International Roundup

By Agencies
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Prosecutors from Mexico City took the extreme and unusual step of getting marines to accompany them across state lines and arrest Uriel Carmona, the attorney general of the neighboring state of Morelos, and spirit him back to the capital.

The scene Friday in Cuernavaca, the capital of Morelos state, was like a soap opera, involving dozens of heavily armed agents, political scandals, a former national soccer star and drug traffickers, one of Carmona’s staff went live on Facebook to film the arrest.

Mexico City prosecutors said Carmona was arrested on charges of obstructing the investigation into the 2022 killing of a Mexico City woman whose body was found dumped just over the state line in Morelos.

But Carmona says he is the victim of a political conspiracy involving former soccer star Cuauhtémoc Blanco, who is currently the governor of Morelos state. 

Carmona said President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ordered his arrest because Carmona was investigating Blanco’s alleged ties to drug traffickers.

Blanco, a political ally of López Obrador, has denied any links to drug traffickers after a 3-year-old photo surfaced showing him posing with three men identified as local drug gang leaders. 

Blanco said in 2022 that he did not then know who the men were, and that he assumed they were just soccer fans, with whom he frequently poses in photos.

In an interview with the MVS radio station moments before he was arrested at his home, Carmona claimed he was the victim of a political persecution and blamed Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, now a primary presidential candidate for López Obrador’s Morena party, and the president himself.

“This is a campaign against me to protect Morelos Gov. Cuauhtémoc Blanco, because detectives under my command have opened more than 10 investigations against him for several serious crimes, like his probable ties to organized crime,” Carmona said.

Carmona called his arrest illegal, because an attorney general must first be impeached before being arrested.

The Supreme Court ruled that Carmona could not be arrested without first being impeached, but López Obrador’s office issued a statement in July rejecting the ruling, claiming that it did not apply to charges like obstruction of justice.

Sheinbaum, who resigned as Mexico City mayor to contend for the 2024 ruling-party presidential nomination, rejected Carmona’s accusations, saying “this is not a political issue, this is an issue of justice.”

In 2022, Sheinbaum accused Carmona of intentionally botching an autopsy of Ariadna López, 27, to cover up for her killer. 

Sheinbaum alleged that Carmona had ties to the suspected killer, though she refused to describe their purported links.

Carmona said at the time that a state forensic exam showed López choked on her own vomit as a result of intoxication. 

A second autopsy carried out by Mexico City experts found “several lesions caused by blows” on López’s body and listed the cause of death as “multiple traumas.”

COLOMBIA

For years, the man known as Otoniel was seen as one of the world’s most dangerous drug lords, the elusive boss of a cartel and paramilitary group with a blood-drenched grip on much of northern Colombia.

On Tuesday, Dairo Antonio Úsuga said he was “accepting responsibility for the crimes that I have committed” as he was sentenced to 45 years in prison in the U.S.

“I apologize to the governments of the United States and of Colombia and to the victims of the crimes that I have committed,” Úsuga, 51, said through a court interpreter.

The former leader of the notorious Clan de Golfo, or Gulf Clan, had pleaded guilty in January to high-level drug trafficking charges, admitting he oversaw the smuggling of tons of U.S.-bound cocaine and acknowledging “there was a lot of violence.”

The U.S. agreed not to seek a life sentence in order to get him extradited from Colombia, where he faces the prospect of further prosecution if he survives long enough to be released in the States.

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement that the 45-year sentence showed the nation would hold criminal kingpins accountable, “no matter where they are and no matter how long it takes,” for harming Americans.

Úsuga and his lawyers sought to cast him as a product of his homeland’s woes, remote rural hardship, surrounded by guerilla warfare, recruited into it at age 16 and hardened by decades of losing friends, fellow soldiers and loved ones to violence.

“Having been born into a region of great conflict, I grew up within this conflict,” he said in court, advising young people “not to take the path that I have taken.”

“We should leave armed conflicts in the past,” he added.

But U.S. District Judge Dora Irizarry, invoking her own childhood in a South Bronx housing complex that she said was wracked with drug dealing and violence, told the kingpin that environment was no excuse.

“People growing up in these communities, who have the will and have the desire, work their way out of it,” she said, telling Úsuga that he had chances “to leave this life behind — and you didn’t.”

The violence has claimed the lives of more than 1 million people, and left millions more forcibly displaced, disappeared and otherwise harmed, according to data from the country’s Victim’s Unit. The government has sought to sign peace accords with the armed groups but has struggled to consolidate peace in a complex conflict rooted in rural poverty and lack of opportunities.