López Obrador defends the end of the Mexican DEA office because it was infiltrated by “crime”

MADRID, 21 Apr. (EUROPE PRESS) –

The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has responded this Thursday to the renewed criticism he has received for the closure of the office of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA, for its acronym in English), recalling that organized crime is had infiltrated that body.

“That happened more than a year ago, already with the change in policy. Because we maintain cooperation, but we try to respect our sovereignty and before, they entered and left the country and did, they ruled, they did what they wanted”, has argued López Obrador during his morning intervention before the media.

“They even fabricated crimes, so you know that order was put in place, and there is cooperation, but with respect to our sovereignty,” López Obrador insisted, on the first anniversary of the closure of this DEA office, made up of Mexican police officers, Opened 25 years ago now.

“It was shown that this group was infiltrated by crime, even that one of its bosses is being tried in the United States,” López Obrador pointed out, although he has ruled out that this person is Genaro García Luna, the former Secretary of Security Public in the six-year term of former President Felipe Calderón.

“They do not investigate anything, they just attack (…) it is no longer the time when Calderón was there and they entered and put the weapons, it is no longer the time of the operations, like ‘Fast and Furious'”, he said in reference to a failed and controversial operation to arrest arms dealers and buyers in Mexico, reports ‘Milenio’.

The Agency for Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) of the United States deliberately introduced some 2,500 firearms into Mexico with the aim of identifying and arresting buyers and distributors, however, the tracking of all these weapons was lost and ended up in the hands of the Sinaloa Cartel.

Because of this scandal, which broke out in 2011 when it was confirmed that one of the weapons in this arsenal was used to kill a United States Border Police agent in December 2010, former President Calderón has an open trial before which he will have to respond, López Obrador has said.

This week, the newspaper ‘Milenio’ published that the Government of Mexico had decided a year ago to terminate the Sensitive Investigations Unit (SIU, for its acronym in English), an elite group of Mexican police officers chosen by the DEA to fight against organized crime in the country, which since 1997 had been established as the main symbol of cooperation with Washington.