MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s president suggested Thursday that talks with the U.S. government on migration and drug trafficking could be harmed following media reports about a U.S. investigation into alleged donations of drug money to his campaign. of 2006.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador suggested that U.S. officials should apologize for what he called baseless accusations, and said it would be difficult to sit down and talk about some of the most pressing issues in bilateral relations until that happens.
“I do not accept this, what I want is for the United States government to take a position,” López Obrador said at his daily morning press conference. “If they don’t have proof, they have to apologize.”
“President (Joe) Biden has to find out about this,” López Obrador said. “How are we going to sit at a table to talk about the fight against drugs if one of his 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 US southwest border.
It would be a political problem for Biden if Mexico refuses to continue doing so or relaxes its already weak efforts to control the flow of deadly opioids manufactured in Mexico and smuggled into the United States.
López Obrador – who later in the briefing pointedly called former President Donald Trump “my friend” – did not specify who he wanted to apologize to, but suggested that the US State Department should say something.
“Don’t the State Department and the Justice Department have any information?” she said, calling media reports “interventionism” in Mexico’s internal affairs.
López Obrador has denied old accusations that drug traffickers donated around $2 million to his first failed presidential bid (he lost in 2012 and ultimately won in 2018) and called the reports an attack by the United States on his government. and his Morena party before. Presidential elections on June 2 in Mexico.
Claudia Sheinbaum, presidential candidate for López Obrador’s Morena party, has a commanding lead in opinion polls for the June 2 election. But Mexico’s continued high rates of violence (and Sheinbaum’s promise to continue López Obrador’s policy of not confronting drug cartels) are one of the ruling party’s most vulnerable flanks.
According to reports from ProPublica, Insight Crime and Germany’s Deutsche Welle, in 2010 the DEA investigated allegations by a cooperating drug trafficker and a former campaign adviser that leaders of the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel gave money to close confidants of López Obrador in 2006.
But a wiretap of a conversation between DEA informants and one of López Obrador’s top advisers did not actually confirm the donations, and US officials later ordered the politically sensitive case closed.
Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former head of international operations, feared that the latest dispute could damage cooperation between the United States and Mexico in the fight against drug trafficking, much like what happened with the 2020 arrest by the United States. of a former Mexican Secretary of Defense, General. Salvador Cienfuegos.
López Obrador has long complained about the actions of DEA agents in Mexico and, after Cienfuegos’ arrest, imposed restrictions on US agents in Mexico.
“It’s just terrible, it will mean more drugs coming to the United States and more violence in Mexico,” Vigil said. “It’s worse than when Cienfuegos was arrested.”
“This is a direct attack against him. Secondly, he sees it as having an impact on the presidential campaign or the upcoming presidential election,” Vigil said. “Now, if we thought that relations with Mexico were bad, they are going to go from worse to almost non-existent.”
López Obrador has long been angry about alleged US interference. He claimed that the United States’ arrest of Cienfuegos, the former Secretary of Defense, was part of a DEA plot to weaken Mexico’s military and allow American agents to reign freely in Mexico.
Cienfuegos was arrested at a Los Angeles airport in 2020, accused of participating in an international drug trafficking and money laundering network.
Mexico demanded the release of Cienfuegos and reportedly threatened to expel US agents unless he was returned. The United States dropped the charges and returned him. Mexico quickly cleared Cienfuegos of any wrongdoing and then withheld visas for U.S. agents and restricted the work they could do in Mexico.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america