“There was no evidence for what they were trying to say,” said former DEA agent Mike Vigil. “I did not see any evidence that López Obrador was involved, had knowledge or intention of receiving ‘hot money’ from drug traffickers.”
At more or less exactly the same time on Tuesday afternoon (Mexican time), three articles were published by three news outlets — two USian, one German — alleging that Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopéz Obrador’s electoral campaign in 2006 had been part-financed by the Sinaloa drug cartel. The first article, published by German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle, was written by the Mexican journalist Anabel Hernández. The second, by Steven Dudley, appeared on the InSight Crime portal. The last one was written by US Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tim Golden for the independent news agency, ProPublica.
All three articles, written by respected journalists, make the same unifying claim (albeit with diverging levels of confidence): López Obrador’s campaign in 2006 received illegal financing in return for a pledge that, as Golden puts it, “a López Obrador administration would facilitate the traffickers’ criminal operations.” The $2 million dollars was allegedly given to Nicolás Mollinedo, a long-time aide and personal driver of AMLO’s. All three articles cite as evidence “a dozen interviews,” with DEA agents and US diplomats, all of whom would like to remain anonymous, as well as official documents relating to a DEA investigation launched in 2010 into AMLO’s campaign funding.
That investigation ended up going nowhere and the prosecutors of the Southern District Court of New York decided to close the case in 2011, as Golden himself documents:
[S]ome officials felt the evidence was not strong enough to justify the risks of an extensive undercover operation inside Mexico. In late 2011, DEA agents proposed a sting in which they would offer $5 million in supposed drug money to operatives working on López Obrador’s second presidential campaign. Instead, Justice Department officials closed the investigation, in part over concerns that even a successful prosecution would be viewed by Mexicans as egregious American meddling in their politics.
“Nobody was trying to influence the election,” one official familiar with the investigation said. “But there was always a fear that López Obrador might back away on the drug fight — that if this guy becomes president, he could shut us down.”
So, while Mexico was locked in the fifth year of a spiralling drug war, during which time the then-public-security secretary, Genaro García Luna, was essentially running a drug trafficking operation in league with the Sinoloa cartel, the DEA was planning a sting operation to snare López Obrador, whom it feared might “back away on the drug fight,” or even “shut down” the DEA’s operations in Mexico. As the Mexico-based pro-AMLO journalist Kurt Hackbarth notes, “the DEA was trying to set up and effectively blackmail AMLO’s 2012 presidential campaign for fear that he would ‘shut down’ their operations in Mexico.”
Now, 14 years later, the agents involved in that case have decided to spill the beans to three news agencies. But by this point the DEA has lost all credibility and is clearly not a disinterested party. That is not to say that AMLO himself or his government do not have links with one or more of Mexico’s drug cartels. However, these articles do not present conclusive proof showing that; instead, what they appear to prove is that the DEA, which is locked in a power struggle with Mexico’s AMLO government (more on that later), is willing to use US and German media outlets to pursue its own interests.
“DEA agents are trying to accomplish in one news cycle what they could not prove before a prosecutor or their superiors,” writes 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).
Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO) himself denied the allegations, declaring in his morning press conference that there is no evidence against him:
“It is completely false, it is slander. They are certainly very upset and unfortunately the press, as we have seen not only in Mexico, is very subordinate to power.”
A Dodgy Source
Other glaring issues with these allegations include the fact that their main source is Roberto López Nájera, a former lawyer for the Beltrán Leyva family and long-time informant with both Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office and the DEA. Code-named Jennifer, López Nájera began working with the DEA in 2010 in exchange for protection and a monthly payment. Since then, he has earned a reputation for fabricating testimonies.
In 2013, an article in El País described him as “capable of grabbing a loose thread of information and converting it on the fly into another twig for his nest of fallacy.”
As Pérez Ricart notes, basing a story on López Nájera testimony is “taking a leap into the void.”
In an interview (in Spanish) with the largely anti-AMLO Mexican broadcaster MVS, Mike Vigil, a former head of International Operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) whom the news presenter Luis Cardenas described as an authority on the subject in his preamble to the interview, dismissed the allegations against AMLO as wholly lacking in evidence:
The narcos have always given money to political campaigns. It happens everywhere and I have seen this in Colombia and many other countries, because what the narcos want is to have influence. They seek to buy protection and obtain political favours that benefit them.
But when I read the article by Tim Golden, there was no evidence for what they were trying to say. I did not see any evidence that López Obrador was involved, had knowledge or intention of receiving ‘hot money’ from drug traffickers, in this case from the Beltrán Leyva, of the Sinaloa Cartel… It all culminated in a meeting in Nueva Vallarta where… members of AMLO’s political campaign were supposedly given $2 million. But … there is no evidence that López Obrador was aware of it.
The other thing that strikes me as curious is that in the trial of Chapo Guzman where many members of the Sinaloa cartel made statements about all the people (who were on the take) but they never mentioned AMLO. And again in the trial of Genaro García Luna (the security minister of former President Felipe Calderon who was recently convicted by a US jury of drug trafficking), many members of the Sinaloa cartel gave evidence but never mentioned López Obrador. They mentioned Peña Nieto who allegedly received $200 million. For me that it is absurd.
Later in the interview, Vigil says:
“I do not agree with López Obrador’s policy of ‘hugs, not bullets’ , because it has failed, but that does not mean that he is taking money from the mafia. You have to be very careful with making accusations like that.”
As Golden himself admits, there is no solid proof. Asked why he framed the title of his article as a question rather than a statement (“Did Drug Traffickers Funnel Millions of Dollars to Mexican President López Obrador’s First Campaign?”), he responded:
“ We are not saying that there is undeniable, conclusive evidence that these donations were made. I believe that people should draw their own conclusions, we are not saying what happened or did not happen, because it seems to us that the information is not conclusive, there was no judicial process that definitively validated that information.”
Anabel Hernández was much more assertive in her reporting for Deutsche Welle, opting for a clearer cut title (“The Sinaloa Cartel Financed AMLO’s 2006 Campaign”). She also claims in the first paragraph of her article that the investigation by the US’s Office of the Southern District of New York and the DEA had “obtained solid evidence that the Sinaloa Cartel contributed between 2 and 4 million dollars to Andrés Manuel ‘s campaign. Which begs two questions: first, why the glaring discrepancy in confidence regarding the investigation’s evidence between the two reports? And second, if the evidence was as “solid” as Hernández claims, why did the prosecutors decide to close the case?
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Nick Corbishley 