The rock is the rising threat of US military intervention in Mexico; the hard place is Sheibnaum’s own party’s narco-politicians.
Late last week, as Mexico was still reeling from revelations that CIA agents are operating in Chihuahua, in direct violation of Mexico’s constitution and sovereignty, the Sheinbaum government received an extradition request from Washington for 10 Sinaloa-based individuals. They included the state’s governor, Rubén Rocha, and its senator, Enrique Inzunza Cázares.
The indictments pose the biggest threat yet to Sheinbaum’s presidency. If she bows to US pressure and agrees to indict Rocha, a senior member of Sheinbaum’s Morena party, and the other nine serving and former politicians and security chiefs, she risks opening the floodgates to more US extradition requests. If she doesn’t, she risks the wrath of an increasingly unhinged Trump administration.
“Without Precedent”
The veteran Mexican journalist Denise Marker described the development as “extremely worrying” and “without precedent”. As one twitter commenter remarked tartly, it is indeed “without precedent”: drug cartels have operated in Sinaloa with total impunity and government protection for nigh on 80 years and not a single PRI or PAN governor has ever been extradited.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on non-state armed groups at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, DC, said that indicting elected politicians in Mexican had “long been considered a very big step, almost a ‘nuclear option’”. And more indictments are likely to come, she added.
Rumours are already flying of an approaching second wave of extradition requests — including for three more governors, two legislators and the son of an ex-president, presumably Andrés Manuel López Obrador. For the moment, this is pure conjecture, but it would be in keeping with the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to international relations.
Perhaps that’s why the Sheinbaum government has declined the extradition request — for now. Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office (FGR) on Friday ruled out provisionally detaining the suspects indicated. The head of the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for Competition Control of the FGR, Raúl Jiménez Vázquez, said there was not enough evidence to justify taking such an action.
Until now, Sheinbaum has generally bent to the US’s will despite her constant reaffirmations of Mexican sovereignty and independence, reports Ioan Grillo:
“We are not a protectorate of the United States. We are not a colony of the United States,” Sheinbaum, the 63-year old former scientist, said Monday.
However, in actions, Sheinbaum has delivered to President Donald Trump on several key demands since he returned to office last year. Her government helped halt the flow of undocumented migrants though Mexico to the U.S. border, slashing Border Patrol encounters to the lowest in decades (this is also due to Trump largely killing asylum at the border). She has whacked fentanyl trafficking, so U.S. border seizures of the venomous drug were down 72 percent last month compared to when she took office in October 2024.
But the demands continue to grow in size and number. As the Wall Street Journal notes, each time Sheinbaum gives President Trump an inch, he demands a mile:
More than a year after both leaders took office, the give and take is forcing Mexico’s president into a corner. In that way, she may be following other world leaders who have tried to forge a working partnership with Trump—from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni to French President Emmanuel Macron—only to face a falling-out.
It was a by-now-familiar pattern in the relationship between the two neighbors. It began with decisions that cost Sheinbaum very little political capital, such as sending National Guard troops to the border to stop U.S.-bound drug smuggling and closing Mexico’s doors to migrants from Venezuela and other countries.
But lately Trump has pushed Sheinbaum into moves that risk angering her political base.
Just over a week ago, it was revealed that four CIA agents had participated in an anti-narcotics operation with the state police force of Chihuahua without informing Mexico’s federal authorities. This was a complete violation of Mexico’s constitution and sovereignty. The only reason why the public — and apparently, the federal government — learned of the operation was that two of the CIA agents died in an alleged car accident as it unfolded.
The resulting scandal severely damaged relations between Mexico and the US while sparking a fierce showdown between the federal government and the Chihuahuan governor, Maru Campos Galván, who has thrown her state’s doors wide open to US government agencies including the CIA, the DEA and the FBI. In doing so, Campos Galván not only violated the constitution, she committed the most serious of crimes: high treason.
Amid the resulting fallout, the Trump administration, represented in Mexico by Ron Johnson, a former CIA agent and Green Beret with decades of experience of destabilising foreign countries, including by training death squads, tightened the screw further by unsealing the indictment of Rocha. In a rare departure from custom, the indictment included 34 pages of allegations that have already been made public.
The goal, it seems, is two-fold: first, to distract the US and Mexican publics from the Chihuahua debacle (and whatever other scandals du jour the Trump administration need cover from, including, of course, Epstein); and second, to paint Sheinbaum into a corner. If she complies with the extradition request, she opens the door to the US gradually picking off more and more of Morena’s elected representatives, with the resulting damage this could do to Morena’s base.
Rocha is fully aware of this fact. In what can be easily read as a veiled threat to Morena’s leadership, he tweeted a couple of days ago (emphasis my own):
“This attack is not just aimed at my person but the whole Fourth Transformation movement, its emblematic leaders and the Mexicans who represent the cause”.
According to unnamed sources cited by the Mexican corporate law firm León Barrena Rodríguez & Partners LLP (LBR), “the Governor’s defiance carries an implicit, scorched-earth ultimatum directed straight at the National Palace”:
The subtext is clear: if Sheinbaum attempts to sacrifice him to appease Washington, he will take the entire structure down with him. A sitting governor with his level of access doesn’t just go to a U.S. interrogation room to face a life sentence; he goes there to trade. The leverage is absolute. The threat (“if you hand me over, I disclose everything regarding AMLO, the presidency, and Morena’s tactical alliances with the cartels”) is the only thing keeping him from being extradited tonight. Sheinbaum is now effectively a hostage to her own party’s regional power brokers.
On the other hand, if Sheinbaum declines the extradition request, as she has done so far, she risks being painted by the US government, Mexican opposition parties and pliant media outlets in Mexico and abroad as a “narco president” who is more interested in protecting the country’s drug lords than helping the US Department of Justice put them behind bars.
Refusal to cooperate also increases the risk of US military intervention in Mexico. After all, if US forces can abduct a sitting president in Venezuela, what’s to stop them from snatching a regional governor in Mexico (apart from Mexico’s US-trained and equipped armed forces)? According to LBR’s sources, this option has been on the table “for months”:
[T]he use of US special operations forces to apprehend Governor Rocha, Senator Inzunza, and other indicted officials has been a live option on the tables of the DOJ, DOW, and DEA for months…
Sheinbaum and AMLO have decided that a total diplomatic rupture with the U.S. is a smaller price to pay than the existential threat of Governor Rocha “spitting” in a New York courtroom. They are gambling on the assumption that Washington lacks the will for forceful extraction. This is a fatal error.
The former DEA agent Mike Vigil, who lives in Mexico, believes than an extraction is unlikely, warning in an interview with the Chilean outlet Entrevistas Meganoticias that any attempt to abduct Rochoa would be a disaster, not only for Mexico but also Latin America as a whole (translation my own):
They did it in Venezuela with Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. But Venezuela is not Mexico. So, to go that way, which for me was an act of war, to remove politicians in Mexico would be a disaster. This would cause instability throughout Latin America.
It would also be a disaster for the US government, Vigil says without elucidating as to why. One thing is clear: this is all happening at the most delicate of times for US-Mexico relations, with the USMCA trade deal up for mandatory joint review in June. One might think that the last thing the US needs right now, as the global economy teeters on the edge of a global crisis of Trump’s choice, is to risk upending its biggest trade partnership.
It’s possible, of course, that Trump is using the extradition requests as leverage in the trade negotiations. However, the threat of US military intervention against the cartels has been on the cards since at least early 2023, when neo-con Republicans like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and former Attorney General William Barr began talking of the need to designate the cartels as “terrorist organisations.”
Which was one of the first things Trump did on his return to office. Sheinbaum and her government are now feeling the inevitable fallout from that.
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
“She’s caught between a rock and a hard place because she obviously understands what’s at stake for her government and the US and the critically important USMCA review,” said Arturo Sarukhán, a former Mexican ambassador to the US.
Sheinbaum has so far prioritised loyalty to Morena. On Friday, she declared that the ten Mexican officials charged with drug trafficking and weapons offences will be tried in Mexico, not the US — if credible evidence emerges against them.
As for Rocha, he allegedly travelled with Sheinbaum to meet with AMLO at his “La Chingada” ranch in Palenque, Tabasco, at the weekend. Immediately afterwards, the Sinaloan governor took temporary leave, which removes all the legal protections against prosecution he enjoyed as a sitting governor.
But is he guilty of colluding with the Sinaloan cartel? Most probably yes.
The word that keeps popping up to describe Rocha, including in some pro-government media outlets, is “undefendable”. He clearly has ties to the Sinaloan cartel (who doesn’t in the higher reaches of Sinaloa’s government?) and allegedly received campaign funding from prominent cartel members. He has almost certainly been fingered (no, not that way) by members of the Chapitos branch of the Sinaloan cartel, who’ve turned witness in return for lighter sentences.
All that being said, Rocha is still a relatively small pawn in a much larger game being played by Washington. That game extends to the entire American continent, and its ultimate goal is to remove all obstacles to the US’ dominion over the strategic resources of that region — including, crucially, its oil and gas. Or as RevKev put it recently, to turn all of Latin America into one giant quarry for Western corps, as we are already seeing in post-Maduro Venezuela.
To achieve that goal, Washington must remove all governments in the region that are not entirely subordinated to its interests and wish to maintain some degree of national sovereignty. And its main instrument for doing that, as we saw with Venezuela, is the so-called war on the drug cartels…
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Nick Corbishley 