Mexico’s president accused of receiving bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel, according to US documents

Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán’s lawyer, Jeffrey Lichtman, declared that both former president Enrique Peña Nieto and current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador ( AMLO ) received million-dollar bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel.

The statement was recorded in court documents from the United States that were made public on Wednesday night and that journalist David Ordaz shared through his Twitter account on the afternoon of November 24.

In these files dated January 2019, the following can be read:

“In his opening statement, the defense attorney promised the jury that the trial would reveal details about the bribery of high-ranking individuals, including several presidents of Mexico”

“How did [Mayo Zambada] manage to become the biggest drug trafficker on the planet? I’ll tell you how: He bribes the entire government of Mexico, including up to the highest level: the current president of Mexico. And the previous one too ”, reads the document.

The Government of Mexico tried to block the testimony but their request was rejected.

“I’ll say that again with some emphasis: Mexico’s current and former presidents received hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes from the Mayo, according to government witnesses.”

The accusations are based on testimony from an individual identified as Alex Cifuentes-Villa, who allegedly worked for El Chapo and whose testimony would point to Ismael El Mayo Zambada as responsible for the bribery of AMLO and Peña Nieto.

However, later in the document, it is clarified that that opening statement could not be supported by the defense, since the bribe would have been paid to an official belonging to AMLO’s electoral campaign in 2006.

“As the government explained in the motion, the planned cross-examination by the defense was misleading, because the bribe in question had been paid to an individual associated with the failed presidential campaign, more than a decade ago, of the current president of Mexico (AMLO).”, reads the document.

Therefore, the court stressed that this was a contradiction with the defense statement in which the president was pointed out as having received the bribe. To which the defense responded by denying that he was referring to AMLO: “I said the previous two presidents of Mexico, who are ( Felipe) Calderón and Peña Nieto .”

They also pointed out that on January 15, 2019, the lawyer asked Cifuentes if the defendant, El Chapo, had paid $100 million dollars to Peña Nieto, which they indicated contradicted the version that Zambada would have been behind the payment of bribes.

After this, they indicated that the bribery accusations would actually only have the objective, on the part of the defense, of damaging the country’s international relations, as well as damaging the image of the president of Mexico.

Another former official who has been linked to the Sinaloa Cartel is Genaro García Luna, who was denied by the United States.

Judge Brian Cogan of the Federal Court for the Eastern District of Brooklyn, New York, denied a request to drop four charges of drug trafficking against Genaro García Luna, who was Secretary of Public Safety for former Mexican President Felipe Calderón.

According to said document, the criminal group has distributed tons of cocaine and other drugs throughout Central America, Mexico, and the United States.

Both the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel ( CJNG ) have reached other countries, specifically their presence has been registered in Qatar. To reach that Asian country, they have established alliances with other criminal organizations.

In relation to Qatar, “since 2017 we have detected the presence of drug cartels, specifically the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco Nueva Generación,” said Johan Obdola, who is currently president of IOSI Global, an organization dedicated to security both nationally, regional and international in an interview with journalist Óscar Balderas.

One of the drugs that criminal organizations offer in Qatar is methamphetamine but also an amphetamine identified as “captagon”, also named “the jihadist drug”, a substance that can prevent sleep for more than 36 hours.

To reach the Persian Gulf, drug traffickers formed alliances with terrorist or paramilitary groups in order to send shipments from America. One of them is identified as Hezbollah, a terrorist organization with a presence in more than 50 countries.