LA TIMES: Mexican official arrested for drug trafficking said his state would never be home to narcoshttp://archive.is/gFdVP#selection-95.0-95.91He sought to cut an image as a fearless anti-crime crusader in his home state of Nayarit, in western Mexico.
Edgar Veytia — the state’s attorney general, a lawyer and a survivor of a 2011 assassination attempt linked to traffickers — once declared: “Nayarit is not fertile ground for law-breaking. Here, there is no room for organized crime.”
His purported crime-fighting acumen even led to a corrido, or popular ballad, championing Veytia as the “terror” of criminals and the “lawyer with a pistol on his belt.”
But media reports had hinted of a darker side, linking Veytia to the powerful Jalisco New Generation Cartel, a bitter rival of the Sinaloa Cartel of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. Relatives of “disappeared” victims of the cartel wars complained publicly that the attorney general’s office in Nayarit did little to find their missing loved ones.
Now U.S. authorities say that Veytia’s law-and-order image was a public relations façade concealing his involvement in the nation’s massive illegal drug trade — an allegation that amplified the common belief in Mexico that being a politician is a license to amass clandestine riches.
Veytia, 46, was arrested at the U.S.-Mexico border Monday in San Diego on a federal indictment from New York alleging that he has conspired to smuggle heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine to the United States since 2013 — the year he became the top law enforcement official in Nayarit state.
Veytia’s arrest is the just latest sign that official corruption continues to debilitate Mexico's government.