According to U.S. records and three people familiar with the matter, American law enforcement has spent years examining allegations that allies of Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, met with and siphoned millions of dollars from drug cartels after his settlement.
The investigation, which had not been previously reported, uncovered information indicating potential links between powerful cartel operatives and Mexican advisers and officials close to the president as he ruled the country.
But the United States never opened a formal investigation into Mr. López Obrador, and the officials involved eventually dropped the probe. They concluded that the U.S. government had little desire to pursue charges against the leader of one of America’s key allies, said the three people familiar with the case, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
López Obrador called the allegations “completely false,” responding to questions from The New York Times on Thursday. He said news of the investigation would not “in any way” affect Mexico’s relations with the United States, but said he expected a response from the U.S. government.
“Does this diminish the trust the Mexican government has in the United States?” López Obrador said this in a regular press conference, adding: “Time will tell.”
Drug cartels have long infiltrated the Mexican state, from the lowest levels to the highest levels of government. They pay the police, manipulate mayors, co-opt senior officials and dominate large areas of the country.
But while recent efforts by US officials have identified possible links between the cartels and López Obrador’s associates, they have found no direct links between the president himself and criminal organizations.
“There is no investigation into President López Obrador,” a Justice Department spokesperson said. “The Department of Justice has the responsibility to review any allegation.”
Much of the information U.S. officials gather comes from whistleblowers whose accounts can be difficult to corroborate and sometimes end up being incorrect. Investigators obtained the information by examining the activities of drug cartels, and it was unclear how much of what informants told them had been independently confirmed.
For example, the documents show that an informant told investigators that one of Mr. López Obrador’s closest confidants met with Ismael Zambada García, a top leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel, before his victory in the 2018 presidential election.
Another source told them that after the president’s election, a founder of the notoriously violent Zetas cartel paid $4 million to two López Obrador allies in hopes of being released from prison.
Investigators obtained information from a third source that suggested drug cartels possessed videos of the president’s sons collecting drug money, the documents show.
Mr. López Obrador has denied all allegations made by whistleblowers.
U.S. law enforcement also independently tracked payments made by people they believed were cartel agents to intermediaries on behalf of Mr. López Obrador, two of the people familiar with the investigation said.
At least one of these payments, they said, was made around the same time that Mr. López Obrador traveled to Sinaloa state in 2020 and met the mother of drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo and is he is now serving a life sentence in a US federal prison.
More than a decade ago, a separate investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration uncovered allegations that traffickers had donated millions to López Obrador’s failed 2006 presidential campaign. That investigation, which was detailed by three media outlets a month last year, it was closed without charges. be brought.
For the United States, pursuing criminal charges against senior foreign officials is a rare and complicated undertaking. Building a legal case against Mr. López Obrador would be particularly challenging. The last time the United States brought criminal charges against a senior Mexican official, he eventually dropped them after his arrest caused a diplomatic rift with Mexico.
The Biden administration has an enormous stake in managing its relationship with López Obrador, seen as indispensable to containing a wave of migration that has become one of the most contentious issues in American politics. This is a major concern for voters ahead of this fall’s presidential election.
Mexico is also a major American trading partner and the single largest collaborator in U.S. efforts to slow the crossing of the southern border of illicit drugs such as fentanyl.
U.S. law enforcement has jurisdiction to investigate and file charges against officials in other countries if they can demonstrate a connection to narcotics trafficking across the border into the United States.
While it is rare for American agents to prosecute senior foreign officials, it is not unprecedented: The drug trial of Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras, began this week in federal district court in Manhattan.
Federal prosecutors in New York also won a corruption conviction last year against Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s former public safety secretary, convincing a jury that he took millions of dollars in scraps from violent cartels that should have been prosecuted.
While efforts to probe López Obrador’s allies are no longer active, the revelation that U.S. law enforcement was quietly looking into corruption allegations against them could be damaging in itself.
Media reports from last month, including one from ProPublicaabout a US investigation into campaign donations in 2006 – for an election he didn’t win – set off a firestorm in Mexico.
López Obrador publicly denounced these stories, implying that they were aimed at influencing the country’s presidential election in June, in which his protégé, former Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, is running to replace him. He suggested the reports could complicate talks on migration and fentanyl with the U.S. government, and said he considered not receiving President Biden’s national security adviser for a planned meeting in the Mexican capital.
“How will we be able to sit at the table and talk about the fight against drugs if they, or one of their institutions, spread information and harm me?” Mr. López Obrador said this in a regular press conference, days after the articles were published.
After President Biden called López Obrador, calming tensions, Mexico’s foreign minister said the U.S. national security adviser had told Mexico “that this is a closed matter for them.”
The Biden administration has treated López Obrador with great care, avoiding public criticism in favor of repeatedly sending senior officials to Mexico City to meet with him and push for sustained migration enforcement in private.
The decision to leave the recent investigation pending, people familiar with it said, was caused largely by the breakdown of a separate and highly controversial corruption case. In the final months of the Trump administration in 2020, U.S. officials filed charges against Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, Mexico’s defense secretary from 2012 to 2018.
In a federal indictment, unsealed in New York after a multi-year investigation dubbed “Operation Godfather,” prosecutors accused General Cienfuegos of using the powers of his office to help a violent criminal group called the H-2 cartel to conduct his drug trafficking operations.
His arrest at Los Angeles airport caused an uproar in the Mexican government, particularly among the leaders of the country’s armed forces, who under the leadership of López Obrador have assumed greater responsibility and power.
The president said the allegations were “trumped up” and his administration released more than 700 pages of intercepted communications from U.S. agents that purported to show criminal activity but were found to be inconclusive.
The Drug Enforcement Administration, which had already had a checkered history as a protagonist in a war on drugs considered bloody and unnecessary, suffered a serious blow in its relations with the Mexican government.
A few weeks after the arrest, the US Department of Justice, under intense pressure from López Obrador, backtracked and dismissed the accusation, sending General Cienfuegos back to Mexico.
The episode not only damaged long-standing security agreements between the two countries, but also left a deep impression on law enforcement agencies north of the border, many of whom saw the botched case as a warning about pursuing similar efforts against other high-ranking officials. Mexican officials.
Emiliano Rodríguez Mega contributed to the reporting.
