MEXICO CITY (AP) — A former Mexican state prosecutor was so corrupt even the crooks who paid him off couldn’t trust him, according to a report released this week by the Mexican government’s Interior Department.
The department’s National Search Commission issued the report as part of its work to uncover the fate of hundreds of people who disappeared in the Pacific coast state of Nayarit between 2013 and 2017, when Edgar Veytia served as state attorney general.
The report says Veytia initially took bribes to favor a gang allied with the Beltran Leyva cartel from 2013 to 2017.
But it says Veytia switched sides in 2017, to ally with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
That change of alliances angered the Beltran Leyva gang, and lead to rounds of reprisal attacks and disappearances that apparently continue.
The report says toward the end of Veytia’s time as the chief prosecutor of Nayarit, his office was actually recruiting youths to work for the Jalisco cartel.
The state attorney general’s office formed “an execution group” that worked for the cartels, and according to the report, “the attorney general’s criminal structure may possibly still be operating, now for another criminal organization.”
The report says parts of the state government essentially acted like a gang, with officials from police officers to judges cooperating to kill, threaten, torture or jail rival gang members.
In 2019, Veytia was sentenced Thursday to 20 years in prison in a U.S. drug-trafficking case accusing him of using wiretaps and other law enforcement tools to protect the turf of a drug cartel.
Veytia told a judge in federal court in Brooklyn that he made a “mistake” by taking hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the cartel while he was the state’s chief law enforcement officer.
Veytia - a dual U.S.-Mexico citizen who had lived off and on in San Diego - had pleaded guilty to charges he took bribes from a drug organization.
