Alejandro Gertz Manero has left the Attorney General’s Office (FGR) in Mexico, after a lengthy negotiation with the ruling party, this Thursday. His term ended in January 2028. According to several sources close to the negotiation, the idea was for Gertz, 86, to present his resignation in the morning, thus avoiding the narrative of confrontation, he, on the one hand, and the Government and Morena’s leg in the Senate, on the other. But the hours passed and the resignation did not arrive. In the end, it happened this afternoon after hours of speculation and rumors. In his resignation text, Gertz assures that the president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has offered him the position of ambassador “in a friendly country.” In one of his last acts as head of the Prosecutor’s Office, Gertz appointed Ernestina Godoy, the legal advisor to the presidency, as a specialized prosecutor for Competence Control. The maneuver confirms the official, a woman Sheinbaum fully trusts, as the country’s new attorney general. Godoy will occupy the position on an interim basis until the Senate endorses the process.
The waiver text says: “Said proposal [la de ocupar una embajada] It will allow me the possibility of continuing to serve my country, in a new task that honors me and that I am grateful for; thus ratifying my long-standing vocation for public service; which is why, as of this date and with all the corresponding legal effects, I am retiring from my current position as Attorney General.”
The sources cited above, aware of the entire resignation process, assure that Gertz falls due to the cooling of his relationship with the president and the Security Cabinet in recent weeks. Gertz, who came to the position with the support of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-2024), thus concludes his time at the helm of the agency, a trajectory marked by his bureaucratic transformation, from the Attorney General’s Office to the Prosecutor’s Office, and also marked by the chiaroscuros of Gertz himself, an elusive official, incapable of bringing to trial the corruption of past governments.
It marks the end of a period in Mexico, of which the senior official was one of the few survivors. Of those who came—or returned—to power with López Obrador, inside or outside the cabinet, the prosecutor was almost the only one who held on, aware of his nine years in office. , former holder of the Security and Citizen Protection portfolio. Many times anticipated these years, mainly due to her age and alleged serious ailments never confirmed, the Senate, in charge of finding a replacement, is now writing her political obituary.
The departure of the prosecutor allows the Government to redesign the federal security apparatus, led by the president, Claudia Sheinbaum. In these 13 months of her mandate, the head of the Executive has tried to show a certain closeness with the prosecutor, who regularly attended meetings of the Security Cabinet, and even Sheinbaum’s own morning press conferences. This closeness was also noticeable in the facilities that Gertz gave so that the president and her security team, led by the secretary of the branch, could place their bishops in the unit, in the case of César Oliveros, landed in the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime.
But his departure paves the way for Sheinbaum and his Government, aware of the serious problem they have with impunity, the number of crimes – the majority of a local nature, it is true – that arrive with force at the court and that then fall apart in the arena of the hearings, either due to lack of evidence or due to their mediocrity. One of the objectives of the Security Cabinet, as Harfuch has repeated these months, is to strengthen criminal investigations, refine the evidence so that cases do not fall before the judge. The arrival of a new prosecutor, close to your ideas and interests, would put an end to any excuse for the future, in terms of results.
Gertz now goes down in history as the first attorney general of the independent Republic and, also, for starring in one of the most notorious cases of possible influence peddling in recent years in the country, which featured her in-laws, and her daughters. In summary, Gertz accused the former couple and their two daughters of not taking good care of his brother, who was ill with pneumonia, causing his death. After he died in 2015, the complaint filed with the Mexico City Prosecutor’s Office by Gertz, then in the private sector, was unsuccessful. But, for some reason, the process revived after his arrival at the FGR.
With Gertz installed at the head of the department, the capital’s Prosecutor’s Office, then in the hands of Ernestina Godoy, until yesterday legal advisor to the Executive, reactivated the case against the ex-partner of the prosecutor’s brother and his two daughters. In September 2020, Godoy’s agents obtained arrest warrants against them and, in October, they arrested one of the daughters, Alejandra Cuevas. Although he never lived with his mother and prosecutor Gertz’s brother, Cuevas spent a year and a half in prison. Until, in March 2022, the Supreme Court of Justice dismissed his case and returned him to freedom.
The prosecutor has been the protagonist of other controversies these years, some perhaps embarrassing, due to the expectations created, which for the moment have come to nothing. The Odebrecht case easily appears on this list, the spearhead of the López Obrador Administration’s efforts against the corruption of previous governments. In July 2019, a judge granted several arrest warrants against the former director of the state oil company, Pemex, Emilio Lozoya, during the years of President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-2018), and some family members. According to the accusation, Lozoya was in the middle of a bribery scheme, paid by the construction company Odebrecht, in exchange for public contracts.
The case raised eyebrows like few others, and made us think that justice was possible. In his statements, Lozoya involved a good number of senior officials from his government and the opposition, but the impossibility of proving his statements has left the case fallow. To date, there is not a single conviction in this matter. The same has happened with cases of corruption of the Workplace, an organization that fought for the food security of the population and that welcomed millionaire embezzlements. To this day, the FGR keeps mid-level officials in prison, without any sentence.
Another stain on Gertz’s file is the decline in the investigations into the Ayotzinapa case. Promoted by López Obrador, the investigation into the disappearance of 43 boys, in the municipality of Iguala, in Guerrero, in 2014, brought excitement to the country and, above all, to the families of the disappeared, after years of immobility by the authorities, in a case that touched the nerve of the nation. After two promising first years, in which Gertz’s investigators even managed to identify the bones of two boys, the prosecutor, pushed by López Obrador, forced the departure of the person in charge of the case, Omar Gómez, returning the investigations to the freezer, in a move that is still incomprehensible today.
It seemed unlikely that Gertz would remain in public service. An octogenarian in his second five years, the wear and tear of his years in the Prosecutor’s Office signaled his retirement, especially after the death, a couple of years ago, of his long-time collaborator, Juan Ramos. But the embassy option will keep him active now. He leaves behind half a life of public service, linked to different political parties and movements. Before becoming a prosecutor, Gertz was a deputy, chief of the police of the capital and the country, an agent of the old prosecutor’s office, part of the team that led the first operations to eradicate illicit crops in the country… If one day he writes his memoirs, ignoring them would be a great sin.
