“There is a legal and judicial offensive under way in Washington to accuse the former president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of having made pacts with drug traffickers.”
Since coming to office on October 1, Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum has gained a reputation both inside and outside Mexico for being cool, calm and collected, especially in her responses to Donald J Trump’s constant threats of tariffs, military invasions and the like. However, in her daily press conference on Monday morning, her voice wavered just a little when she was asked about the “abrazos, no balazos” (hugs, not bullets) security policy of her presidential predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO).
Sheinbaum responded by saying that no one should harbour any doubts that her government will stand by AMLO as well as his security policies.
“We are always going to defend President López Obrador, let no one have the slightest doubt. He was a great president and we are part of the same movement.” Sheinbaum said. “Of course, this is what the opposition wants: to divide us. That is not going to happen.”
Sheinbaum also said her government will further deepen the public strategy implemented by AMLO, which is based on four main pillars: attacking the causes of violence (poverty, lack of job or educational opportunities for teenagers and young adults, paucity of social and sports activities for youngsters…), strengthening the National Guard, intelligence and investigation, and coordination with (but not subordination to) Washington.
That said, Sheinbaum’s government has, under strong prodding from the US, waged a months-long campaign against drug cartels in Sinaloa after the US’ ambushing and kidnapping of veteran drug kingpin Ismael Zambada García, aka “el Mayo”, in July escalated tensions between rival gangs.
“There is the idea that ‘hugs, not bullets’ essentially gave free rein to organised crime, which is absolutely false,” Sheinbaum said.
What AMLO apparently wanted to do was distance himself from the disastrous war on the drug cartels initiated by former president (and AMLO’s bitter political rival) Felipe Calderón, as well as search for alternative means of pacifying the country. His “hugs not bullets” strategy was also about reclaiming a certain degree of national autonomy over Mexico’s public security and defence policies. The United States has always led the way on security matters, says the Mexican journalist Jesús Escobar Tobar:
The presidents in Mexico have precious little room for manoeuvre. The question is: what do they do with that?
AMLO, realising that the war was in the general interest of the elites and against the interest of lower classes, allowing for the constant abuse and maltreatment of those who have the least, and that the US was never going to fulfil its side of the bargain (i.e. by tackling the underlying causes of the insatiable demand for narcotics in the US as well as the constant flow of US weapons into Mexico), decided to go after the causes of Mexico’s drug war.
He decided to invest in the youth, to find ways to ensure that they stay in school (instead of becoming cannon fodder for the cartels).
Looking at Supply and Demand
Sheinbaum also stressed that the problem of drug trafficking should not be viewed purely through a supply-side lens. This is what many US governments have done, with the Trump administration threatening to take it to a whole new level. That way, all of the blame for the US’ opioid crisis can be shifted overseas, diverting attention away from the role played by US pharmaceutical companies such as the Sacklers’ Purdue Pharma in starting and fuelling the opioid epidemic.
Instead, Sheinbaum says, the role of demand must also be taken into account:
“Drug trafficking has to do with demand. There are those who consume and there are those who supply. That is why the United States must do its part to address drug consumption and distribution in its own territory.”
The president’s comments came just hours after US President Donald J Trump officially renamed the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” on Sunday, declaring February 9 as “Gulf of America Day”, and just days after revelations that US aircraft, military and naval vessels were “circling” the Mexican coasts and skies, as well as the border between the two countries.
Buried within the official statement on US tariffs on Mexico’s goods was the following sentence: “the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico.”
To back up that claim, the White House press office cited a link to an Associated Press article on the sentencing of Mexico’s ex-public security chief, Genaro Garcia Luna, to 38-plus years in US for taking cartel bribes. As the AP piece notes, Garcia Luna was once heralded as the architect of Mexico’s war on drug cartels but was convicted by a New York jury in 2023 of taking millions of dollars in bribes to protect the violent Sinaloa cartel that he was supposedly combating.
Of course, it takes some serious, industrial-strength chutzpah to criticise another national government for its ties with drug cartels when for the past 80 years or so the US’ Central Intelligence Agency has wielded more influence over the international drugs trade than any other institution on the planet.
Since the end of the Second World War, the CIA has, among countless other things, used the sales of opium grown in Burma to finance its covert war against Mao’s communist revolution in China; it has helped introduce wave after wave of illicit substances into the US, with hugely destructive consequences for the country’s poorest neighbourhoods, from Air America’s heroin in the 1960s and 70s to Pablo Escobar’s cocaine in the 1980s and 90s, which ultimately sparked the crack epidemic.
The agency has also used the proceeds of its drug trafficking and gun running activities to help fund right-wing paramilitary groups throughout Latin America, again with devastating consequences. Barry Seal, a CIA-affiliated pilot, transported cocaine to the US in CIA planes to help finance counterinsurgency operations in Nicaragua and other parts of Central America. Pablo Escobar’s son openly admits that his father worked for the CIA.
In Mexico, the drug cartels flourished and grew under the protection of the Federal Security Directorate, which in turn was answerable to the CIA. In fact, according to the former DEA agent Hector Berrellez, the CIA filmed the torture of the DEA agent Enrique Kiki Camarena at the hands of the Guadalajara cartel. Camarena had been part of Operation Godfather, which sought to uncover the links between Mexican drug money and Nicaragua, and the CIA wanted to know just how much the investigation had uncovered.
Plain, Old Geopolitics
“This is not about good guys and bad guys,” says Ecobar Tovar. “This is about plain old geopolitics.”
A recent Spectator piece by Joshua Treviño, a former Bush Jr speechwriter and a one-time consultant at notorious Virginia-based spook firm Booz Allen Hamilton, lays this out in black and white:
It is necessary to understand that the Mexican state is now essentially a single-party, left-populist regime, aligned ideologically and operationally with comparable regimes in Cuba and Venezuela. Like those regimes, it regards its nation’s trafficking cartels as vehicles for profit and control and also agents of national policy abroad — especially but not only in the United States.
Treviño does not provide any evidence to back up this claim while resorting to innuendo to argue that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, “in addition to being an inveterate anti-American in his demagogic politics, is widely understood to have been in the pay of the Sinaloa Cartel for most of the past twenty years.”
But Treviño’s arguments will presumably find receptive ears in the Trump administration. In the recent past, the US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) an unreliable partner of the United States, accusing him of “handing over parts of the territory to drug cartels, of praising dictators, like those in Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.” Rubio has even called for an investigation into the hiring of Cuban doctors with money from the Mexican government.
On repeated occasions in recent weeks Trump admin officials, including Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, have refused to rule out invading Mexico to take on the country’s drug cartels.
This is part of a process that began decades ago but which reached a new level of intensity last February when the US Drug Enforcement Agency unearthed 18-year old allegations against AMLO that his 2006 electoral campaign had been part-financed by the Sinaloa drug cartel. Those allegations were aired by the German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle, the InSight Crime portal and ProPublica in what was clearly a coordinated hit job timed to coincide with Mexico’s general elections.
Most of Mexico’s corporate press happily lapped up and amplified the allegations against AMLO while other US and European media joined the scrum over the following weeks. As we noted at the time, the DEA had already lost most of its credibility in Mexico and was clearly not a disinterested party given that the AMLO government had essentially clipped its wings in Mexico.
Since Richard Nixon declared war on drugs in the early 1970s, the agency had been a constant presence in Mexico. However, in 2020 the AMLO government passed a national security reform aimed at reaffirming Mexico’s national sovereignty in matters of security vis-à-vis the United States. In the bill, the Senate of the Republic established provisions and added articles to the chapter on International Cooperation that substantially limit the actions of foreign agencies on Mexican soil.
For the first time in roughly half a century, the DEA agents had less freedom of action in neighbouring Mexico. But that didn’t stop them from running a covert, 18-month incursion into Mexican territory, in direct contravention of the new security law. Just a year later, as Mexico was gearing up for general elections, the agency dug up decades-old allegations against AMLO in the apparent hope of tipping the electoral scales in favour of a more malleable political party.
Given the sorry state of political opposition in Mexico, that was never going to happen. But a less ambitious and more achievable goal could be to sully AMLO’s legacy, and, as already mentioned, drive a wedge between him and his successor.
That is not to say that AMLO himself or his government do not have links with one or more of Mexico’s drug cartels. While he was in power, he did take certain actions that seemed to favour certain members of the cartels.
The most notorious incident took place in October 2020 with the arrest in Los Angeles of Mexico’s former Secretary of National Defense, Salvador Cienfuegos, for his alleged ties to organised crime. Having received no warning of the arrest, AMLO was furious with the DEA and worked hard to get. Through diplomatic channels he was able to convince Trump, who was also apparently left in the dark about the planned operation, to release Cienfuegos.
And Cienfuegos was certainly no saint. His ties to organised crime are well documented and the DEA’s “Operation Godfather” was the most robust international investigation into a Mexican military officer directly related to drug trafficking. Cienfuegos also misled a Mexican investigation into the fate of the 43 “disappeared” students in Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, in 2014, telling the investigators that no soldiers had been anywhere near the alleged crime scene. This was a bare-faced lie: not only were members of the armed forces at the scene, they were directly involved in the atrocity.
However, many reports about the Cienfuegos case, including J. Jesús Esquivel’s best-selling book, “At Your Service, My General”, suggest that AMLO’s actions were a response to direct pressure from senior members of Mexico’s armed forces. The incident, if anything, served as a reminder of the enduring power of Mexico’s generales.
One thing that is undeniable is that Mexico’s drug cartels have compromised large parts of Mexico’s political structures. As the well respected journalist Denise Maerker recently wrote in Milenio, criminal groups have supplanted entire governments in some parts of the country:
No Mexican needs to hear it from anyone else, it is obvious and out there: there are entire regions in which a criminal group controls and governs the territory.
However, the articles published during the election campaign did not present conclusive proof showing AMLO’s complicity; instead, what they appeared to prove is that the DEA, locked in a power struggle with Mexico’s AMLO government, is willing to use US and European media outlets to pursue its own political or institutional interests, just as USAID has used billions of dollars of funds to pollute the media landscape across the globe.
“DEA agents are trying to accomplish in one news cycle what they could not prove before a prosecutor or their superiors,” wrote Carlos A. Pérez Ricart, a professor at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE) and author of the book, Cien Años de Espias y Drogas: La Historia de los Agentes Anti-Narcóticos de los Estados Unidos en Mexico (100 Years of Spies and Drugs: The History of US Anti-Narcotic Agents in Mexico).
Here is AMLO himself explaining his version of events to the Russian journalist Inna Afinogenova (English subtitles included):
Mexico President AMLO calmly speaks on how the US government meddles in Mexican politics via USAID and how even Pulitzer-prize winning journalists become smear merchants for the oligarchy
"The New York Times remains a rag for special interest groups" pic.twitter.com/oSEWZ4xAh6
— COMBATE |🇵🇷 (@upholdreality) February 21, 2024
If the airing of the DEA’s allegations were meant to influence Mexico’s general elections, they had the opposite of the intended effect. Weeks later, AMLO’s approval numbers had increased to 73%, their highest level since 2019, according to an opinion poll carried out for Reforma. On July 4, AMLO’s handpicked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, wiped the floor in the general elections, garnering close to 60% of the votes and taking de facto control of both legislative houses in what El País described as the highest vote count of any candidate in recent history.
As we noted at the time, Sheinbaum’s crushing victory would not have been possible without López Obrador’s enduring — indeed, ripening — popularity.
As the US pollster Gallup reported just days before the election, López Obrador (aka AMLO) is ending his six-year term with record high approval ratings of 80%, making him one of the world’s most popular national leaders. It puts to shame his presidential counterparts in North America. After less than four years in office, Joe Biden is the least popular US president in 75 years, according to Newsweek, while Trudeau’s approval ratings consistently hover at or below 40%.
In 2023, confidence in the national government was twice as high in Mexico as it was in the U.S. (30%). What’s more, public approval of, and confidence in, the government actually grew over time, as opposed to steadily or rapidly declining.
“Building a Case”
In recent months rumours have also been circulating in certain corners of social media that the US government will soon set its sights on Mexico’s former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka AMLO, for his alleged ties to Mexico’s drug cartels. Just under a month ago, the journalist Salvador García Soto published an article in El Universal titled “They Are Building a Case Against AMLO in Washington”:
Behind the message of former President Ernesto Zedillo, where he recommended to President Claudia Sheinbaum to distance herself from her predecessor and not allow “a caudillo hidden in the office attached to the Presidency” to continue deciding the fate of the country, there is a legal and judicial offensive that is taking shape in Washington to accuse the former president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, of having made pacts with drug traffickers, and seeking that the Tabasco native appear before the US authorities.
Headed by the imminent Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, and based on the statements that have already been made to the Department of Justice, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and the two sons of Chapo Guzmán, Ovidio Guzmán López and his brother Joaquín Guzmán López, the legal offensive against the former Mexican president would also have the collaboration of Mexican politicians who are collaborating with Rubio’s office, including a former PAN governor, a former foreign minister of the Republic and a former Mexican ambassador to the United States, who are bringing “information and witnesses” to the U.S. authorities.
Sources close to the next secretary of state confirm that work is being done to build a case against López Obrador, whom Marco Rubio accused several times and publicly of having “agreements with Mexican drug cartels” and of ceding authority and territory to criminal drug trafficking organizations. “Elements are being gathered, based on the statements of Mexican drug lords held by the Department of Justice and we are seeking to integrate a solid case that documents the illegal agreements that empowered the Mexican cartels that produce and export lethal drugs such as fentanyl that are killing U.S. citizens,” said one of the sources consulted.
Then we recently had a Fox News reporter urging viewers to read Anabel Hernández’s latest books and articles. As readers may recall, Hernández was one of the reporters who covered the DEA’s accusations against AMLO in February last year. In her article for Deutsche Welle, she opted for a much clearer cut title (“The Sinaloa Cartel Financed AMLO’s 2006 Campaign”) than Tim Golden’s piece in ProPublica. As the reporter notes, her latest book, La Historia Secreta, is allegedly an exposé of Mexico’s governing party Morena’s financial ties to the Sinaloa cartel.
🚨 Fuertes declaraciones 🚨
La única salida que tiene la PresirvientA es ir a ponerse de acuerdo con el Licenciado Trump y Marco Rubio para entregar a López Obrador y a otros miembros de Morena por lazos con el Narco
¿Qué opinan? pic.twitter.com/lWsuGEVqEi— FERMOR 💎 (@FERMOR_23) February 9, 2025
The closing words from the lady interviewer offers a hint of how the Trump administration may be viewing this situation: “a narco state, the puppet of a communist nation,” presumably in reference to China.
As the US ratchets up its pressure on Sheinbaum, the temptation to offer scalps from within her own Morena party could become unbearable. As Maerker notes, it will no longer be enough to arrest criminals with colourful nicknames: “What is necessary, and hence the difficulty, is that now acquaintances, perhaps even friends, with whom she have crossed paths in meetings and policy circles will have to be arrested.”
The first on the list will probably be Rubén Rocha Moya, the current governor of Sinaloa, who is already under investigation in Mexico for his ties to the Sinaloan cartel. According to La Politica Online, “even in circles close to President Claudia Sheinbaum it is said that a change in Sinaloa would be seen as an action of great relevance by the Trump administration within the month of negotiations on trade tariffs.”
Perhaps cleaning house could be of benefit to both nations, but it could also begin to shake the very foundations upon which the Morena party has been built, especially if the Trump administration is, as the article by Garcia Sota suggests, determined to get its hand on AMLO himself.
In recent months, Garcia Luna has written a letter accusing AMLO of collaborating with the Sinaloa cartel in a desperate attempt to reduce his sentence. As Mike Vigil, a former head of International Operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), pointed out in an interview last year, in the trials of both Chapo Guzman and Garcia Luna, many members of the Sinaloa cartel made statements about all the people who were on the take, including former President Enrique Peña Nieto, but they never once mentioned AMLO.
Over the past decade or so, the US may have succeeded in getting the former presidents of Honduras and Guatemala, Juan Orlando Hernández and Alfonso Portillo respectively, extradited on drug charges, but these were hugely unpopular political figures of relatively small central American nations.
AMLO, by contrast, is arguably Mexico’s most popular president since Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40). Given Sheinbaum and Moreno’s loyalty to AMLO, any attempt by the US to have him extradited is likely to result in a similar outcome to what happened a few months ago in Honduras when rumours began circulating of a US-backed coup against sitting President Xiomara Castro: the scrapping of the country’s decades-old extradition treaty with the US.
That would represent a significant blow to US-Mexico relations, as well as the ability of the US to wage its war on drugs across its southern border. Would US forces kidnap AMLO instead, like they did with el Mayo? It’s possible. This Trump administration seems to believe it can do anything it wants.
Ultimately, this is not just about building a criminal case against AMLO; it is about building a case for yet more war in Mexico — ideally, a war in which Mexicans will do most, if not all, of the fighting, killing and dying while US arms manufacturers provide the weapons for both sides. The last time Mexico ramped up its fight against the drug cartels, the murder rate in the country tripled in the space of just three years.
