Mexico president says "El Chapo" had same power as president
Source: Associated Press
Updated 4:31 pm CST, Wednesday, January 1, 2020
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador closed out 2019 with a parting shot at his predecessors, saying imprisoned drug kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera had had the same power as the country's president.
In a video message from the southern city of Palenque on Wednesday, López Obrador recounted his administration's successes in its first year and highlighted its challenges — foremost surging violence. He said he had already done away with the high-level corruption that was rampant in previous governments, but said it was crucial to draw a bright line between criminal elements and authorities so that the two sides do not mingle as they had in the past.
“There was a time when Guzmán had the same power or had the influence that the then president had ... because there had been a conspiracy and that made it difficult to punish those who committed crimes. That has already become history, gone to the garbage dump of history," López Obrador said.
It appeared to be a reference to the indictment and arrest last month of Mexico's former public safety secretary Genaro García Luna. García Luna was public safety secretary in President Felipe Calderon's Cabinet from 2006 to 2012. Before joining Calderon’s government, García Luna led Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI, the Federal Investigative Agency, under President Vicente Fox.
Read more: https://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Mexico-president-says-El-Chapo-had-same-power-14943414.php
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JANUARY 16, 2019 4:17PM ET
Did Former President Enrique Pena Nieto Take That $100 Million Bribe?
A witness in the El Chapo trial claimed that the former president took a hefty bribe early in his term. But should we believe the allegation?
By J. WESTON PHIPPEN
In Mexico, like we’re becoming accustomed to in the U.S., there are many versions to truths and facts. Jaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera was until very recently, in his own words, a simple farmer. He was also, in the words of his associate, Alex Cifuentes Villa — a former drug lord in Colombia who worked with Guzmán — more powerful than the president of Mexico. So powerful, Cifuentes told a courtroom on Tuesday, that Guzmán paid the country’s top official $100 million to leave him and his Sinaloa Cartel in peace.
Cifuentes hails from a family of drug traffickers who worked with Pablo Escobar. In two days on the stand, he told a story that any Hollywood screenwriter would scrap at the risk of seeming too fantastic: assassination plots involving Canadian Hell’s Angels; gun deals with an Ecuadorian military officer, whom they later spent half a million dollars freeing from trial, only later to kidnap; a fledgeling autobiographical movie, based, of course, on a memoir Guzmán wrote. And yes, while he hid with Guzmán in Mexico’s Sierra Madre mountains, living in pine huts with plasma TVs, Cifuentes said he helped bribe the country’s president.
Enrique Peña Nieto, who left office in November, hasn’t addressed these new allegations. But earlier in the trial when talk of presidential corruption surfaced he denied any connection. Imagine, though, the president who caught Guzmán twice and oversaw his extradition to the U.S., early in his term took the drug trafficker’s money. Like most tantalizing threads pulled from the Mexican drug war, this one sounded too absurd for reality. It’s also one that, whatever the facts or rumors, probably won’t be investigated by the country’s government — partly for fear of what truth may be tied to the other end.
Peña Nieto has been accused of many things. He might have forged his undergraduate law thesis. He may have granted government contracts during his time as governor of Mexico State to a company that built and paid for his family’s $7 million, 15,000-square foot home. His administration also oversaw the investigation into the 2014 kidnapping of 43 students, in which a local mayor, police and the nearby military unit all likely played part in — working with, or as part of, a local cartel. Two outside, international teams found Peña Nieto’s investigation was at best painfully mishandled, and at worst sabotaged to hide the truth. But accepting a briefcase of cash from Guzmán?
More:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/el-chapo-pina-nieto-100-million-bribe-claim-legacy-780040/
Chapo Guzmán trial: Defense lawyer affirms that Sinaloa cartel bribed presidents Peña Nieto and Calderón