Controversial report that points to AMLO’s 2006 drug money laundering campaign Mexico’s president denies

A report published this Wednesday by Media Propublica points to the 2006 presidential campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO, as he is popularly known) as having received financing from drug trafficking, which the president has denied.

According to the report, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) discovered that drug traffickers had given nearly $2 million to AMLO’s campaign in exchange for promises that, if he came to power, he would “facilitate traffickers’ criminal operations”.

Mexico’s president called the publication “blasphemous” and a lie during his morning conference.

“It’s completely wrong, it’s a slander, they’re certainly very upset, and unfortunately the press, as we’ve seen not only in Mexico, but in the world, is very subordinate to power,” he said.

As previously reported, the president denied that he would launch a lawsuit against the media, but attacked the US government for allowing “unethical practices contrary to political ethics” by his agencies.

“The DEA has to say if it’s true or not, what they investigated, what their evidence is,” López Obrador said, asking the State Department to clarify the alleged reports that the anti-drug agency would settle. him..

According to official government documents reviewed by ProPublica and more than a dozen interviews with US and Mexican officials, the money was allegedly given to AMLO campaign advisers in 2006.

However, the report notes that the investigation “could not conclusively determine whether López Obrador approved the alleged donations from traffickers, or whether he knew about them.”

In the DEA investigation, López Obrador’s close advisor Nicolás Molinado Bastar has been identified as a member of his team who received money from drug trafficker Edgar Valdez Villarreal known as ‘La Barbie’. Also involved was Mauricio Soto Caballero, who had worked for AMLO since 2004.

According to ProPublica, in 2008 Roberto López Najera, a legal advisor at the ‘La Barbie’ company, who was a member of the Beltran Leyva Cartel, which in turn was part of the Sinaloa Cartel, decided to cooperate with the agents. The DEA is his boss after he has differences.

López Najera went to the United States Embassy in Mexico and began giving information to DEA agents who established his credibility as a source, as many of the data he provided turned out to be true. Among them, an employee of the US Marshals Service was involved in drug trafficking.

It wasn’t until 2010 that the DEA began to focus on the most shocking revelations that López Najera made in his multiple interviews with both US and Mexican authorities.

Lopez Najera explained, “The two men said they were there with the knowledge and authorization of Lopez Obrador. In exchange for an injection of money, León said, the campaign promised that a future López Obrador government would elect law enforcement officials who would help traffickers,” the report says.

‘La Barbie’ accepted the deal and sent López Najera to deliver the money to Mauricio Soto Caballero and Nicolas Molinado. Thus, the cartel gave Soto and other members of the campaign approximately two million dollars in cash in three deliveries over the following months, as López Najera reported to the DEA.

But Felipe Calderon’s victory in Mexico’s 2006 presidential election broke the pact between drug trafficking and AMLO’s campaign. According to López Najera, the drug lord planned to kidnap the president of the electoral court and force him to annul the victory verdict in favor of AMLO, but the kidnapping attempt failed.

According to ProPublica, the investigation raises difficult questions about the extent to which the U.S. should deal with official corruption in Mexico.

Another problem was that “most crimes related to drugs are also over after five years. By the time the investigation finally got under way in earnest, some of the key events described by López Najera had occurred four years earlier.

As if that were not enough, the US It did not want to jeopardize its diplomatic relations with Mexico, which had become strained after the results of another covert operation, known as “Fast and Furious”, which allowed the entry of weapons. In 2011. Americans in Mexico who were later linked to a shooting in which 150 Mexicans were killed or wounded, as well as the killing of a border patrol agent.

Ultimately, a group of Department of Justice and DEA officials known as the Sensitive Activities Review Committee (SARC) decided to close the investigation, even though DEA ​​agents insisted they did not intend to influence the election. Mexican.

Agents argued that if Mexico elected a president who came to office indebted to powerful drug traffickers, the consequences could be disastrous for the two countries’ security alliance, although SARC decided it was better to avoid the investigation. .

Following the release of the ProPublica report, Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the DEA, fears that the information indicates a decline in cooperation between Mexico and the United States.

“This is a direct attack on them. They see it as affecting the presidential campaign or the next presidential election,” Vigil said. “Now, if we think the relationship with Mexico is bad, it’s from bad to almost non-existent.”