Mexico's former defense secretary arrested in L.A. on a DEA warrant

Mexico's president on Friday lambasted previous administrations as corrupt after the arrest of the country's former defense secretary at Los Angeles International Airport on a Drug Enforcement Administration warrant.

“This is an unmistakable example of the decomposition of the government, of how civil service was degrading,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said according to The Associated Press.

Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda was detained on Thursday, three U.S. law enforcement officials told NBC News.

López Obrador said he only learned about Cienfuegos' arrest after the event and incorporated the incident into his narrative that his predecessors had presided over a steady increase in corruption.

"We won't cover up for anybody," López Obrador told press at a daily news briefing, before voicing support for Cienfuegos' successor at the head of the Army and his counterpart in the Navy, two of the most powerful anchors of national security in Mexico.

“If we’re not talking about a narco state, one can certainly talk about a narco government, and without doubt, about a government of mafiosi,” López Obrador said. “We’re cleaning up, purifying public life.”

Cienfuegos' arrest was confirmed by Mexico's Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard via Twitter earlier on Friday, who said he was informed of the detention by the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Christopher Landau.

Ebrard later tweeted a hearing will take place Friday afternoon in Los Angeles.

Charges along with the exact details and circumstances of Cienfuegos' arrest have yet to be announced. DEA officials did not elaborate on which DEA office was handling the case.

General Cienfuegos, 72, served as defense minister from 2012 to 2018 under former Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and was a powerful figure in the country's drug war, in which the military battled cartels across the country.

Peña Nieto was in office for six years through December 2018. Several members of his cabinet and party have been implicated in high-level corruption cases, sometimes involving allegations of links to organized crime.

Under Cienfuegos, the army was accused of extrajudicial killings and human rights abuses, including the 2014 Tlatlaya massacre, where 22 drug gang members were executed.

The armed forces have taken an increasingly prominent role in fighting crime in Mexico, and have been viewed by some as less prone to corruption than police forces.

The detention of Cienfuegos comes on the heels of the arrest of ex-President Felipe Calderón's security minister, Genaro Garcia Luna in Texas in 2019.

Luna is on trial in New York on suspicion of accepting millions of dollars in bribes from Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman's Sinaloa cartel, which he was tasked with combating.

Elements of the army in the northern state of Sinaloa have long been rumored to have links to the cartel formerly headed by crime kingpin Guzmán, who controlled much of the illegal drug trade across the Western Hemisphere for almost three decades.

Guzmán is now in a U.S. jail after being sentenced to life plus 30 years in July.

The U.S. and Mexican governments portrayed Guzmán's arrest and conviction as a major victory but analysts say his Sinaloa cartel has continued to hum along without him in its reign of terror from its base in Culiacán.

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The high-level arrest of Cienfuegos comes less than three weeks before the U.S. presidential election.

President Donald Trump, seeking a second term, made clamping down on cartel activity a major policy objective when he took office in 2017.

The war against the cartels has taken a heavy toll on the Mexican people. There have been 150,000 murders related to organized crime in Mexico since 2006, according to a Congressional Research report published this year. Some 73,000 people were also reported missing from 2007 to mid-2020, according to the government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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