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When the Justice Department shut down a secret inquiry into allegations that drug traffickers had funded the first presidential campaign of Mexico’s leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, officials in Washington closed the case forcefully.
Over the years that followed that 2011 decision, U.S. law enforcement agencies continued to hear similar reports, including accounts from at least four high-level Mexican traffickers who said their gangs helped to fund López Obrador’s political machine in return for promises of government protection, documents and interviews show.
But U.S. investigators did not pursue those claims, in part because they saw little support in Washington for a corruption case against an important Mexican political leader, current and former officials said.
“We took our best shot, and they didn’t want to do the case,” one former investigator for the Drug Enforcement Administration said of the 18-month inquiry into López Obrador’s 2006 campaign. “That was it; nobody had any appetite to push it forward.”
López Obrador lost that first presidential race and a second in 2012 before winning election in 2018. A sharp critic of his predecessors’ U.S.-backed “war” on the traffickers, he promised to use social programs — “hugs, not bullets” — to dissuade young Mexicans from joining the mafias. But his presidency has seen organized crime flourish as never before.
The president has denied that his 2006 campaign took money from the traffickers. He blamed recent reports about the DEA inquiry by ProPublica and other news organizations on a conspiracy to weaken his political party ahead of national elections last month. Yet concerns about possible mafia ties to at least one member of his 2006 campaign staff have also emerged within his own government.
The candidate of López Obrador’s party, Claudia Sheinbaum, won the presidential race by a landslide. Although violence was a central issue in the vote, she has signaled that she will follow similar policies in dealing with organized crime.
President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico (Gerardo Vieyra/NurPhoto via Getty Images)As ProPublica reported this year, the DEA investigation began in April 2010, after a trafficker-turned-informant gave agents a detailed account of the negotiation and delivery of some $2 million to López Obrador’s 2006 campaign. It ended when the Justice Department rejected a DEA-proposed sting operation inside Mexico aimed at the future president’s political team.
After Justice officials closed down the inquiry, several high-profile drug traffickers who were captured in Mexico and extradited to the United States offered investigators further information about the mafias’ dealings with López Obrador’s political operation. But, according to previously undisclosed government documents and interviews with more than a dozen current and former U.S. officials, nearly all of that information was filed away or ignored.
Although details of the case were closely held, a larger circle of U.S. law enforcement agents was aware that an investigation into López Obrador’s campaign had been aborted in part because of the perceived risks to the U.S.-Mexico relationship. In other cases, investigators said, they were simply more focused on what information they could extract from the traffickers about their mafia associates and the movement of their drugs. Because of the sensitivity of the case, the officials would only discuss it only on the condition of anonymity.
The American-born trafficker who was said to have donated the $2 million to López Obrador’s campaign, Edgar Valdez Villareal, known as “La Barbie,” was captured by the Mexican authorities in 2010, just as the DEA probe was gaining momentum. But by the time he and two of his lieutenants were extradited, the case was over.
One of those lieutenants, Sergio Villarreal Barragán, a tall former police officer known as “El Grande,” gave the most substantial information to American investigators. In a recent book, a Mexican journalist, Anabel Hernández, quotes unnamed sources as saying the trafficker told senior Mexican prosecutors and two DEA agents in the first days after his arrest on Sept. 12, 2010, that he had personally delivered $500,000 to López Obrador in June 2006, near the end of his election campaign.
But a previously unpublished DEA report reviewed by ProPublica makes no mention of that assertion. The two agents’ “Report of Investigation,” dated Sept. 20, quotes the trafficker as saying he “was interested in cooperating with the U.S. Government and would be able to provide valuable information on high-ranking Mexican government officials.” However, officials familiar with the episode said El Grande emphasized that he would only talk once he was safely extradited to the United States.
Genaro García Luna, a former security minister, in 2010 (Henry Romero/Reuters)Several former officials said that it was not uncommon for American law enforcement agents in Mexico to edit out allegations of high-level corruption from reports they knew would be shared with other U.S. agencies. Officials familiar with the López Obrador campaign inquiry said they never heard that El Grande claimed to have personally delivered cash to the candidate.
El Grande did start talking more openly about Mexican corruption on the extradition flight that took him to Texas in May of 2012, officials said. He described huge bribes to senior officials, including Genaro García Luna, a powerful former security minister who was later convicted on U.S. drug conspiracy charges. He also confirmed he attended the 2006 meeting at which La Barbie agreed to fund López Obrador’s campaign. But the officials added that he was not questioned in detail about those donations because the DEA’s investigation had already been shut down.
Three years later, El Grande’s onetime boss, La Barbie, was extradited to Atlanta, where he, too, confirmed some aspects of the 2006 donations, officials said. But the DEA’s inquiry was far enough in the past that investigators did not question him in depth about López Obrador, they added. (Prosecutors also viewed his memory as sufficiently unreliable that they chose not to use him as a witness in the corruption trial of García Luna last year.)
Another Sinaloa trafficker, Jesús Reynaldo Zambada García, has testified in two high-profile New York trials that his faction of the syndicate also donated millions of dollars to López Obrador’s political apparatus. But Zambada’s accounts have been vague and fragmentary, in part because federal prosecutors sought to limit his testimony about Mexican corruption.
Until his capture by the Mexican authorities in 2008, Zambada oversaw the syndicate’s operations in Mexico City, including the elaborate layers of bribes it paid to safeguard cocaine flights that landed in and near the capital.
During the 2018 trial of Sinaloa cartel leader Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Zambada testified that the gang had paid “a few million dollars” to a top Mexico City security official in 2005, when López Obrador was the capital’s mayor. Zambada indicated that the money was a down payment for protection in a future national government run by López Obrador.
In another trial last year, Zambada confirmed that he had told U.S. investigators that his group paid López Obrador’s aide, Gabriel Rejino, “something like” $3 million.
Jesús Reynaldo Zambada García is cross-examined during the trial of García Luna on charges that the former security minister accepted millions of dollars to protect the powerful Sinaloa cartel. (Jane Rosenberg/Reuters)The claim made headlines in Mexico, where both López Obrador and Regino denied it. But the story got muddy after a lawyer asked Zambada if he had once told investigators the cartel paid Regino $7 million for López Obrador’s campaign against Vicente Fox. (Fox was the previous president from the conservative party of former President Felipe Calderón; in 2006, López Obrador ran against Calderón to succeed Fox.) Zambada, who seemed puzzled by the question, denied saying any such thing.
But a previously unpublished document reviewed by ProPublica shows that Zambada did in fact make such a claim — or that the Homeland Security agent who summarized his debriefing on July 6, 2013, in Washington might have confused one conservative president with another.
“López was paid $7 million USD through Gabriel Regino when López was running against President Fox,” states a summary of the interview, which focused mainly on the layers of bribes to police, customs and military officials that Zambada arranged for drug flights into Mexico City and nearby Toluca.
Current and former U.S. officials said some extradited members of two other Mexican trafficking groups, the Gulf cartel and the Zetas, told investigators that their gangs also contributed to López Obrador’s 2006 campaign.
The first of those traffickers, former Gulf Cartel leader Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, told agents soon after being extradited to Houston in 2007 that his organization had given money to López Obrador’s campaign as well as to government security officials, two people familiar with his account said. But agents did not ask Cárdenas in detail about those purported bribes because they thought then that there was little chance the Justice Department would try to prosecute a corruption case, these people said. An attorney for Cárdenas, Chip B. Lewis, declined to comment on the report.
Although López Obrador has insisted in recent months that there is “no evidence” behind the reports of traffickers’ contributions in 2006, documents from his own government show that Mexico’s defense minister had serious concerns about the alleged drug ties of a staff member from that campaign.
The concerns focused on a retired army colonel, Silvio Hernández Soto, who was one of López Obrador’s senior bodyguards in 2006 and became a target of scrutiny for both DEA investigators and Mexican prosecutors who led a sweeping anti-corruption case during the Calderón government.
A DEA informant who had worked as a trafficker for La Barbie told investigators in both countries that he had been introduced to Hernández in connection with the 2006 campaign and later sought his help in arranging military protection for drug flights through the Cancún airport. In 2012, Hernández was arrested in Mexico along with several army generals who were said to have assisted with the protection scheme.
In 2013, however, a new Mexican government abruptly changed course, dropped the corruption investigation and freed all the suspects in the case. Although the accusations against Hernández were never disproved, he went on to serve as a senior police official in western Sinaloa state, the heartland of Mexico’s drug industry.
After López Obrador took power in 2018, Hernández was named to a sensitive, high-level post in the Mexican attorney general’s office. But in an extraordinary move that did not become public at the time, the new president’s defense minister, Gen. Luis Cresencio Sandoval, sought to block the appointment, documents show.
In a letter to the attorney general on Sept. 12, 2019, Sandoval warned there was “documentary evidence” in both court files and military intelligence databases showing that Hernández “maintained ties with members of organized crime.” The letter cites allegations from the Mexican anti-corruption case — which had also been closely investigated by military prosecutors — and incidents from Hernández’s tenure in Sinaloa.
The letter also noted that the senior official who had recommended Hernández for the sensitive post in the attorney general’s office was the president’s intelligence chief, retired Gen. Audomaro Martínez — who had been Hernández’s direct boss during López Obrador’s 2006 campaign.
The defense minister’s letter was first reported by the nongovernmental group Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity, which discovered it in a trove of Defense Ministry documents made public last year by a hacker group, Guacamaya Leaks.
López Obrador’s chief spokesperson, Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, said Hernández was not ultimately hired to the attorney general’s office or any other post in López Obrador’s government. He did not comment on why Martínez had recommended Hernández for the position.
A lawyer for Hernández did not respond to messages seeking comment.
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In the summer of 2010, as U.S. agents dug into allegations that a powerful drug mafia had poured money into Mexican politics, the investigators took direct aim at the man who is now the country’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
According to confidential government documents obtained by ProPublica, the Drug Enforcement Administration knowingly risked a political furor to try to penetrate López Obrador’s campaign organization before Mexicans could elect a government that might be beholden to the traffickers.
From the start, the documents indicate, the Americans’ primary target was López Obrador, then the leader of the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, and the front-runner in the 2012 presidential race.
“Should this investigation yield the evidence suggested by the multiple cooperating witnesses, the DEA will seek to indict AMLO and members of his staff and political party,” one Justice Department document states, referring to López Obrador by his initials.
“Thus, this investigation could ultimately affect who runs for president from the PRD party.” The candidate’s possible indictment in the United States, the document adds drily, “would certainly create media attention.”
The investigators initially had remarkable success, co-opting a midlevel campaign operative to act as a DEA mole inside López Obrador’s political team. They then drew up an audacious plan for a sting operation in which an undercover operative would offer the campaign millions of dollars in exchange for future protection, the documents show.
But that plan never went forward. The inquiry was shut down by senior Justice Department officials in late 2011, as the attorney general, Eric Holder, came under heavy political fire for the failure of another undercover operation in Mexico, a gun-tracking effort known as the “Fast and Furious” case.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder testifying in 2012 at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the “Fast and Furious” case (Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)That decision effectively ended U.S. law enforcement scrutiny of the matter, even as the extradition of major Mexican drug traffickers to the United States brought investigators new allegations about drug ties to López Obrador’s political apparatus in the years that followed.
The disclosure of the DEA’s investigation this year by ProPublica and two other news organizations jolted U.S.-Mexico relations and enraged López Obrador, who denied ever taking drug money and went on a weekslong tirade against the DEA, ProPublica and others he said were conspiring against him.
“It’s that the DEA no longer likes the policies we are applying because we are an independent and sovereign country,” López Obrador said last month, alluding to his repudiation of the closer antidrug cooperation of earlier Mexican governments with Washington.
The president’s spokesperson, Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, said López Obrador would not respond to questions about “false allegations” related to the 2006 campaign. But in a letter, he said the president wanted answers to his own questions about ProPublica’s sources and motives in reporting on the DEA inquiry. “Your reporting has damaged the image of the government and the president of Mexico,” the letter added.
Biden administration officials have sought to pacify López Obrador, on whom they are relying to hold back the flow of migrants trying to reach the U.S. southern border. While not denying reports of the DEA investigation, the officials emphasized that it has long been closed and the Mexican president is no longer under investigation.
Still, the revelations again raised a question that has long troubled U.S. officials working on Mexico: How should they deal with evidence of high-level corruption in an allied government that is steadily losing ground to some of the world’s most powerful criminals?
The documents obtained by ProPublica, which have not been previously disclosed, illuminate how U.S. officials initially weighed that question at a high point in their law enforcement relationship with Mexico and help to clarify why, after the political winds shifted, Justice Department officials halted the investigation before agents had come close to finishing their work.
The documents point to some uncertainties of the case, which began with allegations that traffickers had funneled some $2 million into López Obrador’s first presidential campaign, in 2006. (López Obrador lost that race and the one in 2012 before being elected president in 2018.) Although U.S. agents did ultimately corroborate that account with at least five different sources, they never developed any firsthand confirmation that López Obrador himself approved or even knew of the reported donations, officials said.
The DEA’s investigation of drug traffickers’ links to López Obrador’s campaign began with Roberto López Nájera, a young Acapulco lawyer who went to work for one of Mexico’s more notorious drug bosses, Edgar Valdez Villareal, a Texas-born trafficker known as “La Barbie.”
When López Nájera joined La Barbie’s gang in 2004, it was effectively a branch of the drug organization led by the kingpin Arturo Beltrán Leyva — who was in turn one of several leading figures in the trafficking syndicate known as the Sinaloa Cartel. The alliance was fluid enough, López Nájera later told investigators, that gang leaders sometimes gathered their gunmen for meet-and-greets, lest they encounter one another on the street and mistakenly start shooting.
López Nájera eventually turned on La Barbie and made his way to the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, where he offered his help to the DEA. He was moved into protective custody in the United States and became a prized informant, sitting for endless debriefings and even typing up reminiscences of traffickers he had known and episodes he had witnessed.
Edgar Valdez Villareal, a Texas-born trafficker known as “La Barbie,” after his capture in 2010 (Daniel Aguilar/Getty Images)Despite López Nájera’s acknowledged role as a bribe-payer, it took the DEA almost two years to start digging into his account of a January 2006 gathering at which he said La Barbie and two of his key lieutenants met emissaries from López Obrador’s then-surging presidential campaign.
As López Nájera told the story, officials said, the meeting at a hotel in the Pacific Coast resort of Nuevo Vallarta ended with a handshake agreement: In return for some $2 million he donated to López Obrador’s campaign, La Barbie was promised official protection if the candidate won, including a say in the choice of key police commanders and even the federal attorney general.
In the first months of the investigation, López Nájera worked with the DEA to set up meetings in Florida and Texas with Mauricio Soto Caballero, an operative from López Obrador’s campaign team with whom he had arranged the delivery of La Barbie’s contributions in 2006. The two men remained friendly, and López Nájera told agents that Soto had expressed an interest in making some quick money by perhaps acting as an investor on smaller drug deals.
On the night of Oct. 21, 2010, Soto met at a bar in McAllen, Texas, with a couple of men he thought were associates of López Nájera’s. In fact, the men were undercover DEA agents, and they arrested Soto at his hotel hours later. Within days, officials said, he pleaded guilty in New York to a single federal charge of conspiring to traffic cocaine. To avoid prison and return home, he agreed to help the investigators pursue others who had been involved with the traffickers’ donations to López Obrador’s campaign.
Mauricio Soto Caballero, an operative from López Obrador’s campaign who agreed to help the DEA as an undercover source (Facebook)The agents, drawn from DEA teams in Mexico City and New York, submitted a “sensitive investigative activity” request to the DEA’s global operations chief, seeking authorization to use Soto as an undercover source. In essence, they were asking to plant an informant inside López Obrador’s second presidential campaign in 2012 and potentially develop evidence against the candidate himself.
“Without a confidential source in this position, it would be impossible for any entity to identify the level of corruption involved with a presidential campaign,” one undated document states. Soto “will be in a direct position to tell when a Drug Cartel provided monies to the campaign.”
“The ultimate target of this investigation,” the request adds, “is Andres Manuel LÓPEZ-Obrador.”
A list of other campaign staff members whom the agents intended to examine, included in a separate document, names two of López Obrador’s former bodyguards from the 2006 campaign and the one-star army general who headed the security team, Audomaro Martínez, now the powerful head of Mexico’s state intelligence agency.
According to several current and former officials familiar with the case, the agents had different criteria for choosing their targets for scrutiny. One former bodyguard, Silvio Hernández Soto, had been introduced to López Nájera as a contact who might prove helpful with his cocaine-smuggling efforts. Martínez, who supervised the bodyguards, was viewed as a gatekeeper to the candidate but does not appear to have been implicated in any criminal activity. (An attorney for Hernández did not respond to messages seeking comment, while Martínez did not respond to questions submitted to the president’s spokesperson.)
The agents’ first focus of attention was Mauricio Soto’s friend and former boss on the 2006 campaign, Nicolás Mollinedo Bastar, who remained one of López Obrador’s closest aides. Mollinedo had served as the campaign’s logistics chief, responsible for setting up rallies and other events around the country. In an interview, Mollinedo denied that he or the campaign ever took drug money. Soto, who did not respond to numerous requests for comment, has insisted to Mexican journalists that he was never arrested in the United States or collaborated with the DEA. (ProPublica has reviewed six U.S. government documents that state otherwise.)
Throughout the 2006 race, Soto told the U.S. investigators, he and other campaign workers would be approached by “unidentified individuals” offering “cash or high value items,” according to a document that summarizes some of Soto’s interviews. “It was understood that these individuals represented the local drug cartel and in return would request security for their organization to traffic narcotics to the United States.”
Nicolás Mollinedo Bastar at a campaign event for López Obrador (Iván Stephens/Cuartoscuro)“Although at first MOLLINEDO directed his subordinates not to accept these offers, SOTO-Caballero was instructed to maintain a relationship with these individuals should they need anything in the future,” the document continues. That role continued, another summary of the investigation states, when Mollinedo authorized Soto “to receive the illicit funds and other support” that La Barbie sent to the campaign.
Soto told the investigators he discussed the Sinaloa contributions only with Mollinedo, to whom he turned over two large deposits of the traffickers’ cash, former officials familiar with the case said. The agents suspected that López Obrador, who had a reputation as a micromanager, could not have been unaware of such a large donation. But Soto told them he did not know if the candidate discussed the money with Mollinedo, one of his most trusted aides, or with the two businessmen who had claimed to represent his campaign at the meeting in Nuevo Vallarta.
López Nájera had told the investigators he had been introduced to López Obrador during a 2006 campaign stop in the northern state of Coahuila, where the candidate spoke to a huge crowd assembled with financial help from La Barbie.
López Nájera said he called La Barbie and handed his cellphone to López Obrador, who then thanked the trafficker for his donations. But officials familiar with the case said agents treated that claim skeptically: Even if López Obrador knew who was on the phone, whatever López Nájera thought he heard of the conversation would be hearsay. (López Obrador has said he would resign the presidency immediately if anyone could prove he spoke to the trafficker.)
Although the agents’ target list was both ambitious and sensitive, DEA officials said they assumed from the start that the limits of such an investigation would inevitably be set by senior policy officials in the Justice Department and other agencies.
“We were going to try to collect as much information as we could,” said a former senior DEA official who oversaw the matter for a time but, like others, would only discuss it on the condition of anonymity because of its continuing sensitivity. “You knew it was going to be a long road because of the political ramifications. And it was not surprising to us that they basically pulled the plug.”
From the start, the investigators faced a deadline: The federal prosecutors who were guiding their efforts from Manhattan believed the statute of limitations on drug-conspiracy crimes related to López Obrador’s first race would run five years from the day of the vote, July 2, 2006. By early 2011, the investigators had only months left to bring charges based on the earlier campaign.
While working secretly with the U.S. agents, Soto attended weekly meetings in Mexico City with López Obrador and the small team that was preparing his 2012 presidential run, documents show. Soto remained close to Mollinedo, who was almost constantly at López Obrador’s side.
Once officials approved Soto’s deployment as an undercover source, the agents focused their attention on Mollinedo. Hoping to further confirm his role in accepting the 2006 donations, the agents gave Soto a concealed recording device and sent him off on April 8, 2011, to surreptitiously record a chat at López Obrador’s political headquarters.
The results were disappointing. The recording was partly unintelligible, and at one point Soto shut off the device — accidentally or perhaps deliberately, the agents weren’t sure.
A two-page summary of the conversation states that Soto (referred to as “the CS,” or confidential source) told Mollinedo he was concerned that the Mexican authorities had arrested both La Barbie and a lieutenant who had joined him at the Nuevo Vallarta meeting, Sergio Villarreal Barragán, an imposing former police officer known as “El Grande.”
In the recording, Soto said he was also worried about a still-mysterious government witness who had been identified in court papers and news reports by the code-name “Jennifer.” The witness was then making headlines as the source for a big drug-corruption case, “Operation Clean-up,” and the two men had apparently figured out that Jennifer was in fact López Nájera — the young trafficker with whom Soto had dealt during the 2006 campaign.
Mollinedo was apparently worried, too. He said he doubted the traffickers would be credible witnesses, and he cut short the conversation, saying he had to meet his wife and daughter. Soto offered him a ride, but during the drive Mollinedo “mostly talked about a mistress he was currently involved with,” the summary states.
Referring to Soto, the document adds: “The CS advised investigators that he/she was not able to specifically discuss the money payments during the 2006 campaign because the CS and MOLLINEDO were never able to speak in private at the office.”
A month later, the agents tried again. A second recorded conversation on May 9 focused partly on a former bodyguard from López Obrador’s 2006 campaign, Marco Antonio Mejía, who had been making statements to prosecutors after being arrested on corruption charges while running a prison in Cancún.
Back in 2006, Soto had introduced Mejía to López Nájera as a potentially useful contact for the traffickers. In talking with Mollinedo, Soto worried aloud that López Nájera and Mejía could turn against them. (Mejía, who denied any wrongdoing during his legal case, could not be reached for comment.)
Mollinedo was a step ahead of Soto, having already obtained a copy of Mejía’s confidential court file with the statements of various witnesses.
“It’s just vague things,” Mollinedo said of the prosecutors’ file. “But they probably have a file on us.”
Parts of the conversation were again unintelligible, and much of the men’s language was ambiguous or deliberately coded. There were a few references to money that was delivered (presumably to the campaign) and a mention of the man who had first introduced Soto to López Nájera (presumably to arrange delivery of the traffickers’ donations).
DEA agents viewed the transcript as proof that Mollinedo — one of López Obrador’s closest confidants — was fully aware of La Barbie’s donations in 2006 and who had delivered them. “These meetings have revealed evidence corroborating the initial information,” the agents wrote in a subsequent investigative plan.
But Mollinedo made no explicit statements about the traffickers’ donations or what his responsibility for them might have been. As potential evidence, the prosecutors thought it was thin — the sort that a good criminal defense lawyer could tear to pieces in court.
“When you’re dealing with a sensitive, high-level political setting, the level of predication you need goes way up,” a former Justice Department official familiar with the case said, referring to the strength of the evidence needed to prove a corruption case. “That’s true domestically, too.”
Over the next few months, as the statute of limitations deadline came and went, the agents pivoted to a more ambitious plan: They would set up a sting operation, officials said, using Soto to introduce Mollinedo to a carefully chosen undercover operative — perhaps a real former trafficker from another Latin American country who was cooperating with the DEA.
As the presidential race heated up, the operative would offer a huge donation, maybe $5 million, in return for a promise that a López Obrador government would tolerate his future trafficking activities. If Mollinedo accepted, the purported donor would offer a down payment or good-faith gift of $100,000 cash. If Mollinedo pocketed it, they would seek to have him arrested and try to pressure him to cooperate against others, including possibly López Obrador, officials said.
Over the course of the investigation, the documents indicate, the DEA chief in Mexico, Joseph Evans, briefed senior U.S. diplomats in Mexico on its progress. (Evans declined to comment on the matter.) But the inquiry coincided with a period of upheaval at the U.S. Embassy. The ambassador, Carlos Pascual, resigned in March 2011 after conflicts with the Mexican government that escalated when Wikileaks released secret diplomatic cables in which he had criticized Mexican counterdrug efforts.
The documents viewed by ProPublica underscore officials’ concerns about the sensitivity of the investigation and the perils of running an undercover operation inside Mexico — a step they were generally obliged to inform the Mexican government about under the terms of a 1998 agreement on law enforcement cooperation.
Like other especially risky operations, the agents’ plan was submitted to a panel of DEA and Justice Department lawyers and policy officials called a Sensitive Activity Review Committee. That review, on Nov. 22, 2011, in Washington, “revolved around the concerns of what the Mexicans have been briefed on and what they will or will not be briefed on in the future,” a summary of the case states.
DEA officials noted that the problem of official corruption was at the core of Mexico’s failure to make real headway against the traffickers, officials said. U.S. law enforcement agencies were then working for the first time with a strongly supportive Mexican government, that of President Felipe Calderón, a bitter rival of López Obrador’s. DEA officials suggested that they could discuss their plan with Calderón’s intelligence chief, who could brief the president without other Mexican officials learning of it.
Former President Felipe Calderón in 2011 (Mario Tama/Getty Images)But, as some foreign policy and Justice Department officials saw it, the proposal could hardly be more fraught with peril for the U.S. relationship with Mexico. “A sting operation against the leading presidential candidate, who is also the arch-rival of the sitting president?” one former senior U.S. diplomat asked rhetorically. “Are you kidding me?”
A former Justice Department official familiar with the debate added: “You’re not in a situation where you can put an agent in there, so you’re dealing exclusively with people who are informants and criminals. It’s not just about the target of the investigation — it’s about what you’re proposing to do.”
Despite Calderón’s strong partnership with the United States and a flurry of strikes against major traffickers including the Beltrán Leyva gang, the potential for things to go catastrophically wrong in the two countries’ relationship was already on public display.
For months, a major scandal had been raging over a long-running effort by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to secretly track illegal U.S. guns going into Mexico. Hundreds of guns had been allowed to move freely to the trafficking gangs and other criminals, but the tracking had failed miserably. When the guns were identified from crimes or seizures, it was determined that they had been used in the killings of more than 150 Mexican citizens. The Mexican people, including Calderón, were furious.
“You have to have a long view about the relationship and the costs,” the Justice Department official said. “Not just the foreign policy concerns of other agencies, but also to DOJ. I had 10 other prosecutors who had cases that depended on working with (the Mexican government). And they were going to be really angry if this blew up.”
On Oct. 1, 2013, with no further prospects for the DEA investigation, Soto returned secretly to federal court in Manhattan to be sentenced on the cocaine-conspiracy charge to which he had pleaded guilty almost three years earlier, officials said. With the prosecutors’ endorsement, a judge gave him five years’ probation but did not require him to report back in person.
He flew home almost immediately, officials said, and went back to work in the Mexico City government.
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