MEXICO CITY — By his own admission, the Mexican lawman known as El Diablo — The Devil — supervised a scourge of torture, murder, kidnappings, land grabs and other abuses while amassing a fortune in cartel bribes that bankrolled purchases of homes, cattle and a fleet of buses.
Edgar Veytia’s transgressions came while he was the top cop in Nayarit, a small Pacific Coast state that evolved from a sleepy backwater to one of Mexico’s most violent cartel battlegrounds.
Veytia, who honed the public persona of a crusading, pistol-packing prosecutor, brazenly traveled between Mexico and the United States, confident that no one would see beyond 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. agents busted Veytia at a border crossing in San Diego. This was no low-level mule who ferried drugs on his person, but a state attorney general who had facilitated cartel smuggling for years. Veytia pleaded guilty in January 2019 to narcotics trafficking.
El Diablo, however, knew where the bodies were buried — a knowledge he peddled tirelessly to his U.S. handlers. And when he testified against an even bigger Mexican narco-politician, he secured a get-out-of-jail card — before completing even half of his 20-year U.S. prison sentence.
Veytia, 55, was released from prison in Februaryand is currently a free man, residing in the northeastern United States. But now he is facing some of his alleged victims in a singular legal action.
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
— Alexei Schacht, attorney for Edgar Veytia
Five Nayarit families — among them farmers, small business owners and a former police officer — are suing Veytia in federal court in Washington, D.C., under the Torture Victim Protection Act. The law, passed in 1992, allows civil claims against abusers who, while acting in official capacities for foreign governments, engaged in atrocities anywhere in the world.
The Nayarit plaintiffs say they endured torture, death threats and extortion during El Diablo’s reign of terror. While Veytia may have paid his dues under U.S. law, they say his mostly anonymous victims in Mexico, some long-ago slain or disappeared, merit 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 said in a statement. “In the face of that abandonment, we came together—as civil society—to resist silence and impunity.”
Representing the Nayarit residents — who are seeking unspecified damages — is San Francisco-based Guernica37, a nonprofit organization seeking accountability for global rights abuses. Assisting are pro-bono lawyers and UC Irvine’s Civil Rights Litigation Clinic, founded by attorney Paul L. Hoffman, a co-counsel and pioneer in such international actions.
Veytia denies the residents’ charges. His New York-based lawyer, Alexei Schacht, labels the accusers “shake-down artists” and “fraudsters” seeking a big 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,” said Schacht. “It’s unfortunate that these people are lying about him.”
Whatever the truth, Veytia’s history of heinous crimes dramatizes the intractable nexus between Mexican officialdom and the country’s ruthless mafias. For decades, the lure of cartel cash has ensnared prosecutors, generals, mayors, governors — and even the country’s onetime top law enforcement honcho, Genaro García Luna, against whom Veytia testified in federal court in Brooklyn.
That so many corrupt functionaries and cartel capos ultimately face responsibility in the United States — and not in Mexico — underscores a fundamental weakness of the Mexican justice system, observers say.
“It’s one more instance of official impunity in Mexico,” said Guillermo Garduño, a researcher at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City. “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 statement during his sentencing hearing in federal court in New York.
(Elizabeth Williams / Associated Press)
The Massachusetts-sized state of Nayarit, population 1.2 million, boasts both a tourist-beckoning coast (“The Nayarit Riviera”) and a mountainous interior where cultivation of opium poppies and marijuana has long provided a subsistence living 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 rapidly 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, where the homicide rate soon rivaled that of Mexico’s hyper-violent border cities.
“There were people hung from bridges,” Veytia testified when asked to describe Tepic in those days. “There were people who showed up skinned.”
And, he added, there was an especially macabre practice, 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 said. “And they would add some corn grains to it, and call it pozole.”
Veytia, who attended elementary school in San Diego — he is a joint U.S.-Mexican citizen — arrived in Tepic in the early 1990s, running a transport firm and a jewelry shop, according to his testimony. He says he later earned a law degree.
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 top law enforcement slots in both the capital and the state as the folksy politician amassed illicit riches, according to prosecutors. (Sandoval remains jailed in Mexico on corruption charges, which he denies.).
Veytia, a portly figure with a bushy mustache, seemed an unlikely Eliot Ness, but he was credited with reducing violence and hailed as “the terror of every criminal” in a laudatory corrido, or ballad.
In fact, human rights activists say, Veytia crafted a kind of a paz narca, or narco-peace: His legions of corrupt cops didn’t mess with Veyta’s favored mobsters of the moment — the ones lining his pockets. That guaranteed one gang’s dominance. Intra-cartel warfare plummeted, but drug trafficking boomed.
From the moment of his arrest, Veytia tried to secure favor by informing on other narcos, and in 2019 he got his big break with the arrest in Texas of García Luna, Mexico’s security chief under ex-President Calderón. García Luna was a big fish ready to be fried in Brooklyn.
But during his testimony, Veytia recounted his own crimes. During his nine-year law enforcement career, Veytia said, he pocketed about $1 million in kickbacks, along with gifts, including Rolex watches, from traffickers — who dubbed him El Diablo — Veytia admitted being “responsible” for the murders of 10 “or more” people and the torture of dozens of others utilizing various methods — sometimes electric shocks, sometimes waterboarding.
Mexican President Felipe Calderón, center, stands alongside Mexico’s Public Safety Secretary Genaro García Luna, left, and congressional leader Cesar Duarte, right, during a meeting of the National Security Council in Mexico City in 2008.
(Gregory Bull / Associated Press)
While testifying against García Luna, Veytia dropped a bombshell: He said a former Nayarit governor (not Sandoval) had told him that orders came from then-President Calderón and García Luna to protect the legendary Sinaloa cartel boss, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Calderón, who was never charged in the case, denounced Veytia’s testimony as “an absolute lie.”
But a jury in 2023 convicted García Luna of pocketing millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa cartel. He was sentenced to 38 years in prison.
A judge halved Veytia’s sentence, from 20 to 10 years. When Veytia walked out of prison in February, he had served slightly less than eight years.
According to his lawyer, Veytia lost most of his accumulated wealth on legal fees and seizures of properties in Mexico, where prosecutors are seeking his extradition on kidnapping, torture and other charges.
The ghosts of crimes past have proved persistent. In the civil lawsuit, Nayarit residents say Veytia tortured them, threatened to kill them and engaged in systematic property theft as he inflamed a statewide “culture of fear.”
Among the plaintiffs are Gerardo Montoya and his wife, Yadira Yesenia Zavala.
In June 2016, the couple allege in court papers, cops waylaid them on a road, handcuffed them and drove them to see “boss Veytia” at a police headquarters in Tepic. According to Montoya, Veytia threatened to kill him unless he turned over a property the couple owned. Montoya said he was beaten so badly that a paramedic was called to check on him. His wife says she was sexually harassed and forced to go home and retrieve the deed. The couple says Veytia forced them to sign away the property.
Before he was released, Montoya said, Veytia warned him: “If you say anything, you’re a dead man.”
Yuri Disraili Camacho Vega, a former Nayarit state police officer, said he resigned from the force fearing for his life. Camacho said he received death threats after filing a criminal complaint with federal authorities denouncing Veytia’s directive ordering police to protect members of an infamous crime family.
Upon returning to Nayarit more than a year later to visit his ailing mother, Camacho said he was arrested, accused of driving a stolen vehicle, tortured and jailed.
According to Camacho, Veytia demanded that Camacho withdraw his allegations against him — and fork over 1 million pesos, then the equivalent of about $77,000. Camacho said he was severely beaten and subjected to waterboarding, or simulated drowning.
If he didn’t agree to Veytia’s terms, Camacho said he was told, he and his loved ones would be killed. Camacho said his family made the payment and he withdrew the complaint.
In court papers, Veytia denies it all. He accused Montoya of being “a longtime drug trafficker” and called Camacho a “thoroughly corrupt officer” who worked for the Sinaloa cartel and tried to kill Veytia.
Veytia’s lawyer, Schacht, said the allegations defy credibility. Recalling how Veytia wielded power in his narco days, Schacht said, “If my client wanted to torture you, you would be dead.”
Special correspondents Cecilia Sánchez Vidal and Liliana Nieto del Río contributed to this report.
