MEXICO CITY — By his personal admission, the Mexican lawman referred to as El Diablo — The Satan — supervised a scourge of torture, homicide, kidnappings, land grabs and different abuses whereas amassing a fortune in cartel bribes that bankrolled purchases of houses, cattle and a fleet of buses.
Edgar Veytia’s transgressions got here whereas he was the highest cop in Nayarit, a small Pacific Coast state that developed from a sleepy backwater to certainly one of Mexico’s most violent cartel battlegrounds.
Veytia, who honed the general public persona of a crusading, pistol-packing prosecutor, overtly traveled between Mexico and the USA, assured that nobody would see past his righteous, tough-on-crime facade.
“I didn’t think I would be arrested,” Veytia testified later.
His sense of invulnerability was shattered on March 27, 2017, when U.S. brokers busted Veytia at a border crossing in San Diego. This was no low-level mule who ferried medication on his particular person, however a state lawyer common who had facilitated cartel smuggling for years. Veytia pleaded responsible in January 2019 to narcotics trafficking.
El Diablo, nonetheless, knew the place the our bodies have been buried — a information he peddled tirelessly to his U.S. handlers. And when he testified in opposition to a fair larger Mexican narco-politician, he secured a get-out-of-jail card — earlier than finishing even half of his 20-year U.S. jail sentence.
Veytia, 55, was launched from jail in Februaryand is presently a free man, residing within the northeastern United States. However now he’s going through a few of his alleged victims in a singular authorized motion.
Mr. Veytia dedicated some horrible crimes, however he paid for it in a maximum-security jail and he’s making an attempt to show his life round
— Alexei Schacht, lawyer for Edgar Veytia
5 Nayarit households — amongst them farmers, small enterprise house owners and a former police officer — are suing Veytia in federal court docket in Washington, D.C., below the Torture Sufferer Safety Act. The legislation, handed in 1992, permits civil claims in opposition to abusers who, whereas performing in official capacities for overseas governments, engaged in atrocities wherever on the earth.
The Nayarit plaintiffs say they endured torture, loss of life threats and extortion throughout El Diablo’s reign of terror. Whereas Veytia could have paid his dues below U.S. legislation, they are saying his principally nameless victims in Mexico, some long-ago slain or disappeared, benefit a reckoning.
“When the very institutions meant to protect and deliver justice become perpetrators of torture and abuse, they leave citizens with no recourse,” the plaintiffs mentioned in a press release. “In the face of that abandonment, we came together—as civil society—to resist silence and impunity.”
Representing the Nayarit residents — who’re looking for unspecified damages — is San Francisco-based Guernica37, a nonprofit group looking for accountability for international rights abuses. Helping are pro-bono attorneys and UC Irvine’s Civil Rights Litigation Clinic, based by lawyer Paul L. Hoffman, a co-counsel and pioneer in such worldwide actions.
Veytia denies the residents’ fees. His New York-based lawyer, Alexei Schacht, labels the accusers “shake-down artists” and “fraudsters” looking for a giant payday.
“Mr. Veytia committed some terrible crimes, but he paid for it in a maximum-security prison and he’s trying to turn his life around,” mentioned Schacht. “It’s unfortunate that these people are lying about him.”
Regardless of the fact, Veytia’s historical past of heinous crimes dramatizes the intractable nexus between Mexican officialdom and the nation’s ruthless mafias. For many years, the lure of cartel money has ensnared prosecutors, generals, mayors, governors — and even the nation’s onetime high legislation enforcement honcho, Genaro García Luna, in opposition to whom Veytia testified in federal court docket in Brooklyn.
That so many corrupt functionaries and cartel capos in the end face accountability in the USA — and never in Mexico — underscores a basic weak spot of the Mexican justice system, observers say.
“It’s one more instance of official impunity in Mexico,” mentioned Guillermo Garduño, a researcher on the Autonomous Metropolitan College in Mexico Metropolis. “Organized crime and many politicians in this country are one and the same. The Veytia case is a very clear example of that, though it’s far from the only one.”
Genaro García Luna stands flanked by U.S. Marshals as he reads his sentencing assertion throughout his sentencing listening to in federal court docket in New York.
(Elizabeth Williams / Related Press)
The Massachusetts-sized state of Nayarit, inhabitants 1.2 million, boasts each a tourist-beckoning coast (“The Nayarit Riviera”) and a mountainous inside the place cultivation of opium poppies and marijuana has lengthy supplied a subsistence dwelling for some peasants.
Nayarit’s location, sandwiched between the drug-trafficking hubs of Sinaloa and Jalisco states, made it prized turf as organized crime syndicates expanded their terrain and embraced new rackets. Violence escalated quickly in Nayarit, and elsewhere in Mexico, after President Felipe Calderón, with U.S. backing, declared “war” in 2006 on drug cartels.
Gun battles and gang killings convulsed Tepic, Nayarit’s volcano-ringed capital, the place the murder fee quickly rivaled that of Mexico’s hyper-violent border cities.
“There were people hung from bridges,” Veytia testified when requested to explain Tepic in these days. “There were people who showed up skinned.”
And, he added, there was an particularly macabre observe, a warning that evoked pozole, the signature Mexican corn and meat stew.
“They were these big tins where they would put dismembered parts like legs, heads,” Veytia mentioned. “And they would add some corn grains to it, and call it pozole.”
Veytia, who attended elementary faculty in San Diego — he’s a joint U.S.-Mexican citizen — arrived in Tepic within the early Nineties, working a transport agency and a jewellery store, in line with his testimony. He says he later earned a legislation diploma.
Veytia hitched his fortune to the spurs of the charismatic Roberto Sandoval, a glad-handing pol in a cowboy hat who was elected mayor of Tepic and, in 2011, governor of Nayarit. Sandoval named Veytia to high legislation enforcement slots in each the capital and the state because the folksy politician amassed illicit riches, in line with prosecutors. (Sandoval stays jailed in Mexico on corruption fees, which he denies.).
Veytia, a portly determine with a bushy mustache, appeared an unlikely Eliot Ness, however he was credited with lowering violence and hailed as “the terror of every criminal” in a laudatory corrido, or ballad.
In truth, human rights activists say, Veytia crafted a form of a paz narca, or narco-peace: His legions of corrupt cops didn’t mess with Veyta’s favored mobsters of the second — those lining his pockets. That assured one gang’s dominance. Intra-cartel warfare plummeted, however drug trafficking boomed.
From the second of his arrest, Veytia tried to safe favor by informing on different narcos, and in 2019 he obtained his massive break with the arrest in Texas of García Luna, Mexico’s safety chief below ex-President Calderón. García Luna was a giant fish able to be fried in Brooklyn.
However throughout his testimony, Veytia recounted his personal crimes. Throughout his nine-year legislation enforcement profession, Veytia mentioned, he pocketed about $1 million in kickbacks, together with presents, together with Rolex watches, from traffickers — who dubbed him El Diablo — Veytia admitted being “responsible” for the murders of 10 “or more” individuals and the torture of dozens of others using numerous strategies — typically electrical shocks, typically waterboarding.
Mexican President Felipe Calderón, heart, stands alongside Mexico’s Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna, left, and congressional chief Cesar Duarte, proper, throughout a gathering of the Nationwide Safety Council in Mexico Metropolis in 2008.
(Gregory Bull / Related Press)
Whereas testifying in opposition to García Luna, Veytia dropped a bombshell: He mentioned a former Nayarit governor (not Sandoval) had instructed him that orders got here from then-President Calderón and García Luna to guard the legendary Sinaloa cartel boss, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Calderón, who was by no means charged within the case, denounced Veytia’s testimony as “an absolute lie.”
However a jury in 2023 convicted García Luna of pocketing tens of millions of {dollars} in bribes from the Sinaloa cartel. He was sentenced to 38 years in jail.
A choose halved Veytia’s sentence, from 20 to 10 years. When Veytia walked out of jail in February, he had served barely lower than eight years.
In response to his lawyer, Veytia misplaced most of his gathered wealth on authorized charges and seizures of properties in Mexico, the place prosecutors are looking for his extradition on kidnapping, torture and different fees.
The ghosts of crimes previous have proved persistent. Within the civil lawsuit, Nayarit residents say Veytia tortured them, threatened to kill them and engaged in systematic property theft as he infected a statewide “culture of fear.”
Among the many plaintiffs are Gerardo Montoya and his spouse, Yadira Yesenia Zavala.
In June 2016, the couple allege in court docket papers, cops waylaid them on a street, handcuffed them and drove them to see “boss Veytia” at a police headquarters in Tepic. In response to Montoya, Veytia threatened to kill him until he turned over a property the couple owned. Montoya mentioned he was overwhelmed so badly {that a} paramedic was known as to examine on him. His spouse says she was sexually harassed and compelled to go residence and retrieve the deed. The couple says Veytia pressured them to signal away the property.
Earlier than he was launched, Montoya mentioned, Veytia warned him: “If you say anything, you’re a dead man.”
Yuri Disraili Camacho Vega, a former Nayarit state police officer, mentioned he resigned from the power fearing for his life. Camacho mentioned he acquired loss of life threats after submitting a legal grievance with federal authorities denouncing Veytia’s directive ordering police to guard members of an notorious crime household.
Upon returning to Nayarit greater than a 12 months later to go to his ailing mom, Camacho mentioned he was arrested, accused of driving a stolen automobile, tortured and jailed.
In response to Camacho, Veytia demanded that Camacho withdraw his allegations in opposition to him — and fork over 1 million pesos, then the equal of about $77,000. Camacho mentioned he was severely overwhelmed and subjected to waterboarding, or simulated drowning.
If he didn’t comply with Veytia’s phrases, Camacho mentioned he was instructed, he and his family members could be killed. Camacho mentioned his household made the cost and he withdrew the grievance.
In court docket papers, Veytia denies all of it. He accused Montoya of being “a longtime drug trafficker” and known as Camacho a “thoroughly corrupt officer” who labored for the Sinaloa cartel and tried to kill Veytia.
Veytia’s lawyer, Schacht, mentioned the allegations defy credibility. Recalling how Veytia wielded energy in his narco days, Schacht mentioned, “If my client wanted to torture you, you would be dead.”
Particular correspondents Cecilia Sánchez Vidal and Liliana Nieto del Río contributed to this report.
