Edgar Veytia is questioned by Florian Miede during the trial of former Mexican Secretary of State for Public Safety Genaro García Luna.JANE ROSENBERG (Portal)
Edgar Veytia set fire to the Mexican political scene with his statements on Tuesday. Former Nayarit prosecutor, known as El Diablo and convicted of drug trafficking in the US, targeted various political figures at the Genaro García Luna hearing in New York. The former prosecutor also injected former President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) and former Governors Ney González (2005-2011) and Roberto Sandoval (2011-2017), in addition to the former security minister, whom he says he had waived the order, Protect drug traffickers like Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán. Veytia has one of the darkest pasts anyone in her entity has ever had. Not only did he miss a thousand people, he was the prosecutor who allied himself with the major drug cartels and conspired to traffic heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and marijuana from Mexico to the United States.
The trajectory raises doubts about the weight of his testimony after becoming a US prosecutor’s witness. When the FBI arrested him at the Tijuana-San Diego border crossing in March 2017, no one would come out to defend him. While Veytia was in charge of law enforcement in Nayarit, this was an open secret directly linked to organized crime. Not even his political godfather, Governor Sandoval, came forward to defend him at the time. On the contrary, he said he was “totally disgusted by her split personality”.
Veytia suffers from the evil that other witnesses in the trial of García Luna also have: He enjoys a more than dubious credibility. His cooperation with the US authorities even led to the investigation in the United States of former Mexican defense minister Salvador Cienfuegos being accelerated. On that occasion, the former prosecutor had accused the former army chief of protecting drug cartels in exchange for bribes, according to a journalistic investigation published last December. However, the DEA agents decided to dismiss this statement as it was a character with very little credibility, which could pose a problem in court.
For many years, El Diablo was one of Roberto Sandoval’s most trusted men, who is currently imprisoned for operations involving resources of illegal origin. When the PRI received the mayoralty of the state capital Tepic in 2008, Veytia became the city’s transport director. The following year he was promoted to Minister of Public Security. In 2011 he was elected to his state administration by the ex-governor. First as Assistant State Attorney and two years later as State Attorney, from where he enforced the Terror Law.
Despite Veytia’s dubious credibility, he is a character who has journeyed into the organized crime underworld in Mexico and has plenty of information about how and who operated there during the years he was active between 2008 and 2017. Nayarit is a small state. Nestled on the Pacific Coast between Jalisco and Sinaloa. Because of its location, it was an important place for criminal organizations dedicated to drug trafficking. During his tenure as prosecutor, the state authorities operated a mechanism of extortion and looting. The highest spheres engaged in the drug trade and associated with one or the other depending on power and time.
All of this was proven during his trial in New York, for which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Veytia was charged with life imprisonment, but in hopes of bringing that number down, he decided to cooperate with the judiciary. Among the former prosecutor’s allegations, he accused Calderón of issuing the order to protect the people of El Chapo and Sandoval when he agreed mayor of Tepic with the Beltrán Leyva cartel to pay for his campaign without providing evidence to the election to the governor. Back then, these two cartels fought for power in the small coastal state. Both Calderón and Sandoval have denied the allegations.
Already with the conviction in the bag, Veytia told in great detail what the agreements between authorities and drug dealers meant. “We didn’t stop them, we gave them information so they could flee and evade justice, we covered up the crimes they committed,” he told a court in New York on Tuesday. The explosiveness of his statements was not supported by a single piece of evidence in court. “The agreements with the drug dealers are not in writing,” he explains. The jury will now be tasked with determining the validity of these words, which have roiled the Mexican political scene.
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