A highly trusted former deputy attorney general, who later became Mexico’s drug czar and was embraced by Washington until his death, is accused in a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration report of taking bribes from one of Mexico’s oldest narcotics trafficking cartels.

Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, killed in November in a mysterious plane crash over Mexico City, is among three senior federal law-enforcement officials named in an April 21-page DEA briefing on organized crime and drug trafficking south of the border.

Vasconcelos was never charged with a crime. The other two are being prosecuted by Mexico.

The report, prepared as a primer on drug cartels, does not say when, or how much money was allegedly taken by Vasconcelos, who spearheaded counternarcotics efforts for President Felipe Calderon and had similar duties as deputy attorney general over fighting organized crime for Calderon’s predecessor, Vicente Fox.

He is alleged to have been snared by the Beltran Leyva organization, which the DEA report says is known to use bribery and assassinations to ensure its share of Mexico’s drug trade, and go “toe to toe” with larger syndicates.

When contacted Wednesday, DEA spokesman Garrison Courtney, said the agency could neither refute nor offer a source for the highly charged allegation, which appears in the report as fact. The information was included without being fully vetted for release, Courtney said.

The Calderon administration declined comment.

Sadly, this flag is draped over the coffins of too many honest Mexican soldiers while corrupt Mexican Government Officials get rich

PLease got to http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/chronicle/6423131.html fo he rest of the story

FaceFwd.com Comments: It should come as no surprise that the reason the Drug/Border war continues is that the government supports it. Should the Drug Cartels be shut down, there would be no retirement program for government employees

Tags: illegal aliens, Immigration, Mexican Border, Mexican Drug Cartel, Mexican Drug Wars, Mexican Government

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 14th, 2009 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Current Events, Not Born in the USA, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.