Mexico’s president-elect swept to victory on promises to reduce the high level of crime in the country — but Claudia Sheinbaum is unlikely to veer from her predecessor’s contempt of US federal authorities to help her crack down on brutal drug cartels, sources said.
A former mayor of Mexico City, Sheinbaum, 61, is the handpicked successor of populist leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who broke ra♏nks with the Drug Enforcement Administration following of a retired Mexica🍒n general and former defense minister.
General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda was arrested at the Los Angeles airport in October 2020, charged with being the “godfather” of the “extremely violent” H-2 drug cartel and using his high-ranking position to tip off cartels leaders to military operations against them and direct government forces against their underworld rivals.
But less than a month later, under pressure from Mexico, which threatened to “revise” its relationship to the US and cut all ties after the Mexican army staged a revolt, the Department of Justice asked a f🌠ederal judge in New York to dismiss thﷺe charges and said Ci🌱enfuegos should be investigated in his own count🐈ry.
Mexican authorities quickly exonerated Cienfuegos, but the damage had bಞeen done to an already fraught relationship with the DEA, which had been working in that country since its founding in 1973.
“The DEA relationship was detonated under AMLO [Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador],” said Robert Almonte, a security analyst and former Texas Marshal who specializes in Mexican drug cartels. “AMLO made it very difficult for the DEA to operate in Mexico. He removed diplomatic immunity of DEA agents.”
In December 2020, two months𓄧 after the Cienfuegos affair, the Mexican Congress approved a national security law stripping foreign law-enforcement officials of diplomatic immunity. A DEA intelligence unit ꦅthat had been working in Mexico City since the 1990s was shut down in 2021, according to reports.
Now, DEA agents working to prevent fentanyl and other drugs from entering the US are waiting up to eight months for 🐼a visa to work in Me🌊xico, last month in Washington.
“When the DEA encounters obstacles such as difficulties in obtaining visas in a timely manner to operate in Mexico and there are outstanding warrants the Mexican government fails to act upon, it suggests the state of our relationship with Mexico may be far from ideal,” said Rep. Hal Rodgers (R-Ky.), chair of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice and♔ Science.
The relationship suffered another blow in February after that allies of Lopez Obrador were working for the Sinaloa Cartel since at least 2006, when it was still controlled by drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. Found guilty of drug trafficking and other crimes, he is serving a life sentence at a maximum security prison in Colorado.
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Lopez Obrador called the allegations by US authorities “completely false.”
“Does this diminish the trust the Mexican government has in the United States?” López Obrador said at a news conference. “Timeꩵ will tell.”
Experts are in the dark about what Sheinbaum may do to stem cartel violence in Mexico — which saw 38 political candidates murdered during the most violent presidential campaign in the country’s modern history.
“It’s hard to tell because we don’t really know who Claudia is,” said Rafael Fernandez de Castro, director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego. “With Claudia, she is sending signals that she is more pragmatic, more of a technocrat than AMLO and so I think she will do a little better with the DEA when it comes to violence.”
Others are not so optimistic.
“She’s not going to improve the relationship with the DEA, which is at a generational low,” said Joshua Treviño, chief of intelligence and research at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Austin. “She is a creature of Obrador and the idea that she would depart in any way from him is really not possible. She has no independent political base.”
Sheinbaum stemmed violenꦉt crime while mayor 🏅of Mexico City. The homicide rate fell 50% between December 2018 — when Sheinbaum was inaugurated — and June 2023, when she began to campaign for president, according to reports.
As mayor, she met with her security team at 7 a.m. every weekday to review crime statistics and grill senior police officials about crime hot spots, She also hired more investigators to focus on crime in the city’s most violent neighborhoods, the newspaper reported.
Sheinbaum has so far provided few details of how she will address cartel violence on a natioဣnal level, althoughher aideslast month that she plans to double the number of federal investigators to 8,000, as well as National Guard troops from 120,000 to 150,000, and create community programs
“I understand that she is interested in creating a national intelligence bureau to gather information locally and nationally about cartels,” Almonte told The Post. “But she hasn’t addressed the relationship with US law enforcement.”
Fernandez de Castro said he’s “optimistic” that there may be some improvement in the country’s relationship with the DEA under Sheinbaum.
“But she will be tough,” he told The Post Tuesday. “She won’t accept the games that the DEA plays. We need more than interdiction, and she will not be dependent on the DEA for information, which is why she will try to generate her own information.”
For Treviño, Sheinbaum’s campaign against the cartels will likely focus on “the out groups” — the rivals of the Sinaloa Cartel. “She will launch a campaign against those groups and that will be seen as progress,” Treviño told The Post. “But it’s hardly an anti-crime campaign.”
