MEXICO CITY — Two senior army generals were jailed Thursday on drug trafficking charges, in one of the biggest public scandals to hit Mexico's secretive military in decades, officials announced.
"This is an important breakthrough. It establishes a precedent," said Roderic A. Camp, a political scientist at Claremont College near Los Angeles and an expert on Mexico's military.
At the urging of the U.S., Mexico's military has taken an increasingly prominent role in the fight against drugs in recent years, as shipments of U.S.-bound cocaine have soared. But critics have warned that the military could face the same corruption that has crippled this country's police forces. The arrests appeared to underscore that problem.
The Defense Ministry announced Thursday night that retired Division Gen. Francisco Quiroz Hermosillo and Brig. Gen. Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro have been jailed on drug charges.
It was only the second time that senior military officials have been detained for suspected narcotics trafficking. The first incident, the 1997 arrest and, later, conviction of Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, Mexico's top anti-drug enforcer, provoked shock in this nation and among U.S. officials, who were appalled to find that corruption had reached the highest levels of the government.
Quiroz Hermosillo and Acosta Chaparro were not as well known publicly as the anti-drug czar. But they were among the most senior officials in the military. Acosta Chaparro was a legend in the war against Mexico's small left-wing guerrilla bands in the 1970s. Quiroz Hermosillo was a three-star division general--the highest army rank--and was director-general of a key department, military transportation, until 1998.
"Nobody of that rank has been publicly arrested [on narcotics charges] with the exception of the drug czar. And that was a very quick, sudden case, which received a lot of attention. This is something more fundamental," Camp said.
"It gets at what a number of us have recognized is corruption at the highest ranks of the military--about which no one has ever done anything."
The military prosecutor, Gen. Rafael Macedo de la Concha, told reporters that more military officials could be involved, prompting speculation that the scandal could widen.
In its two-page communique issued Thursday, the Defense Ministry said an investigation of the two generals began in 1998, when participants in the country's fledgling witness-protection program implicated the pair in testimony to Justice Ministry investigators.
