US blocks appointment of top Mexican general as defense minister

Just days before Mexico’s presidential inauguration on December 1, 2012, the US ambassador to Mexico, Anthony Wayne, met with senior aides to the country’s newly-elected President Enrique Pena Nieto to warn against the planned appointment of decorated General Moises Garcia Ochoa as the minister of defense, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
 
    The behind-the-scene intervention, according to the report, reflects not only a small portion of the American government’s “deep involvement in Mexican security affairs,” but also highlights “the tensions and mistrust” between the two governments despite public declarations of cooperation and friendship.
 
 
While the daily quotes a former senior American official as saying, “When it comes to Mexico, you have to accept that you’re going to dance with the devil,” it cites a former high-level Mexican intelligence official as expressing similar misgivings about American officials.
 
“The running complaint on the Mexican side is that the relationship with the United States is unequal and unbalanced,” said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Mexico is open with its secrets. The United States is not. So there’s a lot of resentment. And there’s always an incentive to try to stick it to the Americans.”
 
The daily describes the 61-year-old Mexican general as a model officer with two advanced degrees who founded the country’s elite National Center for Counter-Narcotics Intelligence, formerly served as a student and an instructor in American military training programs, and has authored three books on the role of military in the war on drugs.
 
Noting that Ochoa was on the short list of candidates for defense minister and counting on US support for the promotion, the report adds, however, that he did not realize “that the United States was quietly advocating against him,” accusing him of skimming money and supplies from large defense contracts.
 
    The American intervention to block General Ochoa’s appointment as the Mexican defense minister was further described in the report as a “containment” measure by US authorities, “quietly moving to weed out Mexican officials suspected of corruption” with the claim that Mexican institutions would not be willing or able to do it themselves.
 
 
Eventually, General Ochoa was not appointed to the post of defense minister. The position was rather given to General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, commander of a military base in the state of Mexico, where President Pena Nieto used to serve as its governor.
 
General Ochoa, instead was sent to a military base in the northern border state of Coahuila, “a hotbed of cartel-related prison breaks, police corruption and political assassinations,” according to the report.
 
US drastically expanded its cooperation with Mexico under the previous government of Felipe Calderon, the daily notes, “with American and Mexican agents conducting coordinated operations that resulted in the capture or killing of several dozen important cartel leaders.” The campaign, however, prompted a wave of violence across Mexico, leaving nearly 60,000 people dead.