Mexico and Colombia, drug traffickers and politics
By: Francisco Santos - 14/08/2024
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What just happened in Mexico, in an event of drug trafficking, drug traffickers and the relationship with the president of that country, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), is not only very serious, but it is a symptom of a cancer that spreads throughout the region, especially in Colombia, with the current president Gustavo Petro.
What happened, which is surprising not to have been more publicized, seems taken from the series Narcos, a Mexican version, in which the corruption of this business reaches even the presidency of the Republic, something unprecedented in the region. Ooops, I had forgotten the case of Ernesto Samper in Colombia, elected in 1994 with money from drug traffickers, or that of the president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, extradited, accused and convicted in the United States for drug trafficking. Not to mention the dictators Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela or the original on these issues, Manuel Antonio Noriega in Panama.
By citing this background, I do not want to minimize what happened in Mexico, which I already told you, but on the contrary, show that this is a historical pattern that has been growing in the region and that has moved from Colombian drug traffickers to Mexican drug traffickers. , today, the great owners of this business. However, we have not seen in the region a power like that of the Mexican mafia, which managed to permeate the entire political system of that country, elect governors and mayors and, in addition, have a president who views this 'alliance' favorably. of politics with organized crime.
What's more, AMLO, in his six years of government, preferred “hugs and not gunshots” with drug traffickers, he opposed the capture and extradition of Joaquín “el Chapo” Guzmán's son, Ovidio Guzmán, and the extradition of another important drug trafficker, Rafael Caro Quintero, co-founder of the Guadalajara cartel, captured in 2022, and created such a mess with the United States for the capture in Los Angeles of General Salvador Cienfuegos - Minister of Defense of Mexico in the previous government - to try him for drug trafficking , that, in an act of weakness, Donald Trump's administration returned him to Mexico, where he is free today.
The past two weeks with two major drug trafficking operators in Mexico is something out of a movie. The Americans deceived another son of “Chapo” Guzmán, Joaquín, along with a partner and highly wanted drug trafficker -founder of the Sinaloa Cartel-, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, and took them to the United States, where they will be tried. for drug trafficking.
Everything would remain exclusively a violation of sovereignty, although the United States ambassador in Mexico denies it, if it were not for a statement from Zambada before entering the Court in Brooklyn, in which he stated that he was “ambushed in a meeting that summoned Joaquín Guzmán López, son of “El Chapo” Guzmán, to mediate in an ongoing dispute between Rubén Rocha Moya and Héctor Melesio Cuén Ojeda… Rocha Moya’s relationship with Zambada was clearly exposed, leaving President López Obrador trapped.” , writes the Mexican journalist Raymundo Riva Palacio in his column Strictly Personal.
AMLO's relationship with Rocha Moya is very close, he calls him “my brother,” and this governor of Sinaloa is widely recognized as the political operator of the mafia in that state and in Durango. “Rocha Moya, according to Mexican and American intelligence sources, was responsible for colluding with the drug cartels, in particular with the Pacífico/Sinaloa, the popularly elected positions of Morena, or even other parties with commitments to support López Obrador's agenda,” writes Riva Palacio.
Here the similarities begin with Petro, the drug traffickers or their allies, the FARC. On the one hand, the latter have complained publicly about the support they gave Petro to get him elected and how he has betrayed them; On the other hand, there are strong accusations about the support of drug traffickers for Petro's campaign and, although there are no investigations for now in this regard, what is clear is that they have had free space to act, since Petro ended the eradication. of coca (“oil is worse than coca,” he said two years ago at the UN), has stopped almost all anti-drug action and has discouraged military and police action against drug traffickers, who today control extensive territories of cultivation and production of coca. Coca throughout the country.
It is not at all unreasonable that we see drug traffickers supporting the progressive political agenda in the 2026 presidential elections, as they did in the election of AMLO in 2018 and Claudia Shinbaum this year. That learning has already arrived in Colombia, without the audacity of Mexico; for now. It is not surprising that with this path taken, plus what AMLO demonstrated in his country about the benefits of that criminal and political alliance, this is the direction that the drug traffickers use to expand their power. That is, Pablo Escobar's dream would be a reality in Colombia, as it is today in Mexico.
AMLO put it in the exact words: “hugs and not bullets”; that is, political alliance and free way for business. Here Petro has done the same, in a different way, without the audacity of López Obrador. Colombia is going to end the four-year period with more than 300 thousand hectares of coca, the constant kidnappings of soldiers, or wrongly called retentions, in different areas of the country controlled by organized crime are free space for criminal illegality, and the control of mayors in the cultivation, production and transit areas, especially in the Colombian Pacific, and in Catatumbo it is already a reality.
The assassination of presidential candidates, such as Fernando Villavicencio in Ecuador last year or Luis Carlos Galán in Colombia in 1989, or the extradition and conviction of presidents and dictators, such as Hernández and Noriega, are part of that history of drug trafficking and politics that has existed in the region. However, what López Obrador did, and which is revealed in Mexico with this operation, shows a new and very dangerous path of alliance of populism with drug trafficking that we are going to have to face
Maduro, as a narco-dictator, is in a separate place and the survival of his regime depends on the money from drug trafficking and other illegal businesses that are protected in that country. AMLO, and now Petro, consolidate this new path of political alliances with criminality, which supposedly goes more along the lines of silver or lead of the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, bosses of the Cali Cartel, than the lead-only wave of Escobar in Medellín.
However, the elections in Mexico are a mirror in which we must look, since the most violent electoral process in the history of that country shows us that lead continues to be the main actor in that policy, in which not only the candidates who do not give in to drug trafficking but democracy is also dying.
It's unfortunate, but that's where we're going, initially Colombia, but ultimately all of us. Mexico and AMLO paved the way.
«The opinions published herein are the sole responsibility of its author».