Mexico City.– It was a strange and surprising sight when Mexico’s most wanted drug lord landed on a runway near El Paso, Texas, in July, but the story of how he got there is turning into a scandal that threatens senior figures in Mexico’s ruling party.
At issue is whether Rubén Rocha, the governor of Sinaloa state and a close ally of the president, may have met with senior leaders of the so-called Sinaloa Cartel, the largest producer of fentanyl, which kills 70,000 Americans a year.
The saga has twists and turns worthy of a 1940s crime film, but it threatens to undermine Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s most important claim: that while he avoids confronting Mexico’s drug cartels, he also does not make deals with them.
On Thursday, Mexico’s federal prosecutor’s office said Sinaloa authorities mishandled evidence in an apparent attempt to cover up the July 25 killing of Hector Cuen, a politician who allegedly invited drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada to a home where he hoped to meet with Gov. Rocha. Instead, Zambada was kidnapped by another drug lord and flown to the United States, where he was arrested.
Zambada said in a letter released by his lawyer that Cuén was killed in the house where the kidnapping occurred. Gov. Rocha has maintained that Cuén was killed by gunmen in a botched gas station robbery later that day, and even provided video of the alleged attack taken by a security camera.
But federal prosecutors immediately noticed something was wrong: Post-mortem records showed Cuén’s body had four gunshot wounds, while only one shot can be heard on the security camera footage, and gas station employees say they didn’t hear any.
Federal officials also say Sinaloa authorities violated all murder investigation rules by allowing Cuén’s body to be cremated. Gov. Rocha denies planning a meeting with Zambada, but in the dispute over the day’s events, the kingpin’s version now seems more credible. The head of Sinaloa’s attorney general’s office resigned Friday.
“It seems to me that in Sinaloa, as they often do, what they did was cover up the murder,” said Mexican security analyst David Saucedo.
López Obrador acknowledged on Friday that “we are already aware of these contradictions, which (…) began from the very beginning,” and promised to get to the bottom of the matter. The federal prosecutor’s office has taken over the case and the president said that “the prosecutor’s office is also making it known that there are things that do not match up.”
Governor Rocha has been something of a key man for López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” policy, which consists of not confronting drug cartels; his state is home to the most powerful gang in Mexico.
The governor has accompanied the president on his most controversial trips: the half-dozen visits that the president has made to Badiraguato, Sinaloa, the hometown of drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who is currently imprisoned in the United States.
At one point, López Obrador even stopped to chat with Guzmán’s late mother. Governor Rocha was also born in Badiraguato.
The Mexican president’s drug policy is based on a series of unconvincing propositions: there is no point in arresting drug lords, because new ones will emerge. López Obrador claims that arrests of cartel leaders were a policy imposed on Mexico by the United States; refusing to continue it is a victory for national sovereignty.
The president claims that Mexican cartels do not manufacture fentanyl (they do, and high-level Mexican officials have admitted as much), and that social problems in the United States, not Mexican cartels, are responsible for the fentanyl crisis.
López Obrador says drug cartels are “respectful people” who “respect the citizenry” and generally only kill each other. The only solution to Mexico’s high homicide rate, he says, is to use job training programs to deplete the cartels’ pool of potential recruits.
All of these claims rest on a central proposition that now appears to be in doubt: that while the government does not attack the cartels, it does not make deals with them either. While no one has produced credible evidence that the president has met with drug lords, analysts say that Governor Rocha, a member of the Morena party to which the president also belongs, has.
“It is no longer a suspicion, it is a certainty,” Saucedo said. “It is clear that the federal government has intermediaries who negotiate with the Sinaloa cartel.” Rocha denies having met or dealt with drug lords.
Saucedo said it would not be the first time that Mexican governors or their relatives have met with drug lords: one of them was caught on video in 2014.
Zambada’s arrest in late July, along with that of El Chapo’s son Joaquín Guzmán López, was embarrassing for Mexico from the start because the Mexican government was not even aware of it.
But it was Zambada’s subsequent account of how he was duped by the younger Guzmán — who had always intended to turn himself in to U.S. authorities and apparently took Zambada, who had a $15 million bounty on his head, as his prize — that sent shivers through Mexico’s political class.
Zambada said Cuén, whom he trusted, invited him to the meeting to help smooth out the political rivalry between Cuén and Gov. Rocha. Zambada was famous for having eluded capture for decades thanks to his incredibly tight-knit, loyal and sophisticated personal security apparatus.
The fact that he had knowingly left all that behind to meet with Governor Rocha means that Zambada viewed the meeting as credible and feasible. The same goes for the idea that Zambada, as leader of the Sinaloa Cartel’s oldest wing, could act as an arbiter in the state’s political disputes.
Governor Rocha has denied knowing about or attending the meeting where Zambada was kidnapped. In a bizarre piece of political theater, Rocha published the flight plan for a plane that he claims took him out of state that day on a family vacation, and even posted a video that day carefully explaining that he was not in the state.
But in the central dispute over what happened that day, Zambada’s version seems the most credible.
“I find the version told by ‘Mayo’ Zambada to be more credible,” Saucedo said.
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