The reported discovery in cartel hands of a sheaf of police documents containing agents’ names and contact numbers, along with apparent references to shared US intelligence data, has renewed fears of high-level corruption in Mexico’s war on drugs.
The papers — which also included an apparent drug cartel payroll listing police commanders — was found in the car of an associate of Mexico’s most powerful drug lord, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, during a bust in May last year, the newspaper Reforma said on Monday.
Coming less than two years after a widespread corruption probe known as Operation Clean House toppled Mexico’s former anti-drug czar — Noe Ramirez — and other top officials for allegedly collaborating with a drug cartel, the revelation raised more questions about Mexican law enforcement.
“Operation Clean House was a warning that something wasn’t working, and this confirms that it still isn’t working,” said Jorge Chabat, an expert on drug cartels.
“What I see clearly here ... is that the process of infiltration continues” among Mexican police, the country’s former top anti-drug prosecutor Samuel Gonzalez said.
Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel has reportedly gained ascendancy in recent months, with the leadership of rival the Beltran Leyva cartel hit hard by a government offensive.
Allegations have long circulated that Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna, who emerged as the top law enforcement officer after Operation Clean House, may have somehow favored the Sinaloa cartel. No firm proof of favoritism has ever been presented, but the arrests of top drug capos have hit all of the other cartels, while leaving Sinaloa’s leadership largely untouched.
However, Garcia Luna has proved a valuable ally to the US, said David Shirk, director of the University of San Diego’s Transborder Institute, so much so that “there is a certain degree of real concern in the [US] administration” that Garcia Luna will leave office with Calderon in 2012.
Meanwhile, Mario Ernesto Villanueva Madrid, a recently extradited former governor of southeastern Quintana Roo state, on Monday denied taking millions of dollars in bribes for protecting US-bound cocaine shipments before a New York federal judge.
Villanueva Madrid was flown to White Plains, New York, late on Sunday, the US Department of Justice said in a statement.
He faces a maximum life sentence if convicted. He is also charged with money-laundering, which carries a 20-year term.
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