Adrián de la Garza Santos

Adrián Emilio de la Garza Santos (born 17 September 1971) is a Mexican lawyer and politician who served as the municipal president of Monterrey from 2015 to 2021 and as the attorney general of Nuevo León from 2011 to 2015.

Early life and education
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.

Attorney General of Nuevo León
On 3 February 2011, the Governor of Nuevo León, Rodrigo Medina de la Cruz, announced that he would nominate de la Garza as Attorney General. Seven days later, the Congress of Nuevo León held an extraordinary session and unanimously confirmed his nomination.

During his tenure, the Attorney General's Office was restructured to create three regional offices: north, central, and south; the AMBER Alert system was implemented in the state; new uniforms for the Attorney General's Office were introduced; the new organic law of the state prosecutor's office was published, the Specialized Group for Immediate Search was created, and the renovation of the State Investigation Agency building was initiated.

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 election.

Link to Los Zetas
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. 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.

2015
On 15 January 2015, candidate registrations for the Institutional Revolutionary Party began. One week later, Senator Marcela Guerra, who had registered as a precandidate for the municipal president of Monterrey, withdrew in favor of de la Garza. The following day, de la Garza resigned from his position as attorney general to register as a precandidate for municipal president of Monterrey.

On 27 February 2015, the PRI confirmed him as their candidate, and on 2 March 2015, he registered with the State Electoral Commission as the candidate for the coalition Alianza por tu Seguridad, which consisted of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Ecologist Green Party of Mexico, New Alliance Party, and the Democratic Party.

In the election, de la Garza won with 34.4% of the votes, defeating his nearest opponent by nearly 8 points.

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

In the election, de la Garza lost to Felipe de Jesús Cantú of the National Action Party by 4,679 votes. 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. 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.

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.

Fiscal policy
In his first year in office, de la Garza restructured Monterrey's debt, reducing the debt inherited from his predecessor, Margarita Arellanes Cervantes, by approximately 27%. By 2020, he had reduced it by 23% when compared to the initial amount. These efforts, combined with proactive tax policies, prompted various credit rating agencies, such as Standard & Poor's, HR Ratings, and Moody’s, to upgrade the municipality's credit rating, placing it above Mexico's average credit rating.

Crime and policing
During De la Garza's tenure, the municipality added 780 new vehicles to the police force between 2017 and 2020, built a new police academy with an investment of MXN $110 million, 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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

Corruption
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 motorcylces, but the specifications only allowed one company to participate, this being Harley-Davidson. It was also reported that before the invitation to tender had been issued, a local distributer, Coyote Harley-Davidson, had already ordered the sixty motorcycles. 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 purshase as providing continuity to the project, as the same cameras would be used.

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. NGO Redes Quinto Poder accused de la Garza of breaking the law by omitting Vargas' ban when appointing him to his cabinet.