Mexico vows purge after ex-defence chief arrested in US

MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president yesterday promised to clean up the armed forces but backed its current leadership after the arrest of a former defence minister on drugs charges in the United States.

The day after the stunning detention in Los Angeles of Salvador Cienfuegos, defence minister from 2012 to 2018, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador pledged to suspend anyone inside his government implicated in the charges.

“We won’t cover up for anybody,” he said, before voicing fulsome support for Cienfuegos’ successor at the head of the army and his counterpart in the navy, noting that he had personally vetted them for honesty.

“They are incorruptible,” he added at a news conference.

Some Mexican officials were privately shocked at the detention of Cienfuegos in Los Angeles airport, worrying it was an unprecedented U.S. intervention against a symbol of Mexican national security.

But Lopez Obrador quickly incorporated the arrest into his narrative that predecessors had presided over a debilitating increase in corruption in Mexico, which for years has been convulsed by often horrific levels of drug gang violence.

“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,” Lopez Obrador said.

“We’re cleaning up, purifying public life.”— Reuters.