ProPublica misses the point of its own scoop on Mexican drug cartels funneling millions

ProPublica, the left-leaning investigative outfit, got itself a big scoop: That Mexico’s president, Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador, on the other side of Joe Biden’s open border, has had close government aides apparently on the take from Mexican drug cartels in his climb to power.

In a long, long, engrossing story by longtime investigative reporter Tim Golden:

According to more than a dozen interviews with U.S. and Mexican officials and government documents reviewed by ProPublica, the money was provided to campaign aides in 2006 in return for a promise that a López Obrador administration would facilitate the traffickers’ criminal operations.

The investigation did not establish whether López Obrador sanctioned or even knew of the traffickers’ reported donations. But officials said the inquiry — which was built on the extensive cooperation of a former campaign operative and a key drug informant — did produce evidence that one of López Obrador’s closest aides had agreed to the proposed arrangement.

While the story is interesting, the obvious thing, lo obvio, sin embargo, is that the news outlet doesn’t underline the significance of its own story.

Here is what in the news trade is known as the “nut graf,” the sentence near the top that tells the readers why they need to keep reading:

The case raised difficult questions about how far the United States should go to confront the official corruption that has been essential to the emergence of Mexican drug traffickers as a global criminal force. While some officials argue that it is not the United States’ job to root out endemic corruption in Mexico, others say that efforts to fight organized crime and build the rule of law will be futile unless officials who protect the traffickers are held to account.

Democracy? Doing nothing? I would argue that that’s not what this is about. That horse left the barn years ago.

What matters is that there’s a border surge going on. Cities in the U.S. are being bankrupted, kids are being thrown out of their parks and schools, crime is skyrocketing, and fentanyl is pouring across the border, killing 109,000 Americans in the last year. It’s the number one issue in the U.S. for voters and now we learn we’re dealing with a Mexican president who’s part of the problem.  

The report found that government operatives very close to the sitting Mexican president found pretty conclusive evidence that AMLO’s operatives were on the take from drug cartel leaders associated with the Sinaloa cartel, including the Beltran-Leyva group, and the now-Supermaxxed drug lord, Edgar Valdez Villareal, otherwise known as “La Barbie,” who was busted in 2010 and extradited to the U.S. A former bagman of La Barbie’s had come forward around 2008 after La Barbie, a notoriously ruthless killer, took out his brother and told the DEA what he knew about the AMLO camp’s corruption dating from 2006. The DEA actually busted La Barbie based on the prospect of getting him to cooperate for a new operation to take out corrupt Mexican officials such as those associated with AMLO.

While this story is worth attention all by itself, it’s the crisis now that draws attention. Were the cartels not so fat and happy on AMLO’s watch, it’s doubtful ten million illegals would have crossed so easily into the U.S.

.So while much of the story focuses on activity more than a decade ago, the eventual election of AMLO to Mexico’s presidency in 2018 did have consequences, starting with an end to drug cooperation between the two countries which is to say, against the people-smuggling cartels.

First he sidelined the Mexican commando teams that had been the most trusted partner of U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. He then shut down a federal police unit that the DEA had trained and vetted to work with the Americans on big drug cases.

When DEA agents arrested a former Mexican defense minister, Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda, on drug-corruption charges in October 2020, López Obrador turned on the agency even more forcefully. With the military high command pressing the president to act in Cienfuegos’ defense, Mexican officials made clear that counter-drug cooperation was at risk. After U.S. Attorney General William Barr dropped the case and repatriated the general, López Obrador declared the Mérida accord “dead” and pushed through strict new limits on how U.S. agents could operate inside Mexico.

López Obrador’s long-standing promises to carry out a crusade against political corruption have produced almost no meaningful results. 

So what’s that again about why this should matter to us? A contest between doing nothing and Mexican democracy? Not exactly. Right now there’s a border surge unlike any ever seen on this planet going on. That’s why we pay attention to cartels and Mexican governments.

As Golden notes, the cartels have grown big and powerful on AMLO’s watch as president, controlling about a quarter of the country. His cartel-fighting policy is “hugs, not bullets.”

And more to the point, the millions of illegals entering the U.S. from our Southern border involveds the cartels, combined with the optimal-for-them situation of Joe Biden’s open borders.

The cartels control who crosses the border, and illegal border crossers pay cartels “taxes” and “crossing fees” to get across.

Was AMLO involved here? Was Joe Biden involved here? Did money change hands at their levels, too?

With ten million illegals now in the U.S., that’s a lot of money going to cartels with a Mexican government on the take and a Biden administration inviting them in.

It’s known that corrupt Colombian officials and the entire Nicaraguan government have been enriching themselves from the border surge. Scattershot information indicates that Mexican officials benefit, too.

But this ProPublica report indicates that the corruption goes all the way to the top, with the Mexican government fully protecting its cartel buddies so they can exploit the migrants and themselves get rich. It certainly does explain AMLO’s refusal to condemn Nicaragua or Venezuela, both likely narcostates, the way other countries in the hemisphere have, over various bad behaviors. 

If AMLO is cartel’ed up, that changes the equation on the border surge going on right now.

If the Mexican government is a narcostate no different from Venezuela, then a hard hand, not negotiations, and not that secret agreement that Joe Biden and AMLO supposedly pulled off to damp down the surge until after elections, as reported by Todd Bensmann, is the only way to handle the surge.

Close the border. Sanction Mexican officials. Drop the free trade agreement. Threaten to reveal all that is known about public corruption, unless AMLO plays ball on the border surge. That we don’t is a mystery. We don’t have to overthrow their government, we just need to send them the kind of message they’ll understand, being drug dealers and all. The law of the drug world is the law of the jungle. Strength, not concessions, is what is going to get their attention.

And while we are at it, Joe Biden would have known these things, being at the top of the U.S. intelligence pyramid. So is he, too, implicated? If drug dealers can buy off Mexican top officials, is it farfetched to wonder if maybe they bought off a few Americans on the other side? Funny how there is so little reporting, and so few arrests on this front, yet we have the perfect storm of cartel payoffs in Mexico and an open border in the states.

Wonder why.

Image: Screen shot from Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador video, via YouTube