Adrián Emilio de la Garza Santos (born 17 September 1971) is a Mexican lawyer and politician of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who has served as municipal president of Monterrey since 2024. He previously held the office from 2015 to 2018 and from 2019 to 2021, and was attorney general of Nuevo León from 2011 to 2015.
De la Garza spent two decades in the Nuevo León state justice apparatus before Governor Rodrigo Medina de la Cruz appointed him attorney general in February 2011. He held the post through the most violent years of the Mexican drug war in the state, directing the investigations into the 2011 Monterrey casino attack and the Cadereyta Jiménez massacre. He resigned in January 2015 to seek the PRI nomination for the Monterrey mayoralty, which he won that June, returning the party to control of the city after nine years of National Action Party government. His narrow defeat in the 2018 election was overturned through a five-month sequence of electoral challenges that ended in the annulment of the contest; he won the resulting special election in December 2018 and became the first municipal president of Monterrey to serve consecutive terms.
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 attorney general of Nuevo León from 1977 to 1979.
He studied law and social sciences at the Autonomous University of Nuevo León, where he also completed a master's degree in criminal sciences. He later took postgraduate diplomas in oral trials and in the development and administration of intelligence systems at the Monterrey Institute of Technology.
Early legal career De la Garza entered the Nuevo León state justice system in 1990 as political subdirector and general secretary to the head of the state Judicial Police. He subsequently worked as a qualifying judge and adviser to the legal subdirector of the state Directorate of Public Security, and as private secretary both to the attorney general and to the director general of public security.
Within the state Attorney General's Office he rose from an internship to head the Directorate of Preliminary Investigations in 2007 and the State Investigative Agency in 2010.
Attorney general of Nuevo León (2011–2015)
Appointment
On 3 February 2011, Governor Rodrigo Medina de la Cruz nominated de la Garza as attorney general of Nuevo León. The Congress of Nuevo León confirmed the appointment unanimously seven days later. He took office during a period of heightened violence linked to organized crime, with Nuevo León among the states most affected by the Mexican drug war.
Reorganization of the prosecutor's office De la Garza reorganized the state prosecutor's office into three regional branches—north, central and south—with the stated aim of decentralizing operations and shortening response times. He created specialized units, among them an immediate search unit for missing persons and a criminal investigation unit.
His office introduced the AMBER Alert system in the state for locating missing children, issued standardized uniforms for investigative agents and forensic personnel, and renovated the headquarters of the State Investigative Agency.
Organized crime cases
On 25 August 2011, gunmen set fire to the Casino Royale in Monterrey, killing 52 people. The state prosecutor's office under de la Garza announced the first arrests four days later. The five detainees said they belonged to Los Zetas and had intended to frighten the owners rather than cause mass casualties. Investigators drew on surveillance footage of the attackers' vehicles and on witness statements used to compose portraits of the suspects. The number of detainees grew to at least 17 over the following weeks and included Carlos Oliva Castillo, alias "La Rana", described as the organizer of the attack, and Baltazar Saucedo Estrada, alias "El Mataperros". No convictions for murder or arson were obtained in the decade following the attack, the cases having stalled in the federal courts.
On 19 February 2012, 44 inmates identified as members of the Gulf Cartel were killed and 30 prisoners belonging to Los Zetas escaped from the prison at Apodaca, the deadliest prison massacre in Mexico to that point. De la Garza announced that 29 prison officials and guards had been placed under arraigo, a form of pre-charge detention, over their part in, or failure to prevent, the killings and the escape, and said that staff under investigation had admitted taking money from Los Zetas.
On 13 May 2012, 49 dismembered bodies were found beside a highway near Cadereyta Jiménez, and de la Garza's office led the investigation. Identification was the principal obstacle for prosecutors, as the victims had been mutilated to impede it. Soldiers arrested Daniel Elizondo Ramírez, alias "El Loco", a regional Zetas leader, on 21 May; he told investigators he had organized and carried out the killings on the orders of the cartel's commanders.
Search for disappeared persons The prosecutor's office held periodic working meetings with the relatives of disappeared people, convened with the human rights organization Ciudadanos en Apoyo a los Derechos Humanos (CADHAC) and the victims' group AMORES, at which prosecutors reported on individual investigations and relatives supplied information to direct them. De la Garza chaired the sessions. The first meetings were tense, but a working method developed in which volunteer lawyers reviewed the progress of each case with the public prosecutors beforehand, and the participants began drafting a search protocol to be triggered whenever a disappearance was reported.
In January 2015, the United Nations human rights office in Mexico commended CADHAC, AMORES and the prosecutor's office for their joint application of the protocol, at the presentation of a document systematizing the experience.
Torture and human rights complaints Human rights bodies documented widespread torture by state police during de la Garza's tenure. The Nuevo León State Human Rights Commission (CEDHNL) confirmed 119 cases of torture by state officers, none of which resulted in an officer being criminally sanctioned, and recorded cases rose from 21 in 2012 to 44 in 2013. Between 2007 and 2015 the state's police forces drew more recommendations for torture than those of Tamaulipas, Michoacán, Guerrero, Veracruz, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, Baja California and Durango.
The prosecutor's office said it had records of only 16 complaints and had substantiated torture in none of them, and that officers had been disciplined administratively rather than prosecuted. Aristegui Noticias reported that the office did not open investigations on its own initiative when notified of cases, as required by Article 8 of the Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture, and that the complaints the commission filed on the basis of its 119 documented cases were reported only as being in process. Most of the documented abuse was attributed to the State Investigative Agency, which de la Garza had headed in 2010 and 2011, and to which United Nations investigators were refused access. The report also said torture had been used to fabricate culprits in the Casino Royale case.
In 2024, Daniel Abdón Torres Muñiz, a former officer of the State Investigative Agency, publicly accused de la Garza of responsibility for his torture and enforced disappearance after he was seized in Apodaca in October 2011. Torres said he had been beaten, burned and had his fingers broken to extract a confession. The state had paid him more than two million pesos in compensation, and the victims' commission had recognized him as a victim of torture and enforced disappearance since 2016. A complaint lodged with the Federal Attorney General's Office later that month named de la Garza over the disappearance, the torture and its concealment, together with the then head of the State Investigative Agency.
Allegations of links to organized crime In October 2016, a report by the Spanish National Police Corps named de la Garza among the political contacts of Juan Manuel Muñoz Luévano, alias "El Mono", during his tenure as attorney general. The finding was based on years of wiretapping of Muñoz Luévano. Muñoz Luévano had been arrested earlier that year over his alleged role in shipping cocaine to Europe for Los Zetas.
El País published an account of the police report in June 2017, quoting it as stating that Muñoz Luévano's dealings extended to "prosecutors and former prosecutors such as Homero Ramos, attorney general of Coahuila, Adrián de la Garza, attorney general of Nuevo León, or Torres Charles, former attorney general of Coahuila". According to the report, Muñoz Luévano had taken over the cartel's European operation from Madrid in July 2012 and moved some 2,100 kilograms of cocaine into Europe.
Municipal president of Monterrey (2015–2021)
Elections
2015
Candidate registration within the PRI opened on 15 January 2015. Senator Marcela Guerra, another aspirant, withdrew her precandidacy in his favor. De la Garza resigned as attorney general on 24 January and registered as a precandidate the following day. The State Electoral Commission approved his candidacy on 5 March for the Alianza por tu Seguridad coalition of the PRI, the Ecologist Green Party of Mexico, the New Alliance Party and the local Democratic Party.
In the election of 7 June 2015 he won 34.4 percent of the vote, against 26.5 percent for Iván Garza Téllez of the National Action Party (PAN). The result returned the PRI to the Monterrey mayoralty after nine years of PAN administrations.
2018 and annulment De la Garza announced in a video posted to social media in February 2018 that he would seek re-election. He lost the July election to Felipe de Jesús Cantú of the PAN by 4,679 votes.
He challenged the result before the Electoral Tribunal of Nuevo León, which annulled ballot boxes favoring the PAN and awarded him the office. The regional chamber of the Federal Electoral Tribunal overturned that ruling and declared Cantú the winner; on appeal, the tribunal's superior chamber annulled the election altogether and ordered a special election.
With the city left without an elected mayor pending the rerun, Governor Jaime Rodríguez Calderón announced on 2 November 2018 that the state government would assume command of the Monterrey municipal police to avoid a vacuum of authority. The measure was agreed with the interim municipal administration and declared to run for 60 days, renewable.
The special election was held on 23 December 2018. De la Garza won it with 41.22 percent of the vote on a turnout of 33.04 percent, down from 59.7 percent in July, and became the first municipal president of Monterrey to hold consecutive terms.
Tenure Fiscal policy The municipality carried debts of more than 3.8 billion pesos in bank loans and supplier obligations when de la Garza took office in 2015; his administration reported the figure at 1.97 billion pesos by the third quarter of 2020. The fact-checking outlet Verificado rated as misleading the claim that his government had paid off the debt it inherited, finding that the municipality had continued to contract new obligations. The municipal government renegotiated credit agreements, lowering interest rates from 0.79 to 0.50 percent on one facility and from 0.62 to 0.48 percent on another. Standard & Poor's raised the city's rating from "AA (stable)" to "AA (positive)" in February 2019, HR Ratings from "HR AA−" to "HR AA", and Moody's to "Ba1/A1.mx" in May 2018.