By: Rich Lowry – nationalreview.com – February 3, 2025

Yes, it’s been shamefully entangled with the cartels.

The Mexicans don’t like President Trump’s currently delayed tariffs, but they really hate what he said about their government’s collusion with the drug cartels.

The White House fact sheet announcing imminent tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China said, by way of justifying the action, that “the Mexican drug trafficking organizations have an intolerable alliance with the government of Mexico.”

This charge created a furious reaction in Mexico. “We categorically reject the White House’s slanderous claim,” President Claudia Sheinbaum posted on X, “that the Mexico government has alliances with criminal organizations.” Mexico’s governors chimed in with a joint statement: “We energetically condemn the accusations that suggest there is a link between our government and narco-trafficking cartels.” And outraged headlines filled the newspapers.

The White House line is strong stuff but hits on a fundamental problem. It’s not as though the Mexican government signed a formal alliance with the cartels aboard the Mexican equivalent of the USS Missouri, or as if drug enforcement has altogether ceased in Mexico. But the Mexican government fought a bloody, yearslong war against the cartels that it lost; then it reached a corrupt modus vivendi with the organizations.

The Mexican government doesn’t like being called on this, and it’s a stark shift after the whitewashing of the Biden era.

That doesn’t change the facts, though. If the Mexicans feel defensive about Trump’s accusation, that’s because they have so much to feel defensive about.

As the New York Times has written of the cartels, “They pay off the police, manipulate mayors, co-opt senior officials and dominate broad swaths of the country.” (Sheinbaum has made much of Mexico’s sovereignty in her response to Trump’s tariff threat, but the cartels are a stark, ongoing affront against its sovereignty.)

Joshua Treviño of the Texas Public Policy Foundation has long been drawing attention to this issue, and has edited an exhaustive, unsparing report on the relationship between the narcos and the state.

There are strong suggestions that Andrés Manuel López Obrador, or AMLO, Mexico’s populist president from 2018 to 2024 who was a dove on the cartels, was in the pay of the criminal gangs.

This long ProPublica piece on alleged cartel payments worth $2 million to AMLO’s first, unsuccessful presidential campaign in 2006 reads like the treatment for a Netflix series.

“According to more than a dozen interviews with U.S. and Mexican officials and government documents reviewed by ProPublica,” the report notes, “the money was provided to campaign aides in 2006 in return for a promise that a López Obrador administration would facilitate the traffickers’ criminal operations.

“The investigation did not establish whether López Obrador sanctioned or even knew of the traffickers’ reported donations. But officials said the inquiry — which was built on the extensive cooperation of a former campaign operative and a key drug informant — did produce evidence that one of López Obrador’s closest aides had agreed to the proposed arrangement.”

As luck would have it, when AMLO was eventually elected in 2018, he pursued a policy toward the cartels of “hugs not bullets,” which has been about as effective as you’d expect.

ProPublica again: “By some estimates, criminal gangs dominate more than a quarter of the national territory — operating openly, imposing their will on local governments and often forcing the state and federal authorities to keep their distance. The violence has hovered near historic levels, while the gangs’ extortion rackets and other criminal enterprises have metastasized into every layer of the economy.”

The U.S. government was also aware of allegations that allies of AMLO were receiving payments from the cartels while he was in office. It’s been AMLO’s good fortune that it’s never been considered a good time to pursue a full-fledged investigation of him, whether he was an influential political leader on his way up or whether he was the head of state of an important U.S. ally. A great deal of evidence and leads were simply never pursued.

AMLO is out of office. Still, he just saw his hand-picked successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, overwhelmingly elected, and he remains the country’s foremost power broker.

Ultimately, whether we are calling out the Mexican government or not, it’s going to need our assistance if it is ever going to make serious inroads against the cartels. The criminal organizations are so powerful — and have the resources to distort government toward their ends — because the Mexican state lacks the capacity to dismantle them, demonstrated during President Felipe Calderón’s abortive war on the cartels beginning in 2006.

The unraveling of the intolerable alliance will require more than tough words from the United States.

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Source: The Mexican Government Can’t Handle the Truth | National Review