Imagine if Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), both close partners of President Donald Trump, were suddenly indicted for taking huge bribes from an international drug cartel operating out of Texas.
That’s essentially what just happened with the Justice Department indictments issued against the Sinaloa drug cartel on Wednesday. Based out of Mexico’s western Sinaloa state, the Sinaloa cartel is the country’s most powerful cartel after the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. Following the 2017 U.S. incarceration of Sinaloa Cartel leader, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, the organization entered a period of uneasy peace. However, following the July 2024 U.S. arrest of top leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia (perpetrated by one of El Chapo’s sons Joaquin Guzman Lopez in return for a reduced sentence), a faction under two of El Chapo’s sons (“Los Chapitos”) has been at war with a faction controlled by El Mayo’s son, Ismael Zambada Sicairos (“Los Mayos”).
The United States has now charged Sinaloa governor Ruben Rocha Moya and Mexican senator Enrique Inzunza Cazarez, both senior members of President Claudia Sheinbaum’s ruling Morena Party. Sinaloa’s deputy chief prosecutor, Damaso Castro Zaavedra, and the former chiefs of all of Sinaloa’s main law enforcement agencies have also been indicted. They weren’t indicted simply for turning a blind eye to the Sinaloa Cartel’s mayhem.
One of the indicted former chiefs, Juan Valenzuela Millan, is said to have ordered the kidnapping of a DEA source and his son, for example. The indictment reports how, ‘Specifically, under Millan’s command, municipal officers, in a patrol car, stopped the [source and a relative], kidnapped them, and turned them over to Cartel sicarios, who tortured and then killed those and other victims.” Cartel specialist reporter Ioan Grillo notes that one of the victims was the source’s 13-year-old son.
Trump has just dropped a nuclear bomb on Sheinbaum’s bow.
Appointing a former CIA paramilitary officer as U.S. Ambassador to Mexico City and targeting drug cartels across Latin America, Trump had already shown he is writing new rules of the game. Now he’s challenging Sheinbaum to extradite Moya and company, and to stand firm on counter-drug trafficking cooperation. Trump knows that the Sinaloa Cartel’s corrupt tentacles reach into the very heart of the Morena Party. Indeed, Sheinbaum’s predecessor, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, was strongly hinted at by former FBI Director Chris Wray to be corrupt.
The boldness of these indictments further suggests that Trump will authorize U.S. attacks or kidnappings against cartel officers and collaborators if Sheinbaum now breaks off cooperation. That Mexican threat of suspended cooperation previously worked during the last days of the first Trump administration. In late 2020, a former Mexican defense minister was allowed to walk from a U.S. indictment after Obrador threatened to suspend U.S. cooperation.
The indictments target figures most associated with Los Chapitos. That’s good news.
Although not quite bearing the near-psychopathic brutality of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (with whom Los Chapitos are temporarily partnering in order to fight Los Mayos), Los Chapitos are key to the fentanyl and heroin trade into the U.S. This trade afflicts the poorest, most desperate Americans rather than the wealthy idiots who snort Cocaine and pretend no one suffers for it.
The accused are said to be part of a “conspiracy with the [Sinaloa] Cartel to import massive amounts of fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine from Mexico into the United States.” We are told, “These politicians and law enforcement officials have abused their authority in support of the Cartel, exposed and subjected victims to threats and violence, and sold out their offices in exchange for massive bribes. Certain police officials in Mexico, including certain of the defendants, have directly participated in the Cartel’s violence and retribution, including by murdering enemies of the Cartel and kidnapping individuals in Mexico suspected of cooperating with U.S. law enforcement.”
The documentary evidence listed in the indictment is extensive and includes records of meetings, payments, and obvious eyewitness testimony. It is likely, for example, that some of the information in the indictment was provided by Joaquin Guzman Lopez while in U.S. custody.
What comes next?
Well, Ruben Rocha Moya described the indictment as “slander,” adding that it lacks “any truth or foundation whatsoever.” Claiming the indictments are an attack on the Morena party, he added, “It is part of a perverse strategy to violate the constitutional order…” This hyperbole reflects Moya’s recognition that the only way he is getting out of this mess is to make it a test of false Mexican nationalism versus objective American justice.
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Trump shouldn’t blink in demanding rapid extraditions.
And if Sheinbaum refuses to cooperate, he should take more direct action to defend American security.