Retired Mexican general shot in capital; was accused and cleared of drug ties, rights abuses

Mexican general formerly tied to cartels is shot

MEXICO CITY — A retired general who was convicted and later cleared of aiding one of Mexico’s most powerful drug lords has been shot in the capital.

Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro was in intensive care at a military hospital Wednesday, city Attorney General Miguel Angel Mancera said.

Mancera did not give details of Tuesday night’s shooting in a central Mexico City neighborhood, though he said police had identified one possible suspect.

“We do not have the line of investigation absolutely defined,” Mancera told MVS Radio. “It could have been a direct attack on the general or it could have been a robbery. We are not ruling that out.”

Acosta, who reached the rank of brigadier general, was incarcerated in 2000 on charges of protecting former Juarez cartel leader Amado Carillo Fuentes, who had died three years earlier after botched plastic surgery.

But in 2007 a panel of judges overturned Acosta’s drug trafficking conviction and ordered him released, ruling that prosecutors failed to prove the alleged links to Carillo Fuentes.

In 2002, Acosta was accused of homicide in the disappearance of leftist activists and revolutionaries during the government’s so-called dirty war against dissent during the 1970s and 1980s.

A judge determined that Acosta was not responsible for the disappearances and the charges were dismissed.