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AMLO Official Reveals: Due to “DEA Hypocrisy”, The SIU Was Dismantled
Excerpt:
According to an official from the López Obrador government, presidential anger at the “hypocrisy of the DEA” was what led the Mexican authorities to dismantle the Sensitive Investigations Unit, a team that for years worked within national territory with the anti-drug agency.
According to an official from the López Obrador government, presidential anger at the “hypocrisy of the DEA” was what led the Mexican authorities to dismantle the Sensitive Investigations Unit, a team that for years worked in the national territory with the American anti-drug agency. They arrested Iván Reyes Arzate, who confessed to drug trafficking crimes… and later pardoned him, when García Luna’s former collaborator offered himself as a collaborating witness.
The agreement that Iván Reyes Arzate reached with the United States Department of Justice by pleading guilty to drug trafficking crimes was the straw that broke the camel’s back and led President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to dismantle the Mexican special team who worked with the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
“The president took it as a mockery. Reyes Arzate was proven that he was involved with drug traffickers, with the Sinaloa Cartel, but the DEA pardoned him; you cannot collaborate with US agents this way,” a high-ranking official from the Mexican federal government explains to Proceso.
This week the British news agency Reuters revealed that in April 2021 the López Obrador government dismantled the Sensitive Investigations Unit (SIU), which for years worked with the DEA in the fight against drug trafficking in Mexico.
Reyes Arzate, former commander of the now defunct Federal Police and right-hand man of Genaro García Luna, Secretary of Public Security during the government of Felipe Calderón, pleaded guilty in October last year to drug trafficking charges brought against him by the DEA.
Before the Federal Court for the Eastern District in Brooklyn, New York, where García Luna will be tried for drug trafficking this fall, Reyes Arzate accepted the agreement proposed by the DEA to become a protected witness.
“It just can’t be! This man (Reyes Arzate) was García Luna’s operator in the Calderón government; the same DEA arrested him in the United States as well as the commander of the Federal Police and for the same reasons, but they don’t work fairly, ”says the Mexican official.
On condition of anonymity –because of the sensitive matter in the relationship with the United States–, the high-ranking official of the López Obrador government explains that since 2020, when Reyes Arzate was arrested by the DEA, it surfaced that the United States would pardon this corrupt ex-cop.
Presidential Anger
During Calderón’s six-year term, the DEA worked with and manipulated Reyes Arzate, who was precisely head of the SIU, a team that also included members of the Secretary of the Navy.
“This is a DEA hypocrisy, that is how President López Obrador took it and decided to close that chapter that, if reviewed well, equally exposes the corruption of US agencies. How else can Reyes Arzate’s exoneration be understood, if not this way?” adds the source.
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The DEA, like most US government departments, has been a failure. Mexico isn’t a shining example of a well run government given the cartels and the human trafficking going on there. One would think AMLO or his staff knows or understands American law with the possibility of this happening. Interesting events happening in unexpected places.
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