Mexico plan to strip US drug officials of immunity risks rift with Biden

Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has tossed another hot potato to the US president-elect, Joe Biden, with a proposal that would restrict US agents in Mexico and remove their diplomatic immunity.

The proposal submitted quietly last week by López Obrador would require Drug Enforcement Administration agents to hand over all information they collect to the Mexican government, and require any Mexican officials they contact to submit a full report to Mexico’s foreign relations department.

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“The proposal is that foreign agents will not have any immunity,” according to a summary of the president’s proposal to the Mexican senate published on Friday. In most countries, the chief DEA agent in the country often has full diplomatic immunity and other agents have some form of limited or technical immunity.

“The proposal requires that foreign agents give Mexican authorities the information they gather,” according the proposed changes.

Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of international operations, said of the handover of all information, “That is not going to happen.

“Sadly, there is endemic corruption within the [Mexican] government. It’s going to be leaked, it’s going to compromise agents, it’s going to compromise informants,“ Vigil said.

The history of leaks is well documented. In 2017, the commander of a Mexican police intelligence-sharing unit that received DEA information was charged with passing the DEA data to the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel in exchange for millions of dollars.

The proposed changes also specify that any Mexican public servant – state, federal or local – who receives a phone call or text message from a US agent would be required “to deliver a written report to the foreign relations department and the public safety department within three days”.

“It’s just going to make a burdensome system,” Vigil said, adding: “It is going to hinder bilateral operations, it is going to hinder bilateral exchange of information. This is going to be much more detrimental to Mexico than to the United States.“

The proposal appears to reflect Mexico’s anger about the arrest of the former Mexican defense secretary, Salvador Cienfuegos, in Los Angeles in October.

Under the pressure of Mexico’s implicit threats to restrict or expel US agents, US prosecutors folded, dropping their case so Cienfuegos could be returned to Mexico and investigated – though he has not so far been charged – under Mexican law.

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Seth DuCharme, an acting US attorney, told a judge at the time, “The United States determined that the broader interest in maintaining that relationship in a cooperative way outweighed the department’s interest and the public’s interest in pursuing this particular case.”

Cienfuegos, a general who led Mexico’s army department for six years under then-President Enrique Peña Nieto, was the highest-ranking former Mexican cabinet official arrested since the top security official Genaro García Luna was held in Texas in 2019.

Cienfuegos was secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in New York in 2019. He was accused of conspiring with the H-2 cartel in Mexico to smuggle thousands of kilos of cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana while he was defense secretary from 2012 to 2018.

Prosecutors said intercepted messages showed that Cienfuegos accepted bribes in exchange for ensuring the military did not take action against the cartel and that operations were initiated against its rivals.

The Mexican attorney general’s office has pledged to look at the evidence, but Cienfuegos was immediately released upon his arrival back in Mexico and few expect him ever to be convicted there.