Mexican president suggests US talks on migration and drugs may suffer after drug money allegations
MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president suggested Thursday that talks with the U.S. government over migration and drug trafficking could suffer due to media reports of a U.S. investigation into alleged drug money donations to his 2006 campaign.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador suggested that U.S. officials should apologize for what he called baseless accusations, saying it would be difficult to sit down and talk about some of the most pressing issues in bilateral ties until that happens.
“I don’t accept this. What I want is for the US government to take a stand,” López Obrador said during his daily morning press conference. “If they don’t have proof, they should apologize.”
“President (Joe) Biden needs to figure this out,” López Obrador said. “How are we going to sit down and talk about the war on drugs when one of their agencies is leaking information and harming me? How are we going to talk about migration, how are we going to talk about the fight against drugs or fentanyl?”
The Biden administration has for some time relied on Mexico’s willingness to accept the return of migrants from third countries as a way to quickly return migrants and asylum seekers at the U.S. southwest border.
It would be a political problem for Biden if Mexico refuses to continue doing so, or its already feeble efforts to ease the flow of deadly opioids made in Mexico and smuggled into the United States.
López Obrador – who later pointedly called former President Donald Trump “my friend” in the briefing – did not specify who he wanted to apologize to, but suggested the US State Department say something.
“Doesn’t the State Department, the Justice Department, have any information?” he said, calling the media reports “interventionism” in Mexico’s internal affairs.
López Obrador has denied old allegations that drug traffickers may have given around $2 million to his first, failed bid for the presidency – he lost in 2012 and ultimately won in 2018 – and previously called the reports a US attack on his government and his Morena side. The Mexican presidential elections of June 2.
Claudia Sheinbaum, the presidential candidate for López Obrador’s Morena party, has a commanding lead in opinion polls for the June 2 elections. But Mexico’s persistently high levels of violence — and Sheinbaum’s pledge to continue López Obrador’s policy of not confronting drug cartels — leave one of the ruling party’s most vulnerable flanks.
According to reports from ProPublica, Insight Crime and Germany’s Deutsche Welle, the DEA in 2010 investigated claims by a cooperating drug trafficker and a former campaign adviser that leaders of the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel had given the money to close confidantes of López Obrador in 2006.
But a wiretap of a conversation between the DEA informants and one of López Obrador’s top aides did not actually confirm the donations, and US officials later ordered the politically sensitive case closed.
Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of international operations, feared the latest dispute could damage U.S.-Mexico cooperation on countering drug trafficking, in much the same way as the 2020 U.S. arrest of a former Mexican minister of Defense, General Salvador Cienfuegos.
López Obrador has long complained about the actions of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Mexico, and after Cienfuegos’ arrest, he imposed restrictions on U.S. agents in Mexico.
“It’s just terrible. It will mean more drugs coming into the United States and more violence happening in Mexico,” Vigil said. “It’s even worse than when Cienfuegos was arrested.”
“This is a direct attack on him. Second, he sees it as having an impact on the presidential campaign or the upcoming presidential elections,” Vigil said. “Now if we thought relations with Mexico were bad, they will go from worse to almost non-existent.”
López Obrador has long been angry about perceived American interference. He alleged that the U.S. arrest of Cienfuegos, the former defense secretary, was part of a DEA plot to weaken Mexico’s armed forces and give U.S. agents free rein in Mexico.
Cienfuegos was arrested at a Los Angeles airport in 2020, accused of participating in an international drug trafficking network and money laundering.
Mexico demanded Cienfuegos’ release and reportedly threatened to expel U.S. agents unless he was returned. The United States dropped the charges and sent him back. Mexico quickly cleared Cienfuegos of any wrongdoing and later blocked visas for U.S. agents and limited the work they could do in Mexico.
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