by Tim Golden, ProPublica
After months of U.S.-Mexico tensions sparked by the Trump administration’s threats to strike unilaterally at Mexican drug traffickers, the two governments are heading for a potentially more serious confrontation over President Claudia Sheinbaum’s refusal to arrest Mexican officials charged in the United States with drug corruption.
U.S. Justice Department officials have yet to present a full picture of their evidence against 10 current and former Mexican officials, whose indictments were announced on April 29. They include the governor of Sinaloa state, Rubén Rocha Moya, an ally of the president and a prominent figure in her leftist political party.
But as the Trump administration steps up its efforts to target Mexican government figures who are accused of protecting the drug trade, Sheinbaum is taking a hard-line stand against extraditing Rocha and the others charged in a New York federal court, Mexican officials said.
“She is very clear about this,” a senior Mexican official said of the U.S. request for Rocha’s extradition. “She has decided no.”
The impasse presents the Trump administration with a potentially critical test of its aims in Mexico, raising questions about how far it will go to challenge the corruption that has long sustained Mexico’s trade in illegal drugs.
By elevating the importance of the drug issue and threatening harsh economic penalties if Sheinbaum did not join forces to combat it, the administration has pushed Mexico to dramatically escalate its fight against organized crime.
After years in which Sheinbaum’s political mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, withdrew from confrontation with the drug mafias, her security forces have worked with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies to destroy clandestine drug labs, seize large caches of drugs, and kill or capture ranking crime bosses.
Sheinbaum also circumvented the two countries’ extradition treaty to hand over at least 92 accused traffickers sought by the United States — voicing none of the concerns about U.S. evidence that she has cited in refusing to arrest the Sinaloa officials.
Still, U.S. officials acknowledge privately, the two countries’ intensified counter-drug campaign has emphasized tactical strikes and short-term gains rather than a coherent, longer-term strategy to undermine organized crime groups, confront endemic corruption or strengthen Mexico’s criminal justice system.
To many senior Trump administration officials, particularly in the Justice Department and the White House, attacking the high-level corruption that sustains the drug trade represents a crucial next step. They have argued it is a step that U.S. prosecutors should take aggressively if Mexico will not do so, according to U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Some diplomatic and intelligence officials, however, are wary of pushing Sheinbaum too hard, seeing her position as precarious. They fear that demanding she take on her own party’s old guard might prompt her to pull back on Mexico’s cooperation with U.S. drug enforcement and immigration policies, the officials said.
After keeping largely silent on Mexico’s changing relationship with Washington, López Obrador thrust himself back into the public debate on June 3 with a blistering attack on the New York indictments. U.S. officials were simply using drug corruption as a pretext, he claimed, to undermine Morena, as the leftist party he founded is known.
“To be clear,” the former president wrote, “some U.S. officials are plotting to weaken Morena and strengthen the rightist opposition in Mexico with the idea of once again having a submissive, corrupt, mafioso and cruel government.” Such a regime, he added, would be more amenable to Washington’s “interventionist designs.”
Turning Themselves In
When Rocha was elected in 2021 as governor of Sinaloa, a stronghold of Mexico’s drug trade for almost a century, the former teachers’ union organizer was known as a skilled political operator and a close friend of then-President López Obrador. But his campaign was assailed for what opposition parties and civic groups called the blatant role that criminal gangs played on Rocha’s behalf.
Questions about Rocha’s links to the traffickers exploded again in July 2024, after a son of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the imprisoned drug boss known as El Chapo, kidnapped his father’s longtime partner in the Sinaloa cartel, Ismael Zambada García, and delivered him to U.S. agents on an airstrip in New Mexico.
Both Guzmán and his brother Ovidio, who was extradited to the United States in 2023, have since provided federal prosecutors with extensive accounts of their relationships with Mexican government figures. Investigators in New York also obtained detailed ledgers of the gang’s bribe payments, which were referenced extensively in the Rocha indictment.
Barely a day after a federal court in New York unsealed the indictment of the 10 men, Sheinbaum dismissed that evidence as insufficient, saying she would not act without “overwhelming and irrefutable proof” of their guilt.
More recently, at least one of the accused Mexicans has changed that calculus. The former Sinaloa secretary of public safety, Gerardo Mérida, turned himself in to U.S. marshals at the Arizona border on May 11, and later indicated he might be willing to cooperate with prosecutors in return for leniency.
Aides to Sheinbaum have begun to suggest that she could scale back anti-narcotics cooperation if Washington pushes too hard on the Rocha case, two U.S. officials said. Whether she has the wherewithal to follow through remains to be seen — but such threats have worked for Mexico in the past.
“But these guys are not Biden,” a former Mexican foreign minister, Jorge G. Castañeda, said of the Trump administration. While Sheinbaum’s predecessors could almost always rely on U.S. leaders to prioritize Mexico’s stability above other interests, he added, “Trump just doesn’t care.”
This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive their biggest stories as soon as they’re published.