Two agents from the DEA, the US anti-drug agency, have compiled a list of 35 current and former public officials, whom they link to drug trafficking, in revenge for then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ordering a halt to unlimited US operations in Mexico, suggests Tim Golden’s article in ProPublica today.
Golden, a former reporter for The New York Times and other US media outlets, reappears with this article on Mexico 14 months after a previous publication that attempted to link López Obrador to organized crime. His February article was widely criticized for lack of evidence. The former president even threatened to sue the journalist and publicly challenged him to discuss his evidence. Golden never presented it.
On the program “Los Periodistas” on SinEmbargo Al Aire, Álvaro Delgado and Alejandro Páez Varela analyzed Tim Golden’s new report and concluded that, in the fine print, the American reporter reveals that Washington’s recent pressure against the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo is based on an attempt at revenge by two DEA agents who operated in Mexico until López Obrador’s new regulations limited them.
He adds: “That prior effort sought to identify Mexican government figures who could be criminally prosecuted for aiding drug trafficking. This led to the formal indictment in 2019 in the United States of the country’s former security chief, Genaro García Luna, and his conviction for drug trafficking three years later in a federal court in New York.”
“The two former DEA officials in Mexico City who oversaw the compilation of the 2019 list, Terrance Cole and Matthew Donahue, also proposed that the State Department cancel the US visas of some of the Mexican political figures mentioned on it. Senior US diplomats rejected that proposal,” the American journalist writes in his article.
A US official told the American journalist that while the visa withdrawal could send a powerful signal of the United States’ new willingness to challenge Mexican corruption, it could also provoke renewed conflict between the two governments.
