SALTILLO, Coahuila — A former Mexican president has accused the former governor of this state of having allowed Los Zetas drug cartel leaders to “live comfortably”.

During a political rally, former president Felipe Calderon said that former Governor Humberto Moreira, the brother of the current governor, had asked him to remove the Mexican Marines from his state. Calderon is a member of Mexico’s National Action Party, who served as president from 2006 to 2012; he visited this city in an effort to provide support to gubernatorial candidate Guillermo Anaya.

During his speech, Calderon said that when he was president, former governor Humberto Moreira, who was a member of the Revolutionary Institutional Party, asked him to stop sending troops to fight the cartels.

“The most dangerous criminal group that wrecked havoc in Coahuila and in Mexico has been Los Zetas, Calderon said. “When Humberto Moreira was the governor of Coahuila, all of them, all the leaders of Los Zetas lived comfortably in Coahuila.”

The former president is often criticized by international news outlets for using Mexican Marines and the Mexican military to fight cartels. The move was done after organized crime had managed to infiltrate local, state, and federal police forces.

“When the Marines arrived to defend the families in Coahuila, to protect them from extortion, kidnapping, abuse, murder when the marines and the soldiers arrived to liberate Coahuila; Do you know what Humberto Moreira told me?” Calderon asked.

“He called very offended to tell me that I remove the Marines that they had no place in Coahuila, that Coahuila did not have a sea, to get them out.”

Breitbart Texas has reported extensively on how Humberto Moreira, who ran the PRI when current Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto ran for office, has been named as a surrogate of Los Zetas and is credited with providing the cartel with a safe haven in his state. After Moreira left his post to run the PRI, his interim governor continued to turn a blind eye to the actions of Los Zetas. A three-month investigation by Breitbart Texas revealed that from 2011 to 2013, Los Zetas were able to incinerate more than 300 victims from the rural areas near Allende. Half of those victims were burned inside the state prison in the border city of Piedras Negras.

Moreira and various other individuals tied to his cabinet have had properties and sums of money seized by U.S. federal authorities in Texas. Moreira spent several weeks inside a Spanish prison after having been accused of laundering money, as Breitbart Texas reported. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto had his staff exert political pressure in order to have the case dismissed. The charges against Moreira in Spain for laundering money were based on information from U.S. federal court documents that linked his wealth to cartel bribes. Moreira has not been criminally charged in Texas, however, it remains unclear if he has a sealed indictment since court records in the civil forfeiture cases hint at a fear of being arrested. Both Humberto and his brother the current Governor Ruben Moreira have not been seen north of the border in years.

Ildefonso Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded the Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and Stephen K. Bannon. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook.

“J.M. Martinez” from the Cartel Chronicles project contrtibuted to this report.

