When officials seek to evade their obligations regarding Transparency, they resort to the trick of “testing” documents, thus converting documents with information, which should be public, into sheets studded with black marker, it is as if they eliminated it to prevent the data from being known and at the same time pretend that they comply with the Law.
In the decades that I have been a reporter dealing with this type of documents, I had not seen asset statements with as much proven data as those of Alejandro Gertz Manero.
The declaration of assets and interests is an obligation of officials, according to the General Law of Administrative Responsibility of Public Servants, which establishes that all public servants are obliged to present declarations of assets and interests, that said declarations must be public, except for some personal and private data such as personal address, bank account numbers, home telephone number, and others.
But in the case of Gertz Manero, in the statements corresponding to the years as Prosecutor, most of the data is tested and others appear as “reserved.” The Transparency Committee of the FGR validated these deletions and declared it as “reserved”, a Committee whose members were headed by the same head of the Prosecutor’s Office, that is, Gertz Manero.
That opacity, that lack of transparency in his statements, where he hid even the amounts he received as a public official, also the income from his private activities, his wealth, his businesses – which are known to be many – his possible conflict of interest, this lack of transparency in his asset declarations is precisely a symbol of his conduct as a Prosecutor: an opaque official, without results, who made the Prosecutor’s Office his office for personal vendettas, from where he discretionally concealed information of various kinds that he It had to be public, testing it or declaring it “reserved” and in this way the laws regarding transparency and accountability were evaded, while complete files, complete investigation folders were leaked, delivering them to certain media outlets linked to the opposition for political use, and to sabotage the investigations.
The dismal performance of Alejandro Gertz Manero at the head of the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) and his null results showed that the supposed “autonomy” is not enough to guarantee the efficiency of an institution that is the core of the Mexican State, because in the hands of Gertz the ossified PGR, under the FGR letterhead, continued like a white elephant, immovable, dysfunctional, the same practices, the same corruption, only more costly and with transexennial power.
Gertz threw away seven years of the first autonomous Prosecutor’s Office, because he used it factiously and as an extension of his private office to operate his interests. Evidence of this were the exposed conversations in which he spoke with Juan Ramos, who was his personal legal representative and whom he made an official by designating him as head of the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for Competence Control, a key area created to handle the most relevant matters in the FGR, the second highest hierarchy, and from there he had him litigating his revenge against his in-laws.
Gertz Manero has been a government official since the sixties, first in the Labor Secretariat, and then in the Communications and Transportation Secretariat; In the seventies he came to the PGR as an agent of the Public Ministry. Then he held positions in the local government and then at the federal level again, as Secretary of Public Security with Fox, years later he left as a legislator, and in November 2018 he arrived as Deputy Attorney General; In December he was appointed in charge of the PGR’s office, and by January 2019 he was ratified by the Senate as the first Attorney General of the Republic.
So he has held positions in governments of all parties, although in no position did he have an outstanding performance, and what emerged from his presence in the Prosecutor’s Office were his scandalous personal vendettas to which he dedicated the resources of the institution, at the same time that matters of greatest public impact collapsed.
The conversations with Lozoya’s father, Emilio Lozoya Thalman, a PRI member who was Secretary of State in the Government of Salinas, are evidence of his disloyal conduct towards the institution. In those conversations, Gertz seemed more like his advisor, in addition to the scandalous privileges he gave to the former director of Pemex, who today enjoys impunity.
Or the Master Scam where the investigation was also sabotaged from within the Prosecutor’s Office by presenting a case with so many flaws and absurdities in the proceedings, and which now has those responsible for the looting of millions of public resources, there, in the streets, unpunished and even in the political sphere again.
Also the flaws in the investigation folders for huachicol, and the huachicoleros bribing officials from the Prosecutor’s Office.
Each of these cases involved opening maxi-trials by organized crime and white-collar crime networks, but the Prosecutor’s Office acted carelessly, negligence, or in the worst case in their deliberate sabotage. Thus, the results on issues of high impact on national life were almost null, thereby contributing to impunity.
With his behavior and that of the officials under his charge, he sabotaged not only the Prosecutor’s Office, but the Government that proposed him as Prosecutor. It is not for nothing that those favored by his inaction, beneficiaries of corruption, are now those who demand his departure, because he became a very comfortable Prosecutor for the corrupt.
Gertz Manero’s years at the head of the FGR were lost years for the country, because he threw overboard the possibility of investigations against the high structures of corruption, but he is not the only one responsible, because in those years there was no Congress that called him to accountability, to his obligation in matters of transparency, there was never a review of his work.
What happened with Gertz forces us to rethink, and to discuss the scope and use of the supposed “autonomy.”
It was at the end of the 1990s when the need to provide prosecutors’ offices – at the state and federal level – with autonomy began to be raised. It was intended that these bodies of the Executive Branch, which are responsible for the investigation and clarification of crimes, would seek efficient and effective justice, and that they would really contribute to strengthening the rule of law, that they would diligently carry out their functions, and not as sword of Damocles or for political and arbitrary purposes, the famous “Justice and grace for friends, and plain Law for enemies.”
It was thought that the remedy to these evils of deficient administration of justice was in “autonomy” (a model already underway in other countries), so, under international standards, one by one, through reforms to state laws and at the federal level, this idea of “autonomy” for the prosecutor’s offices came to fruition. Reengineering of these institutions was promised, which was not done, even when it was given greater powers and budgets.
Just as happened with Gertz at the federal level, it has happened with state prosecutors’ offices, in which unpresentable, scandalous characters have been created, such as Edgar Veytia, Prosecutor of Nayarit, nicknamed “El Diablo”, a PRI member linked to drug trafficking whom his compadre Governor Roberto Sandoval made Prosecutor.
When changes were promoted at the state level to convert attorney offices into prosecutor’s offices, Nayarit was one of the first entities: in 2013, reforms were approved in Congress to give the Attorney General’s Office status and autonomy. Sandoval sent Congress the proposal to appoint Veytia as Prosecutor for seven years.
Their practices of extortion and looting, extrajudicial detentions, kidnappings, and police facilities converted into torture centers were public. He was linked to drug trafficking in partnership with several drug cartels, until, in March 2017, When he was traveling to the United States, he was detained by agents of the Customs and Border Protection Office, under accusations of criminal association for the illegal manufacture and importation, and distribution of heroin, methamphetamines, marijuana and cocaine that he would have carried out during all the years that he served as Prosecutor.
Or there is the case of the Guanajuato Prosecutor’s Office, occupied by another unpresentable: Carlos Zamarripa, the eternal Prosecutor who had been in that position since 2009 and in the transfer of the Prosecutor’s Office to the Prosecutor’s Office he was made Prosecutor for a period that ended in 2028, but due to the accumulation of scandals he brought forward his departure and left office last January, assigning himself a millionaire retirement. During its period, Guanajuato had an exponential growth of insecurity, crime incidence, and the operation and violent dispute of organized crime groups mainly in the crime of huachicol. The local press also documented the irregularities in that Prosecutor’s Office under Zamarripa’s command.
And we could talk about many other entities with all-powerful, imperial prosecutors, but with shameful performance, and who must be held accountable.
These are cases that show that the supposed autonomy that the prosecutor’s offices have today is not enough, both at the federal level and in the entities, effective mechanisms are required in which their owners conduct themselves with transparency and accountability; Greater levels of coordination are required on a permanent basis between the state prosecutor’s offices and that of the Federation, as well as with other government agencies, because only in coordination will security and combating crime and corruption strategies be able to function, as relevant as the national strategy against extortion, or that of combating theft, smuggling and illicit marketing of fuels, and other strategies that have been proposed.
In a few days the process will begin in the Senate to review the candidacies and designate who will lead the FGR for the next nine years. It is also necessary that the transparency and accountability mechanisms be reviewed, to prevent the supposed autonomy from continuing to be used in a discretionary manner, and to prevent characters like Gertz Manero from rotting the institutions.