MEXICO CITY, Oct 16 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Former Mexican defense minister Salvador Cienfuegos has been arrested in the United States on undisclosed charges, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said.
Ebrard said on Twitter that he had been informed by the US ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau, that Cienfuegos, who was defense chief from 2012-2018, was detained at Los Angeles airport.
“The consul in Los Angeles will inform me of the charges in the next few hours. We will offer the consular assistance to which he is entitled.”
Cienfuegos headed the defense ministry under former president Enrique Pena Nieto.
He is the second former Mexican minister who is detained in the United States.
Ex-public security minister Genaro Garcia Luna was arrested in Texas in December 2019 on charges of taking huge bribes to allow the notorious Sinaloa cartel to ship drugs into the US.
Garcia Luna, who served under former President Felipe Calderón, has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges.
Cienfuegos is 72 years old and has retired from active duty. Mexico’s Defense Department had no immediate reaction to the arrest.
Under Cienfuegos, the Mexican army was accused of frequent human rights abuses, but that was true of both his predecessors and his successor in the post.
The worst scandal in Cienfuegos’ tenure involved the 2014 army killings of suspects in a grain warehouse.
The June 2014 massacre involved soldiers who killed 22 suspects at the warehouse in the town of Tlatlaya. While some died in an initial shootout with the army patrol — in which one soldier was wounded — a human rights investigation later showed that at least eight and perhaps as many as a dozen suspects were executed after they surrendered. — NNN-AGENCIES
