Officials with the justice department and the Biden administration have downplayed a report that US law enforcement spent years looking into allegations that allies of Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, were investigated for taking millions of dollars from drug cartels after the president took office.
López Obrador, who denied the report, also reacted to the New York Times report on Thursday by revealing the contact details of the journalist at its Mexico bureau, Natalie Kitroeff, including her telephone number – which Mexico’s freedom of information body (INAI) immediately said it would launch an investigation into.
“During said event, the president made reference to an investigation by the aforementioned international newspaper and read, in front of everyone, the correspondent’s telephone number,” according to an INAI statement.
A US justice department spokesperson told the New York Post that “there is no investigation into President Lopez Obrador”, while the White House national security council spokesman, John Kirby, later echoed the justice department, saying the department has “the responsibility to review any allegation”.
The New York Times report said the US investigation had uncovered information that pointed to potential links between criminal drug cartels and what it called “advisers and officials close to the president”.
The US law enforcement agencies never opened a formal investigation into López Obrador, widely known as Amlo, the paper said, after concluding that the US government “had little appetite to pursue allegations against the leader of one of America’s top allies”.
The Mexico president dismissed the allegations as “completely false”. He said news of the inquiry would not “in any way” affect Mexico’s relationship with the US, but added he expected a response from Washington.
The New York Times report follows the publication of articles by InSight Crime, ProPublica and Deutsche Welle last month that described another US-led investigation into financial connections during López Obrador’s unsuccessful 2006 presidential campaign between the Sinaloa cartel, then led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and a close assistant to López Obrador.
ProPublica said 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”.
The reports come ahead of June’s national elections in Mexico, in which opposition groups have latched on to signs of cartel-influenced corruption in López Obrador’s circle. There has been increasing domestic US pressure on the Biden administration to curb illegal Mexico-US immigration, often controlled by cartel-affiliated smugglers, and the importation of deadly cartel-manufactured fentanyl.
According to Reporters Without Borders, 46 journalists have been killed in Mexico during López Obrador’s administration. “Mexico remains one of the world’s most dangerous and deadly countries for journalists,” the organization says. “President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in power since 2018, has not yet carried out the reforms and measures needed to stop the spiral of violence against the press.”
After revealing the journalist’s details and reading out a letter from editors for comment on the allegations, López Obrador dared the Biden administration to support to or deny the existence of the investigations. “This is interesting because the government of the United States is now going to have to respond,” he said, according to the Hill.
