As Mexico’s military staged its annual Independence Day parade in September, spectators filled the main square of Mexico City to cheer on the armed forces. Nearly 2,000 miles away in Washington, American officials were also paying attention.
But it was not the helicopters hovering overhead or the antiaircraft weapons or the soldiers in camouflage that caught their attention. It was the man chosen to march at the head of the parade, Gen. Moisés García Ochoa, who by tradition typically becomes the country’s next minister of defense.
The Obama administration had many concerns about the general, including the Drug Enforcement Administration’s suspicion that he had links to drug traffickers and the Pentagon’s anxiety that he had misused military supplies and skimmed money from multimillion-dollar defense contracts.
In the days leading up to Mexico’s presidential inauguration on Dec. 1, the United States ambassador to Mexico, Anthony Wayne, met with senior aides to President Enrique Peña Nieto to express alarm at the general’s possible promotion.
That back-channel communication provides a rare glimpse into the United States government’s deep involvement in Mexican security affairs — especially as Washington sizes up Mr. Peña Nieto, who is just two months into a six-year term. The American role in a Mexican cabinet pick also highlights the tensions and mistrust between the governments despite proclamations of cooperation and friendship.
“When it comes to Mexico, you have to accept that you’re going to dance with the devil,” said a former senior D.E.A. official, who requested anonymity because he works in the private sector in Mexico. “You can’t just fold your cards and go home because you can’t find people you completely trust. You play with the cards you’re dealt.”
A former senior Mexican intelligence official expressed similar misgivings about American officials. “The running complaint on the Mexican side is that the relationship with the United States is unequal and unbalanced,” said the former official, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke anonymously to discuss diplomatic and security exchanges. “Mexico is open with its secrets. The United States is not. So there’s a lot of resentment. And there’s always an incentive to try to stick it to the Americans.”
Wave of Violence
Washington’s concerns about General García Ochoa — which several officials cautioned were not confirmed — come as both governments grasp for new ways to stem the illegal flows of drugs, guns and money across their borders.
Under Mr. Peña Nieto’s predecessor, Felipe Calderón, cooperation between the two governments had expanded in ways once considered unthinkable, with American and Mexican agents conducting coordinated operations that resulted in the capture or killing of several dozen important cartel leaders. But while Washington highlighted the record numbers of arrests, the stepped-up campaign created a wave of violence in Mexico that left some 60,000 people dead.
The devastating death toll has Mr. Peña Nieto, 46, a former governor, promising to move his country’s fight against organized crime in a different direction, focusing more on reducing violence than on detaining drug kingpins. But he has so far offered only vague details of his security plans, focusing instead on social and economic programs.
While Mr. Peña Nieto portrays himself as the leader of a new generation of reformers, he is also a scion of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico for more than 70 years through a combination of corruption and coercion until it lost power in 2000. During its time in power, the party was known more for keeping the United States at arm’s length while attempting to strike deals with drug traffickers, rather than combating them head on.
Mr. Peña Nieto’s election has brought the PRI back to power, and since so many of those serving in his cabinet have one foot in the past, foreign policy experts who specialize in Mexico say it is not clear where the new government is headed.
“It could go either way,” said Eric L. Olson of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, speaking of future cooperation between Mexico and the United States. “Part of me says, ‘Let’s not assume it’s all going to go south.’ And there are things that are happening that give me hope. But the longer it goes without some clarity, the more doubts creep in.”
Those doubts have also crept to Capitol Hill. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Democrat from Vermont who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he was withholding nearly $230 million in security assistance to Mexico through the so-called Merida Initiative amid concerns about whether the fight against organized crime is doing more harm than good.
“Congress has been asked for a significant new investment, but it’s not clear what the Mexican government’s plans are,” Mr. Leahy said. “It’s premature to sign off on more of the same.”
General García Ochoa, 61, whose background is at once exemplary and enigmatic, personifies that quandary. On paper, he is a model officer. He earned two advanced degrees from Mexico’s most prestigious military academies, and founded the elite National Center for Counter-Narcotics Intelligence. He has been a student and an instructor in American military training programs. He has written three books, including one on the military’s role in the drug fight.
People who know the general said they were struck by his candid assessments of the fight against organized crime. He spoke openly about governmental corruption, a topic that has been considered taboo. And on at least two occasions over the past year and a half, the general’s friends said, he traveled secretly to San Antonio to meet with American intelligence officials — he didn’t feel safe meeting with agents in Mexico, they said — and gave names of military and civilian officials he suspected of providing protection to drug traffickers.
“He was genuinely worried that corruption was giving the military a bad name, and that if nothing was done about it, it could hurt relations with the United States,” said a person knowledgeable about the meetings. “The way he saw it, this next government has the chance to really change the way Mexico works with the United States. He didn’t want that chance to be missed.”
By then, General García Ochoa was already on the short list to become defense minister. And people who know him said he hoped American support would give him an advantage over other candidates.
What he did not know was that the United States was quietly advocating against him. Current and former American officials said they had put together a troubling portfolio of allegations against the general. In his role as director of military administration and acquisitions, he had been accused of skimming money and supplies from large defense contracts.
Reports in the Mexican news media last summer accused the general of approving payments totaling more than $355 million for sophisticated surveillance equipment, without reporting those payments to civilian authorities or providing an explanation of how that equipment would be used.
‘Mr. Ten Percent’
Behind the scenes, American officials had nicknamed the general “Mr. Ten Percent,” shorthand for their suspicions about the way he handled contracts. And two American officials recalled the general making a formal request for American assistance for the military’s helicopter unit, and then backing out of the arrangement when the United States asked to look at the books — including the unit’s financial, flight and fuel records.
“The United States is sending a lot of money down there,” said one senior American official, describing the concerns about the general. “We need to be sure that money is being used in the right way or we could lose a huge opportunity.”
The D.E.A. suspected the general had long ties to drug traffickers. Agents declined to discuss the specific nature of those links. Nor would they say whether their investigation against the general was continuing. General García Ochoa declined requests to be interviewed.
“There was a lot of information on him, and it was coming from multiple sources,” said a recently retired senior federal law-enforcement officer, referring to what he called the “serious concerns” about the general. “We never found any smoking guns, not enough to make a case.”
The New York Times obtained classified D.E.A. intelligence reports from the early years of the general’s career, when he founded the counternarcotics intelligence center. The reports, dated Dec. 15, 1997, allege that then-Colonel García Ochoa was one of several senior Mexican military officials involved with attempts to negotiate a deal with the country’s most powerful drug trafficking organizations.
“It is highly likely,” said one report, “that military officials wanted to continue to profit from an ongoing relationship with the drug traffickers.”
The reports also allege that the colonel led a raid against the Juárez Cartel in which he deliberately allowed the kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes to escape, saying that the colonel “did not give orders to launch the operation until the car in which ACF was reportedly traveling had departed the area.”
Mexican officials declined requests to be interviewed for this article. American officials declined to comment publicly on their suspicions about the general. But they emphasized that whatever concerns they might have had about an individual general were hardly representative of the larger relationship between the two governments.
There have been significant strides in cooperation in recent years, including the first drones flying over Mexican airspace, the creation of the first joint intelligence center on a Mexican military base, operations staged by Mexican counternarcotics officers on the United States side of the border, and operations conducted by American federal law enforcement agents against money laundering in Mexico.
The United States has successfully shared delicate intelligence with the Mexican Navy, which led to the arrests of significant cartel leaders. And the number of exchanges between the Pentagon and the Mexican military has increased drastically, from 3 events in 2009 to nearly 100 last year, according to a report in Small Wars Journal, an independent online military publication.
“One of the most important bilateral relationships the United States has is with Mexico, and neither side is going to abandon it,” said another former senior D.E.A. official. “Yes, there are significant concerns, but when they come up you try to isolate them, limit their impact and move on.”
The American effort to prevent General García Ochoa’s promotion was just such an exercise in containment, with the Americans quietly moving to weed out Mexican officials suspected of corruption because they feared Mexican institutions would not be willing or able to do so on their own.
Misgivings Aired
After September’s Independence Day parade, senior American officials gathered in Mexico City for two days of meetings to assess their suspicions about the general, and to discuss whether or not to share those misgivings with their Mexican counterparts.
According to a Mexican official, the Americans eventually did share their concerns about the general, less than a week before Mr. Peña Nieto announced his cabinet appointments. The official said the American ambassador met in Mexico City with two senior aides to the incoming leader, including Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, who later became interior minister, and Jorge Ramírez Marin, a former national security adviser.
The official said Mr. Wayne, the ambassador, had discussed Washington’s concerns about the general, emphasizing that the allegations had not been corroborated.
“The timing was important,” the Mexican official said, “because Mexican presidents almost never replace the person they appoint as defense minister, so whoever was chosen would be involved with setting the terms of cooperation for the next six years.”
In the end, General García Ochoa did not get the job. Instead, it went to Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, who Mexican officials said had become close with Mr. Peña Nieto when he served as governor of the state of Mexico and General Cienfuegos commanded the area’s military base.
As for General García Ochoa, he was dispatched to a military base in the northern border state of Coahuila, a hotbed of cartel-related prison breaks, police corruption and political assassinations.
Whether Washington played a central role in how things turned out for the general remains unclear. Meanwhile, a column in the Mexican newspaper El Universal debated whether his dangerous new assignment was a demonstration of the government’s confidence in him, or a demotion aimed at forcing him to consider an early retirement.
Whichever the case, the general made a hasty departure from the military’s headquarters in Mexico City. One person who knows him said he had emptied his office with the help of a handful of aides and dispensed with the usual farewell festivities.
On a day in December when defense ministers from across the hemisphere gathered for a summit meeting in Mexico City, the general was seen wearing civilian clothes, climbing into his personal car and driving away.
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