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Claudia Sheinbaum Is Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place

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The rock is the rising threat of US military intervention in Mexico; the hard place is Sheibnaum’s own party’s narco-politicians.

Late last week, as Mexico was still reeling from revelations that CIA agents are operating in Chihuahua, in direct violation of Mexico’s constitution and sovereignty, the Sheinbaum government received an extradition request from Washington for 10 Sinaloa-based individuals. They included the state’s governor, Rubén Rocha, and its senator, Enrique Inzunza Cázares.

The indictments pose the biggest threat yet to Sheinbaum’s presidency. If she bows to US pressure and agrees to indict Rocha, a senior member of Sheinbaum’s Morena party, and the other nine serving and former politicians and security chiefs, she risks opening the floodgates to more US extradition requests. If she doesn’t, she risks the wrath of an increasingly unhinged Trump administration.

“Without Precedent”

The veteran Mexican journalist Denise Marker described the development as “extremely worrying” and “without precedent”. As one twitter commenter remarked tartly, it is indeed “without precedent”: drug cartels have operated in Sinaloa with total impunity and government protection for nigh on 80 years and not a single PRI or PAN governor has ever been extradited.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on non-state armed groups at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, DC, said that indicting elected politicians in Mexico had “long been considered a very big step, almost a ‘nuclear option’”. And more indictments are likely to come, she added.

Rumours are already flying of an approaching second wave of extradition requests — including for three more governors, two legislators and the son of an ex-president, presumably Andrés Manuel López Obrador. For the moment, this is pure conjecture, but it would be in keeping with the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to international relations.

Perhaps that’s why the Sheinbaum government has declined the extradition request — for now. Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office (FGR) on Friday ruled out provisionally detaining the suspects indicated. The head of the Specialized Prosecutor’s Office for Competition Control of the FGR, Raúl Jiménez Vázquez, said there was not enough evidence to justify taking such an action.

Until now, Sheinbaum has generally bent to the US’s will despite her constant reaffirmations of Mexican sovereignty and independence, reports Ioan Grillo:

“We are not a protectorate of the United States. We are not a colony of the United States,” Sheinbaum, the 63-year old former scientist, said Monday.

However, in actions, Sheinbaum has delivered to President Donald Trump on several key demands since he returned to office last year. Her government helped halt the flow of undocumented migrants though Mexico to the U.S. border, slashing Border Patrol encounters to the lowest in decades (this is also due to Trump largely killing asylum at the border). She has whacked fentanyl trafficking, so U.S. border seizures of the venomous drug were down 72 percent last month compared to when she took office in October 2024.

But the demands continue to grow in size and number. As the Wall Street Journal notes, each time Sheinbaum gives President Trump an inch, he demands a mile:

More than a year after both leaders took office, the give and take is forcing Mexico’s president into a corner. In that way, she may be following other world leaders who have tried to forge a working partnership with Trump—from Italy’s Giorgia Meloni to French President Emmanuel Macron—only to face a falling-out.

It was a by-now-familiar pattern in the relationship between the two neighbors.
It began with decisions that cost Sheinbaum very little political capital, such as sending National Guard troops to the border to stop U.S.-bound drug smuggling and closing Mexico’s doors to migrants from Venezuela and other countries.

But lately Trump has pushed Sheinbaum into moves that risk angering her political base.

Just over a week ago, it was revealed that four CIA agents had participated in an anti-narcotics operation with the state police force of Chihuahua without informing Mexico’s federal authorities. This was a complete violation of Mexico’s constitution and sovereignty. The only reason why the public — and apparently, the federal government — learned of the operation was that two of the CIA agents died in an alleged car accident as it unfolded.

The resulting scandal severely damaged relations between Mexico and the US while sparking a fierce showdown between the federal government and the Chihuahuan governor, Maru Campos Galván, who has thrown her state’s doors wide open to US government agencies including the CIA, the DEA and the FBI. In doing so, Campos Galván not only violated the constitution, she committed the most serious of crimes: high treason.

Amid the resulting fallout, the Trump administration, represented in Mexico by Ron Johnson, a former CIA agent and Green Beret with decades of experience of destabilising foreign countries, including by training death squads, tightened the screw further by unsealing the indictment of Rocha. In a rare departure from custom, the indictment included 34 pages of allegations that have already been made public.

The goal, it seems, is two-fold: first, to distract the US and Mexican publics from the Chihuahua debacle (and whatever other scandals du jour the Trump administration need cover from, including, of course, Epstein); and second, to paint Sheinbaum into a corner. If she complies with the extradition request, she opens the door to the US gradually picking off more and more of Morena’s elected representatives, with the resulting damage this could do to Morena’s base.

Rocha is fully aware of this fact. In what can be easily read as a veiled threat to Morena’s leadership, he tweeted a couple of days ago (emphasis my own):

“This attack is not just aimed at my person but the whole Fourth Transformation movement, its emblematic leaders and the Mexicans who represent the cause”.

According to unnamed sources cited by the Mexican corporate law firm León Barrena Rodríguez & Partners LLP (LBR), “the Governor’s defiance carries an implicit, scorched-earth ultimatum directed straight at the National Palace”:

The subtext is clear: if Sheinbaum attempts to sacrifice him to appease Washington, he will take the entire structure down with him. A sitting governor with his level of access doesn’t just go to a U.S. interrogation room to face a life sentence; he goes there to trade. The leverage is absolute. The threat (“if you hand me over, I disclose everything regarding AMLO, the presidency, and Morena’s tactical alliances with the cartels”) is the only thing keeping him from being extradited tonight. Sheinbaum is now effectively a hostage to her own party’s regional power brokers.

On the other hand, if Sheinbaum declines the extradition request, as she has done so far, she risks being painted by the US government, Mexican opposition parties and pliant media outlets in Mexico and abroad as a “narco president” who is more interested in protecting the country’s drug lords than helping the US Department of Justice put them behind bars.

Refusal to cooperate also increases the risk of US military intervention in Mexico. After all, if US forces can abduct a sitting president in Venezuela, what’s to stop them from snatching a regional governor in Mexico (apart from Mexico’s US-trained and equipped armed forces)? According to LBR’s sources, this option has been on the table “for months”:

[T]he use of US special operations forces to apprehend Governor Rocha, Senator Inzunza, and other indicted officials has been a live option on the tables of the DOJ, DOW, and DEA for months…

Sheinbaum and AMLO have decided that a total diplomatic rupture with the U.S. is a smaller price to pay than the existential threat of Governor Rocha “spitting” in a New York courtroom. They are gambling on the assumption that Washington lacks the will for forceful extraction. This is a fatal error.

The former DEA agent Mike Vigil, who lives in Mexico, believes than an extraction is unlikely, warning in an interview with the Chilean outlet Entrevistas Meganoticias that any attempt to abduct Rochoa would be a disaster, not only for Mexico but also Latin America as a whole (translation my own):

They did it in Venezuela with Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. But Venezuela is not Mexico. So, to go that way, which for me was an act of war, to remove politicians in Mexico would be a disaster. This would cause instability throughout Latin America.

It would also be a disaster for the US government, Vigil says without elucidating as to why. One thing is clear: this is all happening at the most delicate of times for US-Mexico relations, with the USMCA trade deal up for mandatory joint review in June. One might think that the last thing the US needs right now, as the global economy teeters on the edge of a global crisis of Trump’s choice, is to risk upending its biggest trade partnership.

It’s possible, of course, that Trump is using the extradition requests as leverage in the trade  negotiations. However, the threat of US military intervention against the cartels has been on the cards since at least early 2023, when neo-con Republicans like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio and former Attorney General William Barr began talking of the need to designate the cartels as “terrorist organisations.”

Which was one of the first things Trump did on his return to office. Sheinbaum and her government are now feeling the inevitable fallout from that.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

“She’s caught between a rock and a hard place because she obviously understands what’s at stake for her government and the US and the critically important USMCA review,” said Arturo Sarukhán, a former Mexican ambassador to the US.

Sheinbaum has so far prioritised loyalty to Morena. On Friday, she declared that the ten Mexican officials charged with drug trafficking and weapons offences will be tried in Mexico, not the US — if credible evidence emerges against them.

As for Rocha, he allegedly travelled with Sheinbaum to meet with AMLO at his “La Chingada” ranch in Palenque, Tabasco, at the weekend. Immediately afterwards, the Sinaloan governor took temporary leave, which removes all the legal protections against prosecution he enjoyed as a sitting governor.

But is he guilty of colluding with the Sinaloan cartel? Probably yes.

The word that keeps popping up to describe Rocha, including in some pro-government media outlets, is “undefendable”. He clearly has ties to the Sinaloan cartel (who doesn’t in the higher reaches of Sinaloa’s government?) and allegedly received campaign funding from prominent cartel members. He has almost certainly been fingered (no, not that way) by members of the Chapitos branch of the Sinaloan cartel, who’ve turned witness in return for lighter sentences.

All that being said, Rocha is still a relatively small pawn in a much larger game being played by Washington. That game extends to the entire American continent, and its ultimate goal is to remove all obstacles to the US’ dominion over the strategic resources of that region — including, crucially, its oil and gas. Or as RevKev put it recently, to turn all of Latin America into one giant quarry for Western corps, as we are already seeing in post-Maduro Venezuela.

To achieve that goal, Washington must remove all governments in the region that are not entirely subordinated to its interests and wish to maintain some degree of national sovereignty. And its main instrument for doing that, as we saw with Venezuela, is the so-called war on the drug cartels.

Since the recent rash of elections that have returned far-right governments in Chile, Bolivia and Honduras (with prodding from Trump, of course) and the US’ half-baked coup in Venezuela, the number of non-US aligned countries is in rapid decline. Chief among them are Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, which together account for over 60% of the region’s population and GDP, as well as Nicaragua and Cuba, whose shattered economy is now subject to blanket US sanctions.

The latest revelations of the Hondurasgate scandal suggest that Argentina’s Milei is now conspiring with the recently pardoned Honduran narco-president Juan Orlando Hernández, whom the US and Israel apparently want to return to power, to spread propaganda online to “eliminate the left” in Latin America, targeting Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, and the left-wing opposition in Honduras — all apparently paid for with US and Israeli funds…

In Mexico, the goal is presumably to erode Morena’s support base with a view to the mid-term elections in 2027. That’s assuming the US doesn’t try to remove Sheinbaum by force, á la Maduro, before then. For now that is hard to imagine, given she is democratically elected and still enjoys high levels of public support. According to the latest El Financiero poll, her approval rating is 68%, which is just six points above Donald Trump’s latest disapproval rating (62%).

In order to destroy Morena, Washington must first destroy the reputation of its co-founder and first national president, López Obrador, who ended his six-year term with an approval rating of close to 80%. During his presidency, AMLO did the unthinkable: he sought to distance himself from the disastrous war on the drug cartels initiated by President Felipe Calderón in 2006.

In 2020, the AMLO government passed a national security reform aimed at reaffirming Mexico’s national sovereignty in matters of security vis-à-vis the United States. In the bill, the Senate of the Republic established provisions and added articles to the chapter on International Cooperation that substantially limit the actions of foreign agencies on Mexican soil — the same provisions and articles that have been violated by the CIA and Chihuahua’s state government.

All of this made AMLO some powerful enemies in Washington. William Barr called AMLO the cartel’s “chief enabler” for refusing to wage war against the cartels with quite the same zeal as his predecessors:

“In reality, AMLO is unwilling to take action that would seriously challenge the cartels. He shields them by consistently invoking Mexico’s sovereignty to block the U.S. from taking effective action.”

Of course, Barr is hardly one to talk given his prominent role in the cover-up of Iran-Contra, which included drug running by the CIA (h/t Carloninian), as well as other crimes and misdemeanors.

As readers may recall, the DEA finally struck back against AMLO by launching a series of accusations against him in his final months in office. However, the widely published allegations did not present conclusive proof showing AMLO’s complicity; nor did they dent Morena’s electoral prospects in the 2024 presidential elections. Sheinbaum ended up winning by a historic landslide.

Since then, however, the US appears to have set its sights on bringing down AMLO, as we reported in February 2025:

In recent months rumours have also been circulating in certain corners of social media that the US government will soon set its sights on Mexico’s former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka AMLO, for his alleged ties to Mexico’s drug cartels. Just under a month ago, the journalist Salvador García Soto published an article in El Universal titled “They Are Building a Case Against AMLO in Washington”:

Headed by the imminent Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, and based on the statements that have already been made to the Department of Justice, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada and the two sons of Chapo Guzmán, Ovidio Guzmán López and his brother Joaquín Guzmán López, the legal offensive against the former Mexican president would also have the collaboration of Mexican politicians who are collaborating with Rubio’s office, including a former PAN governor, a former foreign minister of the Republic and a former Mexican ambassador to the United States, who are bringing “information and witnesses” to the U.S. authorities.

One thing that is undeniable about Mexico today is that its drug cartels have compromised or even taken over large sections of its political structures at the local and state level in key strategic regions. All of the political parties, not just Moreana, are implicated. As Denise Maerker wrote in Milenio, criminal groups have all but supplanted local authorities in some parts of the country:

No Mexican needs to hear it from anyone else, it is obvious and clear as day: there are entire regions in which a criminal group controls and governs the territory.

That does not mean that criminal groups govern the entire country or that Mexico is a “narco state”, as some politicians and pundits in the US are wont to claim. Also, conspicuously absent from the public debate in Mexico is an acknowledgment that the US itself is a criminal state that is simultaneously waging a war of aggression against Iran, facilitating genocides in Gaza and Lebanon, and conducting extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific.

It is also clear that expanding and escalating the US’ war on the drug cartels will do nothing to improve the situation on the ground in Mexico, especially if nothing is done on the demand side or to srem the “iron rivers” of guns flowing from the US. On the contrary, it will bring yet more violence, suffering and immiseration while doing little to reduce the flow of drugs.

Even the New York Times ran an op-ed in 2022 declaring the US-War on Drugs as a “staggering failure” — from a counter-narcotics perspective. As Roberto Saviano, the Italian anti-mafia author known for Gomorra and ZeroZeroZero, has long argued, the only effective way to dismantle the economic power of organised crime is to legalise drugs.

“Legalising cocaine would mean cutting off access to the oil wells of criminal organisations, legalisation would transform the world economy,” Saviano told journalists during the launch of ZeroZeroZero in 2019.

But that is the last thing Washington wants. At their root, both the international drugs trade and the Global War on Drugs, like the Global War on Terror, are tools for imperial hegemony and resource plunder.

If the Trump administration’s plan for hemispheric hegemony comes off, which is still a big “IF” given how over-extended the US empire has become as well as the compounding economic risks it faces from Trump’s war of choice against Iran, the future of Latin America is likely to look a lot like Daniel Noboa’s Ecuador — in other words, bleak. Once the region’s second safest country, Ecuador is now the most violent.

After signing up to a US-led military crackdown in early 2024, that violence has done nothing but spiral to unprecedented levels — in 2025, the national homicide rate was 50.9 per 100,000, more than triple the rate in Mexico — while Ecuador’s weight in the global narcotics trade has done nothing but grow. Oh, and lest we forget, the Noboa family’s banana business has been repeatedly implicated in the smuggling of cocaine to Europe.

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14 comments

  1. Candide

    “They did it in Mexico with Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores.”
    Correction coming….

  2. The Rev Kev

    I think that Sheinbaum is going to have to dig in her heels and say no. If she buckles and says yes, the demands and extraditions will keep on increasing. It is like a form of danegeld. And it is only a matter of time until the Trump regime demands that extradition of the big one – AMLO, Mexico’s previous President. They may even say that there is an open investigation on Sheinbaum like they have with Venezuela’s present President to put pressure on her.

    Still, it’s a bit rough to say that the drug cartels have compromised or even taken over large sections of Mexico’s political structures when the CIA, the DEA and the FBI have done exactly that under the Chihuahuan governor, Maru Campos Galván.

  3. PVDSteve

    I highly recommend Oswaldo Zavala’s excellent recent work Drug Cartels Do Not Exist on the way narrative structures around the cartels in Mexico are used to obscure the driving role of the US, both in terms of raw demand as well as direct involvement of intelligence/security agencies in protecting and enriching drug smugglers. It’s a great read and helps show how US imperialist policies (and even the corruption of individual Mexican politicians friendly to them) are obscured and reinforced via the way we talk about the issue.

    1. Nick Corbishley Post author

      Thanks for the recommendation, Steve. Have read some of his articles and seen him in interviews and have always found his ideas refreshing but never got round to reading the book. Will try to amend that.

  4. Carolinian

    Of course, Barr is hardly one to talk given his prominent role in the cover-up of the Iran-Contra scandal as well as other crimes and misdemeanors.

    Iran-Contra which included drug running by the CIA. There’s even a Tom Cruise movie.

    And of course those Mexican cartels depend on the US for both weapons and customers. In any case thanks for the very interesting above. Given the disaster in the ME Trump’s megalomania may have its own sell by date–not to mention the possibility of President Dementia making his own exit before Sheinbaum does

    1. Nick Corbishley Post author

      Iran-Contra which included drug running by the CIA. There’s even a Tom Cruise movie.

      Fair point, Carolinian. An oversight on my part. Have now put it it as well as thrown a wee hat-tip your way.

      Incidentally, it’s not bad that American Made movie. The scene that most sticks in my mind is when Seal is getting arrested at MENA airport by a whole assortment of three letter agencies, and one of the officials, presumably the state attorney, phones the state governor to ask which one should take him into custody, and is duly told to release him. At no stage is the name Clinton used but the number of times the state attorney says “Bill” during the phone call is quite funny. I imagine the reference flew over many viewers’ head though. What I didn’t know is that other scenes from the movie that would have more directly implicated not just Clinton but also George H W Bush in the Iran Contra affair were nixed from the Gary Spinelli-penned script. According to Hollywood Reporter, “the producer and financier, Cross Creek Pictures, wanted to keep the film from being political.” The film’s name was also changed from Mena to American Made in order to “downplay the Arkansas connections”.

      It is yet more confirmation of Zavala’s argument that the narrative structures around drug cartels are constantly used to obscure the driving role of the US.

      1. Carolinian

        Alex Cockburn was on the Mena story long ago.

        I don’t think Cruise is very political (and if so rightwing–see Top Gun) but he’s a big airplane guy, flies his own jet etc. This was undoubtedly the attraction for him.

      2. Skip Intro

        And without the Iran Hostages twist, the Contra operation would have been a knock-off of the ‘Air America’ operations in SE Asia. There’s also a movie about that one! One assumes something similar in inter-Taliban Afghanistan, though I haven’t seen the movie yet.

  5. lyman alpha blob

    RE: “….what’s to stop them from snatching a regional governor in Mexico (apart from Mexico’s US-trained and equipped armed forces)?”

    The cartels themselves might have something to say about any extradition attempt, and I’d imagine they could put up a very competitive fight against US special forces.

    Of course none of this is about eradicating drugs – it’s about the US government controlling the flow and using the proceeds to fund it’s own dark ops. It’s not at all just a coincidence that opium production dropped to almost nothing in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over in the early aughts, and then spiked again drastically after the US invaded.

  6. Don

    Maybe I should change my handle to pollyanna, but I believe that the USA would be handed its ass if it were to invade Mexico or attempt to overthrow Morena. It’s just not gonna happen.

    Morena is a stunningly popular big-tent movement built around a social democratic/socialist core, a political party unprecedented in recent Mexican history. A significant number of working people would put their lives on the line to defend it — it literally has been, and continues to be, their salvation. Morena has tripled the minimum wage (think about it, tripled), workers rights have been protected and extended, powerful, lawless corporations, both Mexican and foreign are being forced to obey the laws (and for some, to pay their taxes for the first time in decades). Mexico is now fast-tracking the process of making its relatively good healthcare system truly universal and single-tiered.

    The USA is broadly disliked, frequently hated, seen to be in collusion with the cartels and to be their armourer. Under Trump, the United States of America is understood to be, yet again, a palpable military threat. Of the scores of American expats living in this non-beach, non-tourist town (almost all of them anti-Trump Dems), who were living here a year ago, most have gone home, unable to cope with the Mexican inability to distinguish between Blue and Red, naivety and culpability: “Isn’t Trump horrible?” “Maybe, but he’s about the same.” Palestinian solidarity is a given (a local kid’s football team wears Palestinian strip), and support for Venezuela, Cuba and Iran is widespread and unapologetic. Like every other place in Mexico, those who defended this country with their lives against previous USA incursions (and the serial theft of just under half of Mexico’s territory), are celebrated as the greatest of heroes; in even small towns, relatively grander streets named after them are ubiquitous.

    And then there is the fact that Mexico is an industrial powerhouse; for all its flaws, a country where things get done, and fast. In April ’25, a US dollar got you 22.4 pesos; a year later it got you ±17.3. Mexico recently surpassed Spain to become the largest Spanish-speaking economy.

    And then there is the FAFO Mexican military…

    But crazier things are happening — so who knows? (But I am confidant they will be stopped well short of El Bajío.

    1. temp

      This argument is made by every third worlder about every third worlder country. The USA has stomped mexico repeatedly throughout history and when you read old newspapers this post could literally be a transcription from those papers at the time right before they got stomped. Be it the Alamo or otherwise this has been the argument for almost a century. The US border patrol was formed mostly to protect mexico from US ranchers and farms who would go revenge kill whole towns for mexician raping and looting. Throughout history mexico has been a joke. Even the left admits it in de facto by comments like ” serial theft of just under half of Mexico’s territory”. US keeps stealing mexico land but somehow they are going to win the fight “this time”. Sure third worlders keep dreaming. The US cav used to chase the indians across the border and the indians would hang out in mexico because it was easy mode next to dealing with the US cav. Further mexicians rebelled against the cartels and won. Then surrendered to the government and were jailed because they believe the propaganda that the government ISN’T the biggest cartel. Just freeing those mexician would result in the overthrow of huge sections of mexico. The US would barely have to deploy any troops other then select raids to jail break and rearm these heroes.

      Mexico wets its diaper every time they hear a private armed militia is patrolling the border. They then cry to the US government and demand the border patrol protect them. Even when the mexician military and cartels officially ally the cartels get their weapons from the army, the army get weapons from the US government. They won’t be producing more weapons and equipment once cut off. Mexico’s oil sector is on the borderline and can easily be shut down. Mexico can produce as much junk cars and such it can. Its not producing tanks, aircraft, bombs, guns, etc, etc, etc. Once the US cuts the arms off they have nothing to fight with. If trump really really wanted to get full MAGA he would tell the border patrol to allow US militia to patrol and handle mexico issues like in the old days.

  7. Nat Wilson Turner

    Great piece. The western hemisphere seems doomed to suffer greatly as the US empire collapses.

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