Prosecutor to the rescue
Yesterday, prosecutor Alejandro Gertz Manero came to the rescue of President Claudia Sheinbaum and her government, which had entered a downward spiral since Friday after having had their narrative and agenda stolen by a criminal, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada. In response to the blackmail of the former leader of the Sinaloa cartel to intervene and repatriate him, because otherwise it would cause a collapse in the bilateral relationship with the United States, Gertz Manero came to put order in the morning press conference: what he is asking for has already been done by the Mexican government. His request was untimely. Thus he extracted the President from the dilemma she had gotten herself into: Defend a criminal? Abandon a Mexican citizen to his fate abroad?
Gertz Manero revealed something that Zambada, the Mexicans, and apparently the President did not know about: the four occasions on which he asked President Joe Biden's government to extradite him. He received no response from Washington, but he did comply with the constitutional procedure. Did no one tell Sheinbaum what the Attorney General's Office had done? Or did she not react adequately to stop the question and kill, in the media and political terms, the mess that Zambada's letter, in which he made clear his pressure on the Mexican government, had put her in?
The repeated request for extradition was the novelty of the morning press conference, which also reiterated what had already been explained since October: that Zambada was kidnapped in Mexican territory and taken under duress to the United States, where he was handed over to the authorities. Gertz Manero recalled that it is a similar case to that of Dr. Humberto Álvarez Machain, who was kidnapped in 1990 by bounty hunters who handed him over to the DEA in El Paso, Texas, curiously where Zambada was also placed at the disposal of the authorities. In the Álvarez Machain episode there was an official and loud protest from the government of Carlos Salinas. In this, silence has been the trans-sexennial bridge.
Zambada, according to Gertz Manero's version, was kidnapped by his godson Joaquín Guzmán López, son of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, who in collusion with the governor of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha Moya, deceived him with a supposed meeting with former federal deputy Héctor Melesio Cuén in a subdivision in Culiacán and took him to an airfield with a dirt runway - which was supposedly under the protection of the Army - where he put him on a plane and took him to the United States.
The kidnapping took place on July 25, which stunned President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and worsened two weeks later with Zambada's first letter on August 10, in which he accused Rocha Moya. Two days later, the Attorney General's Office opened an investigation accusing the two of possible crimes of illegal flight, illegal use of air facilities, violation of immigration and customs legislation, as well as homicide and deprivation of liberty. López Obrador stopped everything that affected Rocha Moya and yesterday Gertz Manero only spoke of the crime of treason against Guzmán López, without mentioning that, as with Zambada, he requested his extradition to be tried in Mexico for that crime.
But, for the purposes of first impact, the prosecutor took the morning. If Zambada's first letter knocked out López Obrador, the second one took the floor out of Sheinbaum's government. Her appearance at the National Palace gave the regime a new foundation and stopped its free fall. President Sheinbaum did not have the rhetorical energy last Friday to respond off the cuff to the letter that Zambada's lawyers delivered the day before at the Mexican consulate in New York, where he threatened her government with provoking a conflict with the United States if they did not take up her repatriation case.
Her ambiguities and lack of firmness in her responses led to the growing perception in public opinion and on social media that she was protecting Zambada. There was no objective element that allowed her to reach that conclusion, but the force of perceptions passed over her. It contributed negatively to the information that one of Zambada's lawyers is closely linked to several Morena figures, and that among the photographs that were also made public was one of her greeting him during a series of official events in various places, which deepened the political communication crisis until Tuesday morning.
Gertz Manero stopped it, but it is ephemeral. He provided legal support to stop Zambada's lawsuit, but other grievances remain open and he does not neutralize future actions by the drug trafficker. Nor does he neutralize the mastermind behind the public communications of the former leader of the Sinaloa cartel, who has managed to make the letters have worldwide diffusion. The disdain of the United States Government towards Mexico continues, and to this day it has not informed it how Zambada's kidnapping was carried out. Contrary to the prosecutor's version, the US Government's version is that it was carried out by the FBI and the Bureau of Investigation, of the Department of Homeland Security, which fights terrorism worldwide.
An intrinsic part of that contempt was when they offered López Obrador's government information about the capture. A dozen public prosecutors who accompanied the director of the Criminal Investigation Agency of the Attorney General's Office, Felipe de Jesús Gallo, to El Paso, were held in a room for hours, while their boss was taken to receive additional information, very little, about the operation.
The potential for future problems for Sheinbaum and her government does not end there. At some point, Zambada's third response will come. Gertz Manero put a stop to it, but will not stop it. The first letter was intended to denounce Rocha Moya, and the second was given in the context of the photograph of the governor with Andrés López Beltrán, Secretary of Organization of Morena, giving him his membership card openly supporting the person he considers betrayed him. The second expanded the range of accusations against high-level officials and politicians.
Following logic, the third will raise the cost for the Government and for Mexico.
X: @rivapa_oficial
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