Alejandro Gertz Manero, one of the old wolves of Mexican politics, has left his position as attorney general, but he is not giving up on public life, at the age of eighty-six. The official will be an ambassador “to a friendly country,” as he confirmed in his resignation letter. His departure had been rumored several times before, as were his health problems, but on Thursday at the end of November he ended up stepping down. Gertz waited until 5:15 p.m. To submit his resignation, after hours of chaos in the Senate. His resignation leaves President Claudia Sheinbaum free to form her security cabinet. So far, Gertz has been the only piece not selected by the Morino boss.
Gertz became Mexico’s first attorney general in January 2019, proposed by President Andres Manuel López Obrador. Before that, the Public Prosecutor’s Office was the Public Prosecutor’s Office. Although it seemed like a cosmetic change, it was a profound constitutional reform that sought to give the institution independence of action in relation to the executive. From then on, the Head of the Prosecutor’s Office will continue in office for a period of nine years and will exercise it over a period of time, meaning that he can no longer be removed at the will of the new President. Thus, Gertz, who was 79 when he became attorney general, was supposed to remain in office until the age of 88. But he hasn’t arrived yet. But he had in his hands a power that could be turned into a weapon: institutional independence. Gertz’s critics assert that he used his enormous influence to settle a personal vendetta and supposedly protect companies. A defender of the Mexican people on paper, he was, in the eyes of many, a selfish pretender.
Gertz’s appointment as attorney general in 2019 marked the political survivor’s return to public life. Originally from Mexico City, scion of a wealthy family and skilled in the fine arts, he began his career in public service as soon as he obtained a law degree in 1961, in the last phase of the government of Adolfo López Mateos, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). At the dawn of his youth, he combined the work of a bureaucrat with that of an entrepreneur, teacher, researcher and writer (he is the author of dozens of historical and biographical books, according to his autobiography).
In just over a decade, he went from holding minor positions in government — aide, private secretary, legal advisor — to becoming, in 1975, in the administration of Luis Echeverría, Mexico’s first drug czar. His office was officially called the National Coordination for the Anti-Drug Trafficking Campaign. Informally, this “campaign” became known as Operation Condor It witnessed the birth of the punitive approach to combating drugs, which sparked a crisis of violence, disappearances and forced displacement in the country.
In 1998, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, founder of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), appointed him Secretary of Public Security in Mexico City. Cárdenas became the first politician opposed to the regime to win the capital by vote. Was Geertz’s shift to the left of a bureaucrat empowered over decades by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or was it a change in the wardrobe of a pragmatist who acted in that phase that is politics? After all, Geertz, a lover of the play, was the son of a fantasy writer — Mercedes Manero — and he founded the National Association of Theater Producers in 1975.
Gertz lasted two years as an official in Cárdenas’ government. In 2000, he became Secretary of Federal Public Security for Vicente Fox, a charismatic businessman from the conservative National Action Party (PAN). From there, Gertz witnessed what Joaquin was like El Chapo Guzmán, the Sinaloa cartel boss, escaped for the first time – because he might do it again – from a supposed maximum-security prison in Jalisco in 2001, hiding in a laundry cart. Guzman Loera would not be arrested until 13 years later. Despite everything, Gertz retained his position until 2004, when he resigned to retire at the age of 65.
Gertz had no financial concerns. The lawyer, grandson of the German businessman Cornelius Gertz, had a fortune that enabled him to purchase four houses in Spain in the years following his retirement, worth 113 million pesos (more than six million dollars), according to an investigation conducted by this newspaper. In addition, he bought an apartment in New York and another in Santa Monica, California, worth $3.5 million, according to what he published. Univision. This is without counting the 122 luxury cars he acquired for 110 million pesos, according to the Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) accusation that was made public. Global. Gertz has always denied any irregularities in his enormous wealth, the size of which he did not disclose to the Ministry of Public Administration, nor any potential conflict of interest.
In 2009, Gertz returned to the political arena as federal representative of the Ciudadano Movement, a young left-wing party. In the three years he spent in his seat, he presented 14 reform initiatives, none of which succeeded, and he missed more than half of the votes.
López Obrador’s arrival into government after the 2018 elections meant a new return for Gertz to politics, this time with power he had never enjoyed in the past six decades as a civil servant. The architect of his approach to the Obrador movement and his subsequent appointment to the position of Attorney General was Julio Scherer Ibarra, who was a legal advisor to the Presidency. Allies at the start of the six-year period, the resounding dissolution of both in 2021 called into question the integrity of the administration of justice and the prosecution of the crime with Gertz at FGR.
The most scandalous case is that involving his ex-sister-in-law Laura Moran and her daughter Alejandra Cuevas, whom Gertz reported to the Mexico City prosecutor’s office about the death of his brother Federico. The official accused them of murder because they neglected their relative’s health. The D.C. District Attorney’s Office closed the case in 2016 due to lack of evidence. However, it reopened in 2020, after Gertz took the reins of FGR. Alejandra Cuevas was immediately arrested and taken to prison, where she remained for a year and a half, until the Supreme Court of Justice ordered her release.
Beyond matters in which Gertz may have had a personal interest, he was certainly a companion who understood President López Obrador’s desires and steered the Attorney General’s Office in the direction of those winds. There are several examples. When the United States government arrested General Salvador Cienfuegos, the former Minister of Defense, on charges of drug smuggling, the Mexican president was disturbed by the damage these accusations might cause to the image of the armed forces. Cienfuegos was extradited to Mexico, and shortly after, FGR reported that it would not take legal action against him due to lack of evidence. Not only that: Geertz threatened to file international complaints against American investigators who dared to point the finger at the general.
Lopez Obrador has said on several occasions that he believes it is better for those accused of corruption to return what was stolen rather than spend their lives in prison. The Attorney General heard the president’s strange concept of justice, and on that basis filed an FGR lawsuit over the million-dollar fraud against Pemex and government kickbacks. Odebrecht case Which amounted to Enrique Peña Nieto’s six-year term, as with Alonso Ancerra or Emilio Lozoya.
During the Geertz administration, the FGR also closed the electoral crimes file against Pio López Obrador, the president’s brother, and persecuted 31 Conacyt scholars based on the president’s accusations. This is because the prosecutor did not have the same leniency for López Obrador’s enemies, in the case of Rosario Robles, a former friend and collaborator of the president who turned to the Institutional Revolutionary Party. At FGR’s request, Robles was imprisoned – without penalty – for three years on charges of transferring $1 million in funds. Major scam In Peña Nieto’s government, he was pressured by Gertz to implicate Luis Videgaray, the former Treasury Secretary, in corruption. The plaintiff did not achieve his goal.
Claudia Sheinbaum’s rise to power left Gertz like a misplaced chip. Although the official made gestures toward the new president’s government and toward Omar Garcia Harfouche, the powerful security czar, they were not enough to keep him in office. Weeks ago, it was reported that the National Palace is pressuring the Prosecutor General to leave his position in the FGR, because according to Article 102 of the Constitution, the President of the Republic can only dismiss him for serious reasons. The other option was the thousand-times-mentioned reform of prosecutor’s offices. Sheinbaum implemented López Obrador’s star plan to demolish the judiciary, but all the expert voices pointed in the same direction: without modifying the work of prosecutors’ offices, impunity in the country – which stands at around 95% – will not improve.
Geertz was instrumental to Sheinbaum in bringing an end to some of his government’s early crises, such as the discovery of the Teochitlán Ranch, a forced recruitment center for the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, before which the official stood up to deny that it was an extermination center as research groups had suggested. However, he also received a reprimand from the president for some of his efforts. Latest this week is the controversy between Miss Universe and powerful pageant president Raul Rocha. The businessman had an arrest warrant and had been investigated by the FGR since 2024. Members of the Public Prosecutor’s Office also appear in this investigation. In a snowball fight, Sheinbaum asked Geertz to explain the situation. Moreover, on the same Thursday, a few hours before the Prosecutor General’s resignation, the President, who did not want to advance the departure date, said: “We need more coordination between the State Prosecutor’s Offices and the Office of the Prosecutor General of the Republic.”
Critics of the official consider that Gertz squandered the emerging independence of the FGR government to guide the country, where impunity reigns, towards real justice. The task that will now fall to Sheinbaum’s ally, the final link that closes the chain.