Despite the latest news reports connecting President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to Mexican drug cartels and their cash, allegations of cartel involvement in Mexican political campaigns are nothing new.
According to THE COURIER-JOURNAL, for decades, cartels have infiltrated all levels of government in Mexico — financing campaigns, making deals with candidates and even killing when their needs are not met.
“The cartels cannot be successful without corrupt individuals at the highest levels of the government,” former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration special operations director Derek Maltz said.
Just last year, Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico’s former security secretary, was found guilty on drug trafficking charges in a U.S. court.
Garcia Luna, the man who once was the face of Mexico’s drug war, was found to have profited from millions of dollars from the Sinaloa Cartel.
“It is unconscionable that the defendant betrayed his duty as Secretary of Public Security by greedily accepting millions of dollars in bribe money that was stained by the blood of Cartel wars and drug-related battles in the streets of the United States and Mexico, in exchange for protecting those murderers and traffickers he was solemnly sworn to investigate,” U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Breon Peace, said following the February 2023 conviction.
Last month’s news stories — the first coming from ProPublica, DW and Insight Crime on the same day — described a DEA investigation that focused on López Obrador’s allies allegedly receiving millions of dollars from the Sinaloa Cartel during his unsuccessful 2006 presidential campaign.
The New York Times later reported on a similar, more-recent inquiry that was closed after U.S. authorities recognized it could provoke a diplomatic conflict with Mexico.
López Obrador denied the allegations of cartel ties and criticized the news coverage, going as far as to give out the cell phone number of a New York Times reporter during a press conference.
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