Adrián de la Garza Santos

Adrián Emilio de la Garza Santos (born 17 September 1971) is a Mexican lawyer and politician who serves as the municipal president of Monterrey since 2024. He previously held the same position for two consecutive terms from 2015 to 2021. He also served as the attorney general of Nuevo León from 2011 to 2015.^[1]

De la Garza was born on 17 September 1971 in Monterrey, Nuevo León to Filiberto de la Garza de la Garza and Sandra Santos. His father served as the attorney general of Nuevo León from 1977 to 1979.^[1]

On 3 February 2011, Governor of Nuevo León Rodrigo Medina de la Cruz nominated de la Garza as Attorney General of Nuevo León.^[2][3] His appointment was unanimously confirmed by the Congress of Nuevo León seven days later.^[4] De la Garza took office during a period of heightened violence linked to organized crime, as the state was among the regions most affected by the Mexican Drug War.^[5]

As Attorney General, de la Garza implemented a series of structural and institutional reforms aimed at modernizing the state's justice system. His administration reorganized the Prosecutor's Office into three regional branches—north, central, and south—to decentralize operations and improve response times across the state.^[6] He spearheaded the creation of specialized units, including an Immediate Search Unit for missing persons and a dedicated Criminal Investigation Unit.^[7]

De la Garza's office also introduced the AMBER Alert system to coordinate efforts in locating missing children. Other modernization efforts included the rollout of new, standardized uniforms for investigative agents and forensic personnel and major renovations to the headquarters of the State Investigative Agency.^[8][9]

On 24 January 2015, de la Garza resigned in order to contend for the Institutional Revolutionary Party's nomination for the municipal president of Monterrey in the 2015 state elections.^[10]

Under de la Garza's direction, the state prosecutor's office launched a major investigation of the attacks. The first arrests were announced on 29 August, four days after the attack.^[11] The five detainees confessed to being members of Los Zetas and stated they had only intended to scare the owners, not cause mass casualties.^[11][12] The investigation relied heavily on surveillance footage, which captured the attackers' vehicles and actions, and witness statements used to create portraits of the suspects.^[12] Over the following weeks, the number of detainees grew to at least 17. Key arrests included Carlos Oliva Castillo ("La Rana"), identified as the mastermind of the attack and a high-ranking Zetas leader, and Baltazar Saucedo Estrada ("El Mataperros"), another leader who planned and participated in the attack.^[13][14]

Despite the prosecutor's office successfully identifying and capturing the perpetrators, the cases stalled within Mexico's broader judicial system for many years, with no convictions for murder or arson obtained during the first decade following the attack.^[14][15]

On 13 May 2012, after 49 dismembered bodies were discovered near Cadereyta Jiménez, de la Garza's office led the investigation.^[16] The primary challenge for prosecutors was the forensic work, as the bodies were mutilated to make identification difficult.^[17] The investigation led to a major breakthrough with the arrest of Daniel Elizondo Ramírez ("El Loco"), a regional Zetas leader.^[18][19] Elizondo confessed to organizing and carrying out the massacre under direct orders from the cartel's top commanders.

In October 2016, a police report by the Spanish National Police Corps implicated de la Garza as one of several political contacts of Juan Manuel Muñoz Luévano, alias "El Mono", during his tenure as Attorney General. This conclusion was drawn from years of wiretapping Muñoz Luévano.^[20] Earlier in the same year, Muñoz Luévano had been arrested for his alleged involvement in coordinating the transportation of cocaine into Europe for Los Zetas.^[21]

The process for the 2015 municipal election began within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) on 15 January 2015, when candidate registrations opened. De la Garza, who was serving as the Attorney General of Nuevo León, quickly emerged as the party's frontrunner. In a key move, Senator Marcela Guerra, another prominent aspirant, withdrew her precandidacy in favor of de la Garza.^[22]

Following this consolidation of support, de la Garza resigned from his post as Attorney General on 24 January to officially register as a precandidate for the municipal presidency of Monterrey.^[10][23] His candidacy was approved by the State Electoral Commission on 5 March, representing the Alianza por tu Seguridad coalition, which consisted of the PRI, the Ecologist Green Party of Mexico (PVEM), the New Alliance Party (PANAL), and the local Democratic Party.

In the general election held on 7 June 2015, de la Garza secured a victory with 34.4% of the vote. His main opponent, Iván Garza Téllez of the National Action Party (PAN), finished second with approximately 26.5% of the vote.^[24] De la Garza's victory returned the PRI to power in Monterrey after nine years of PAN governance.

In early 2018, de la Garza shared a video on social media confirming his intention to seek reelection.^[25]

In the election, de la Garza lost to Felipe de Jesús Cantú of the National Action Party by 4,679 votes.^[26] De la Garza contested the election at the Electoral Tribunal of Nuevo León, which decided to annul ballot boxes favoring the National Action Party, thereby reversing the result and granting the office to de la Garza.^[27] However, the regional chamber of the Federal Electoral Tribunal overturned this decision, declaring Cantú the winner. De la Garza appealed to the highest chamber of the Federal Electoral Tribunal, which annulled the election and scheduled a special election for December.^[28]

The special election was held on 23 December 2018, in which de la Garza won with 41.22% of the vote, becoming the first municipal president of Monterrey to be reelected for a consecutive term. Turnout for this election was significantly lower than the previous one, with only 33.04% of citizens voting, compared to the 59.7% turnout in the previous election.^[29]

Upon taking office in 2015, the municipality of Monterrey carried a debt exceeding 3.8 billion pesos, including both bank loans and obligations to suppliers. By the third quarter of 2020, the debt had been reduced to 1.97 billion pesos, representing a 23% decrease from the amount inherited at the beginning of the administration.^[30][31][32] The municipal government also renegotiated its credit agreements with financial institutions, lowering interest rates from 0.79% to 0.50% on one facility and from 0.62% to 0.48% on another.^[33] These fiscal consolidation measures, together with revenue-strengthening policies, led to upgrades in Monterrey’s credit ratings: Standard & Poor's raised the rating from “AA (stable)” to “AA (positive)” in February 2019, HR Ratings increased it from “HR AA–” to “HR AA” with a stable outlook, and Moody’s upgraded the rating to “Ba1/A1.mx” in May 2018, placing Monterrey above the national municipal average.^[34]

The administration modernized property tax (predial) collection systems and increased cadastral values by 25% in 2016.^[35] Special rates were enforced for vulnerable populations including widows, retirees, people with disabilities, and single mothers. These reforms increased property tax collection by 71% between 2014 and 2018, with Monterrey becoming the top revenue collector among Mexican municipalities, generating 47% of total income from own-source revenue.^[36][37]

During De la Garza's tenure, the municipality added 780 new vehicles to the police force between 2017 and 2020,^[38] built a new police academy with an investment of MXN $110 million,^[39] and, as part of the Sistema de Seguridad e Inteligencia (in English: Security and Intelligence System), installed four thousand CCTV cameras, establishing the city's first security camera system.^[40] However, in late 2021, his successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio Riojas, revealed that half of the security camera network was not functional and that 277 of the 452 patrol cars were inoperable.^[41]

De la Garza presided over a 79% increase in the homicide rate, from 130 homicides in 2015, when most of the year was under his predecessor, to 233 in 2021, the final year of his second term. The total number of homicides during his first term was 589, marking a 13% increase compared to his predecessor's term, which recorded 520 homicides. In his second term, the total number of homicides reached 680, reflecting a 17% increase compared to his first term.^[42] However, other crimes saw a decrease throughout both of his terms, with business robberies dropping by 52%, house robberies by 26%, and vehicle robberies by 24% between 2015 and 2021.^[42]

During de la Garza's first term, the perception of security decreased every year, measured in the fourth trimester of each year, dropping from 32.2 in 2016 to its all-time low of 15.2 in 2018. However, during his second term, this figure increased every year, reaching 30.3 by 2021.^[43]

During de la Garza's security projects, there were several irregularities with the invitations to tender. In 2016, his administration issued an invitation to tender for the purchase of sixty police motorcycles, but the specifications only allowed one company to participate, this being Harley-Davidson.^[44] It was also reported that before the invitation to tender had been issued, a local distributor, Coyote Harley-Davidson, had already ordered the sixty motorcycles.^[45][46] Additionally, in 2020, de la Garza's administration directly purchased two thousand security cameras without issuing an invitation to tender from a company that had supplied security cameras previously, justifying the purchase as providing continuity to the project, as the same cameras would be used.^[47]

In 2019, de la Garza appointed Federico Vargas as Monterrey's Secretary of Infrastructure, despite Vargas being banned from holding public office for ten years due to corruption during his tenure as the state's Secretary of Economic Development and Social Development under Governor Rodrigo Medina de la Cruz.^[48] NGO Redes Quinto Poder accused de la Garza of breaking the law by omitting Vargas' ban when appointing him to his cabinet.^[49]