Connecting the dots between cartels, Mexico’s president, and the political party he leads

Since the 2018 presidential campaign in Mexico, there have been moments where the now President of Mexico’s relationship with organized crime seemed cozy.

On two occasions, one in Tamaulipas and another in San Luis Potosí, the car in which the candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, now president, was traveling had to stop at drug traffickers’ checkpoints. In one he passed almost automatically, and in the other, one of the criminals spoke on the radio before immediately letting him pass. Later he proposed an amnesty for drug traffickers, and as President, he unilaterally decided that he would not fight criminal gangs and insisted that ‘hugs’ was the best strategy.

Oddities such as his deference to Joaquín el Chapo Guzmán, whom he has always referred to as “sir”, or to the notorious cartel leader’s mother; the benevolence with his son Ovidio and the construction of two highways in the Sierra de Durango, where the Sinaloa Cartel operates hegemonically, and was a boom for trafficking. Porfirio Muñoz Ledo and Francisco Labastida, politicians in Mexico, concluded that López Obrador had a pact with drug traffickers. “Let them stop slandering,” the president replied, “if they have evidence, let them present it.”

They had no evidence. Labastida said that what existed were indications. His government and spokesmen harshly criticized the columnist for El Universal, Héctor de Mauleón, for pointing out alleged links between organized crime and candidates for Morena, the political party that was created by Mexico’s president, in the latest electoral processes, particularly in Tamaulipas, and denied any link to a rise in attacks against journalists.

Hacked information from the Ministry of National Defense last week began to produce charges against López Obrador and his government, with the dissemination of emails exposing the links of the drug cartels with leaders and candidates of the Morena political party. An email includes the report of the Southeast Regional Intelligence Fusion Center, located in Coatzacoalcos, which has under its gaze seven entities in the region, but which focused only on four governed by Morena or its satellites: Campeche, Chiapas, Veracruz, and Tabasco.

The email details the operation and structure of organized crime and the links that governors and mayors could have with criminals. In other emails, it refers to the complicity of officials from Veracruz, governed by Cuitláhuac García, of whom López Obrador has regularly said that he is honest, with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, to which they opened the door. There is also a report from Tabasco, until recently governed by the Secretary of the Interior, Adán Augusto López, which reveals that 63 percent of the territory is already in the hands of the Jalisco cartel.

The hacked emails begin to show the criminal scaffolding that has expanded under Morena governments, which includes other entities, such as Nayarit, where they identify a candidate for mayor, María del Carmen Castellanos, as a member of the structure of the Beltrán Leyva Brothers Cartel. Likewise, they identify former prosecutor Édgar Veytia, currently imprisoned in the United States, as having been the protector of that same organization, in contradiction to what López Obrador thinks, who has very strong ties with the state, who affirms that he was unfairly accused. Nayarit is one of the least seen entities within the enormous puzzle of drug trafficking and its institutional penetration, where a lot of information is expected to be found in the recent hacking of Mexico’s army,

The information is going to unfold and events and people are going to be connected, in time and space. The hack will reveal many more details of narcopolitics. Until now, less than 10 emails have come out where Morena politicians are related or allegedly linked to drug trafficking, and literally, millions of additional emails remain to be explored. What is emerging also allows us to look at some of the techniques used by the Army in gathering information, where in addition to human intelligence, there are telephone interceptions of politicians at different levels.

What has already emerged from the searches of different media are some emails that detail the institutional penetration of criminals, which are supported and ratified in risk maps prepared by some state governments in the past. An example is the military intelligence report prepared after the disappearance of the Ayotzinapa student teachers, whose matrix was carried out by the Guerrero prosecutor’s office, where they establish links between 20 mayors from different parties of the state and criminal organizations.

The published emails also allow establishing some of the methods used by the Army to obtain information in the field, which is considered to be of national security. For example, how the President and the security cabinet worked on October 17, 2019, when the ‘culiacanazo’ took place, has already come out, but the emails of the preparation of the operation and the aftermath of the fiasco have not yet appeared. In the same way, as can be seen in some emails, the methods used, the preparation of the presidential visits to Badiraguato, considered within the Army to have the highest national security priority, will reveal details of how two governors could have negotiated the president’s trip with the Sinaloa Cartel.

López Obrador said on Friday, a day after the hack began to spread, that there was nothing new, and nothing to fear. It is not known if his considerations have changed, but there is news that comes from an irreproachable source for him, the Army, and there are reasons to fear, at least politically, due to the emphasis that can be seen in the published emails on the military concern about the narco in the entrails of Morena, his political party.

By Raymundo Riva Palacio