer was a part of the “regular adjustments” of a brand new administration.
In Sinaloa, Águila’s males dismantled the makeshift base they’d used for key operations just like the Chapo arrest and the meth busts.
“They have been instructed to cease working with us,” stated Donahue, the previous regional DEA chief. “After which that unit was disbanded.”
The DEA losses started piling up. The Mexican authorities dissolved the federal police. They have been changed by a brand new nationwide guard, whose chief had little interest in U.S. coaching or a DEA liaison unit. The sniffer flights ended.
The U.S. brokers thought López Obrador “would take out a room right here, a room there — not demolish the entire home,” stated one other retired DEA official who had labored in Mexico. He spoke on the situation of anonymity as a result of his present employer nonetheless does enterprise with the company.
The pullback went past the DEA. Amid a broad austerity drive, the Mexican authorities slashed the workers within the U.S.-based liaison workplaces of Mexico’s police, lawyer common’s workplace, and tax and customs companies. Mexico eliminated its staff from the Nationwide Focusing on Middle in Sterling, Va., the place U.S. officers tracked planes and ships suspected of transporting medication in addition to suspicious vacationers. Extraditions of Mexican suspects to america slowed.
Some U.S. diplomats thought López Obrador had an instinctive distrust of American know-how. He rejected a U.S. provide to supply six large X-ray scanners to search for medication in vehicles crossing the U.S. border. Additionally nixed have been handheld detectors for port authorities to determine narcotics or chemical compounds used within the manufacturing of artificial medication. Hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in anti-drug help for Mexico was returned to the U.S. Treasury.
For the brand new Mexican president, sovereignty was the larger concern. His staff was astonished to find how a lot the U.S. authorities quietly pulled levers within the nation. For instance, U.S. officers have been coaching police, prosecutors and jail officers in Mexican states — many led by López Obrador’s opponents.
The Mexican authorities didn’t have a transparent image of what america was as much as, in keeping with Martha Bárcena, who was López Obrador’s ambassador to Washington on the time. And there was no course of to collectively consider how efficient the packages have been.
A U.S. official concerned in this system denied that the federal authorities was saved out of the loop, or that there was any “political map” for distributing the help. Velasco, the International Ministry official, stated the incoming authorities had realized that some tools donated by america was barely used due to upkeep and coaching issues. “We needed to research extra intently what we have been doing” earlier than accepting extra, he stated.
The DEA and U.S. congressional investigators would later conclude that 2019 — López Obrador’s first 12 months in workplace — was when Mexico grew to become the highest supply of fentanyl reaching america, as its cartels took benefit of a crackdown in China.
But the Mexicans weren’t the one ones who missed indicators of the looming disaster. Trump’s precedence was to gradual migration and construct a border wall, not struggle narcotics trafficking. To the frustration of Mexican officers, he named three interim DEA administrators throughout his tenure.
“What we should always have been doing was persevering with to give attention to medication, and in apply, it shifted to different features of border administration, even earlier than López Obrador got here in,” stated Earl Anthony Wayne, U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 2011 to 2015.
Lower than a 12 months into López Obrador’s time period, his technique instantly appeared to take a harder flip. On Oct. 17, 2019, troopers and police surrounded a fancy townhouse within the Sinaloan capital, Culiacán, and detained Ovidio Guzmán, considered one of El Chapo’s sons. He was one of many high traffickers of fentanyl and meth to america, in keeping with Mexican officers. The U.S. authorities was requesting his extradition.
It was the type of operation that Águila would have led earlier than 2019. However this time, the Mexican military was in cost. Its troopers had no search warrant. As they waited for the paperwork, tons of of cartel gunmen streamed into town, some wielding .50-caliber rifles that fired armor-piercing bullets the dimensions of carrots.
Gunmen blocked roads to the airport, stopping the military from flying in reinforcements. The operations base constructed by Águila had been dismantled. Fearing an all-out battle that would depart tons of useless, López Obrador advised military commanders to let Guzmán go. He stays a fugitive.
LEFT: Troopers and police detain Ovidio Guzmán, considered one of El Chapo’s sons, outdoors a townhouse in Culiacán on Oct. 17, 2019. (El País) RIGHT: The mom of Alfredo González Muñoz cries at his wake in Veracruz in October 2019. The soldier died in a shootout that erupted because the Mexican military tried to detain Ovidio Guzmán. (Felix Marquez/AP)
“Ovidio’s escape was the primary indication of [López Obrador’s] degree of dedication and what prices they have been prepared to endure to get high-level criminals,” stated one high-ranking U.S. official, who spoke on the situation of anonymity to talk frankly about tensions with Mexico. “If they’d gone with the marines, it might need been completely different.”
Mexican officers have denied they’re much less dedicated to the safety partnership. “We’ve continued to work very intently with america,” Velasco stated, together with on the detention of vital traffickers.
By that December, U.S. Legal professional Basic William P. Barr was getting fearful. “I felt the Mexicans have been dragging their toes,” he stated in an interview. He flew to Mexico Metropolis to press for extra cooperation, together with a better effort to focus on fentanyl labs. Inside weeks, the navy particular forces had returned to the forefront of the anti-drug effort.
The coronavirus pandemic hampered the U.S. effort to restart cooperation, however it was an arrest in a DEA case in October 2020 that almost severed the connection.
Salvador Cienfuegos, a former protection minister, was detained as he arrived at Los Angeles Worldwide Airport on trip. U.S.-based DEA brokers had been investigating the 72-year-old on allegations he labored with drug traffickers throughout his time period from 2012 to 2018.
Mexico’s military management was furious. López Obrador had grow to be extra depending on the navy for all the things from combating crime teams to constructing airports. He accused the DEA of counting on flimsy proof and questioned whether or not the company was making an attempt to weaken the Mexican authorities or its armed forces.
Barr, alarmed that cooperation with Mexico may tank once more, agreed to let Cienfuegos return to Mexico in November 2020.
However the injury was executed. Mexico’s Nationwide Congress handed a regulation limiting U.S. regulation enforcement companies’ entry to Mexican officers in any respect ranges. As seizures of fentanyl on the U.S. border rose, the Mexican authorities held up visas for greater than 20 DEA brokers.
‘Out of gasoline’
Whereas on depart from the navy, Águila opened his personal non-public safety firm in an upscale neighborhood of Mexico Metropolis. Solely a choose clientele knew of it; the agency’s title wasn’t even listed on the listing within the foyer.
However the previous wouldn’t go away.
In 2020, the Mexican authorities’s human rights fee issued a blistering 331-page report inspecting 26 disappearances in Nuevo Laredo throughout a six-month stint by the navy particular forces. The report didn’t point out names, referring to officers by letters and numbers. It urged federal prosecutors to analyze particular forces personnel within the kidnappings — together with their commander, “AR-1.”
El Águila.
The variety of disappearances would ultimately develop to 47. The instances crawled via Mexico’s justice system. By 2022, solely 4 of the kidnappings had led to indictments, and even these bumped into hassle. A decide tossed out costs in opposition to 23 navy personnel, citing an absence of proof, and left simply seven suspects in jail.
Águila was not charged. The human rights report stated he had accompanied particular forces troops on a patrol on Might 21, 2018, throughout which they allegedly detained a younger man who subsequently disappeared. The navy stated its forces had engaged in a firefight with gunmen, who then fled.
Requested concerning the disappearances, Águila stated he was “assured the judicial processes will make clear these incidents correctly.”
Whereas nobody was convicted within the disappearances, the navy final 12 months issued a uncommon formal apology to the victims’ households.
It was not the top of Águila’s authorized troubles.
In August 2022, a authorities Fact Fee concluded {that a} second scandal, the 2014 disappearance of 43 college students attending the Ayotzinapa lecturers school, had been a “crime of state” involving the military, police and politicians. An enormous array of safety officers have been concerned in a subsequent coverup organized by Peña Nieto’s administration, it stated, and considered one of them was Águila. It supplied no particulars of his alleged function and he has not been charged. The navy has denied any unlawful actions.
The legacy of the U.S.-Mexican “kingpin technique” was combined. Águila’s commandos had smashed a number of highly effective cartels, however the captures didn’t considerably scale back the provision of medication or the dying toll in Mexico. Previous mafia teams fragmented and reemerged beneath completely different names, adapting their techniques to remain a step forward.
U.S. officers say there was little extra they may have executed to weaken the traffickers, particularly given Mexico’s unwillingness to speculate extra in its justice and safety sectors, and to break the hyperlinks between politicians and crime teams.
“We have been too depending on Águila, however we didn’t have good options,” stated Roberta Jacobson, who labored with the admiral when she was U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 2016 to 2018.
But each side have acknowledged that the 2 nations didn’t reside as much as their guarantees beneath the Mérida Initiative. Whereas Mexico and america constructed a sturdy financial partnership, there was no equal of NAFTA for safety.
The Mexican authorities had been heartened when President Barack Obama framed his drug technique as “co-responsibility” — recognizing the function of U.S. narcotics demand. “This was seen as a major achievement in Mexico,” stated Alfonso Motta-Allen, a safety analyst and former Mexican diplomat. However, he stated, “it was simply speak. The shortage of belief remained.”
Whereas Trump squarely blamed Mexican cartels for the flood of narcotics reaching america, his ambassador to Mexico Metropolis, Christopher Landau, got here to consider that decreasing U.S. consumption of medication was basic. U.S. authorities have seen a increase within the provide of fentanyl and a corresponding surge in overdose deaths, however federal well being companies have no idea what number of Individuals are utilizing the lethal opioid. Main federal packages that monitored drug use have been eradicated within the years earlier than the disaster hit U.S. streets.
“If the success of our counternarcotics technique is determined by Mexican regulation enforcement, we’re in hassle,” he stated. “They don’t have a purposeful felony justice system.”
Mexican officers say López Obrador’s technique has succeeded in turning round steep annual will increase in homicides. They notice that Mexico is confiscating extra fentanyl than ever. In early July, the military and nationwide guard seized a half-ton of the opioid from a warehouse, the most important such bust in historical past. The president has put the navy answerable for ports to crack down on unlawful shipments of precursor chemical compounds for medication.
But even with the brand new settlement, often called the Bicentennial Framework, the 2 sides don’t share a fundamental understanding of the fentanyl commerce.
“Fentanyl consumed in america doesn’t come solely — or largely — from Mexican territory,” Ricardo Mejía, Mexico’s undersecretary for public safety, stated in an interview.
U.S. brokers say in any other case, pointing to vital busts in Mexico of precursor chemical compounds used to make fentanyl and the hovering portions of powder and drugs seized alongside the U.S. southern border.
“If there are extra chemical compounds coming from China and extra fentanyl is being produced, the Mexican authorities and Mexican authorities must do extra to cease that from taking place,” stated the DEA’s Milgram. “The huge, overwhelming majority of fentanyl is coming from Mexico and is attributable to the Sinaloa and [Jalisco] cartels.”
After 4 years, López Obrador’s promise to refocus Mexico’s safety technique on social packages hasn’t weakened the grip of armed teams. He has more and more turned to Mexico’s navy to struggle organized crime.
In an echo of the previous, the navy particular forces have returned to focusing on cartel leaders. In July, after a nine-year manhunt, they captured some of the storied kingpins — Rafael Caro Quintero, needed within the 1985 killing of a DEA agent.
American drug-war veterans texted each other the beautiful information: The raid was led by Águila’s previous staff.
However the enthusiasm was short-lived. A navy Black Hawk helicopter crashed throughout the operation, killing 14 commandos.
The López Obrador authorities stated the plane ran out of gasoline.
