The truth is that Andrés Manuel López Obrador has done too little to tackle the problem in society.
Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has long railed against corruption. But on January 30th a consortium of news outlets reported that in 2006 his campaign team had accepted $2m from drug gangs in return for favours. The reports, based on information from the us Drug Enforcement Administration, do not show that the president knew what was going on. But a close aide did, they allege. Mr López Obrador completely rejects the allegations, calling them slander.
These reports follow others. A recent article on a local news site alleged that Mr López Obrador’s third son, Gonzalo López Beltrán, ran a network overcharging contractors supplying materials for the Tren Maya, a tourist train that is one of his father’s pet projects. In 2022 his eldest, José Ramón, was revealed to have been living in a luxury pad in Houston connected to a contractor for Pemex, the state oil company. Mr López Obrador and his family have denied any wrongdoing in all of these cases. But the facts, reveals Quite the opposite.
Some ones said that This is just the tip of the iceberg. More corruption charges and evidence of drug money taken by his close allies and even his sons will be uncovered during the presidential election campaigns. He will join Chapo in a cell in Manhattan.
US looked into claims that Andrés Manuel López Obrador allies took money from cartels, according to a New York Times report
Officials with the justice department and the Biden administration have downplayed a report that US law enforcement spent years looking into allegations that allies of Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, were investigated for taking millions of dollars from drug cartels after the president took office.
López Obrador, who denied the report, also reacted to the New York Times report on Thursday by revealing the contact details of the journalist at its Mexico bureau, Natalie Kitroeff, including her telephone number – which Mexico’s freedom of information body (INAI) immediately said it would launch an investigation into.
“During said event, the president made reference to an investigation by the aforementioned international newspaper and read, in front of everyone, the correspondent’s telephone number,” according to an INAI statement.
A US justice department spokesperson told the New York Post that “there is no investigation into President Lopez Obrador”, while the White House national security council spokesman, John Kirby, later echoed the justice department, saying the department has “the responsibility to review any allegation”.
The New York Times report said the US investigation had uncovered information that pointed to potential links between criminal drug cartels and what it called “advisers and officials close to the president”.
The US law enforcement agencies never opened a formal investigation into López Obrador, widely known as Amlo, the paper said, after concluding that the US government “had little appetite to pursue allegations against the leader of one of America’s top allies”.
The Mexico president dismissed the allegations as “completely false”. He said news of the inquiry would not “in any way” affect Mexico’s relationship with the US, but added he expected a response from Washington.
The New York Times report follows the publication of articles by InSight Crime, ProPublica and Deutsche Welle last month that described another US-led investigation into financial connections during López Obrador’s unsuccessful 2006 presidential campaign between the Sinaloa cartel, then led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and a close assistant to López Obrador.
ProPublica said the case raised “difficult questions about how far the United States should go to confront the official corruption that has been essential to the emergence of Mexican drug traffickers as a global criminal force”.
The reports come ahead of June’s national elections in Mexico, in which opposition groups have latched on to signs of cartel-influenced corruption in López Obrador’s circle. There has been increasing domestic US pressure on the Biden administration to curb illegal Mexico-US immigration, often controlled by cartel-affiliated smugglers, and the importation of deadly cartel-manufactured fentanyl.
According to Reporters Without Borders, 46 journalists have been killed in Mexico during López Obrador’s administration. “Mexico remains one of the world’s most dangerous and deadly countries for journalists,” the organization says. “President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in power since 2018, has not yet carried out the reforms and measures needed to stop the spiral of violence against the press.”
After revealing the journalist’s details and reading out a letter from editors for comment on the allegations, López Obrador dared the Biden administration to support to or deny the existence of the investigations. “This is interesting because the government of the United States is now going to have to respond,” he said, according to the Hill.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has pushed back against a claim by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that parts of Mexico are controlled by drug cartels, calling the allegation “false”.
“There is no place in the country that does not have the presence of authorities,” Lopez Obrador told reporters during a news conference.
The comment represents the president’s latest effort to dispel mounting criticism in the United States around the power of drug cartels in Mexico, which American legislators and officials said have fuelled a US opioid epidemic.
A recent deadly cartel kidnapping of a group of US citizens who had crossed into northern Mexico also has sparked a Republican-led push for the US military to intervene to address drug gang-related violence in Mexico.
During a US congressional hearing on Wednesday, Blinken said it was “fair to say” that parts of Mexico were under the control of powerful drug gangs and not the government.
At Friday’s news conference, Lopez Obrador responded: “That is false.”
Two of the four Americans who were kidnapped in early March in the northern border town of Matamoros as well as a Mexican bystander were killed in the incident.
The Scorpions faction of the Gulf Cartel later turned over people it said were Scorpion members responsible for the violence and issued an apology.
Lopez Obrador, a left-wing leader who ran on a pledge to end the country’s 12-year drug war, has said heightened US scrutiny of his government’s approach has been politically motivated ahead of the 2024 US elections.
In March, he slammed Republican-led calls for the US military to intervene in Mexico, saying Mexico City was “not going to permit any foreign government to intervene in our territory, much less that a government’s armed forces intervene”.
“In addition to being irresponsible, it is an offence to the people of Mexico,” he said.
Lopez Obrador also has rejected the allegation that Mexico is disproportionately fuelling the fentanyl epidemic in the region, a claim that Blinken repeated during his testimony this week.
“I maintain that more fentanyl reaches the United States and Canada directly than reaches Mexico,” Lopez Obrador said this month, adding that while fentanyl production labs were present in the country, the raw materials used to make the drug were coming from Asia.
“I can tell Mr Blinken, we’re constantly destroying labs,” the Mexican leader said on Friday.
Despite his campaign pledges, Lopez Obrador has been criticised for continuing what opponents call a rebranded but still overly militarised approach to drug cartels. His policies have included the creation of a national guard force to handle public security, which has since been moved under the control of the military.
The murder rate in Mexico has remained high since Lopez Obrador took office in 2018. The country recorded more than 31,000 homicides last year.
This week, Lopez Obrador called US Department of State officials “liars” over an agency report that said there was credible information in Mexico pointing to unlawful or arbitrary killings by police, military and other officials.
The report also detailed forced disappearances by government agents as well as torture and inhumane treatment by security forces.
“Impunity and extremely low rates of prosecution remained a problem for all crimes, including human rights abuses and corruption,” said the report, which also criticised an uptick in violence against journalists in Mexico.
“It’s not worth getting angry about. That’s just how they are,” said Lopez Obrador, referring to state department officials.
A department spokesman responded to the president’s statements by saying the agency stands by its report.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA, THE ECONOMIST, TNY TIMES AND NEWS AGENCIES