“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…
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Nick Corbishley 