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Tag: sheinbaum

  • Trump’s Cuba oil tariff threat creates new diplomatic challenge for Mexico’s Sheinbaum

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    MEXICO CITY — President Trump’s plan to slap tariffs on nations that provide oil to Cuba has created a formidable new challenge for Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum in her efforts to balance Mexico’s interests with White House demands.

    On Friday, Sheinbaum said Mexico would seek a clarification from Washington in a bid to avoid a difficult choice: Halt oil shipments to Cuba, potentially triggering a humanitarian crisis on the island, or face new tariffs on Mexican products exported to the United States.

    Ceasing oil deliveries to Cuba, she warned, could result in a catastrophic scenario — a cutoff in electrical power to hospitals and homes, threatening medical care, food supplies and other essential services across the island, home to 11 million people.

    However, the leftist president signaled that she would not risk the imposition of additional U.S. levies on imports from Mexico, a nation heavily dependent on cross-border trade. “We cannot put our country at risk in terms of tariffs,” Sheinbaum told reporters at her regular morning news conference.

    For a year, Sheinbaum has been fending off Washington’s plans to impose punishing new tariffs on Mexico. Her efforts have mostly succeeded — and she has won warm praise from Trump — but a White House decree targeting oil supplies to Cuba presents a difficult new test.

    On Thursday, Trump issued an executive order establishing potential tariffs on goods from countries “that sell or otherwise provide oil to Cuba,” a step that, Trump said, was intended to protect “U.S. national security and foreign policy from the Cuban regime’s malign actions and policies.”

    Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel denounced Trump’s move on social media as a “fascist, criminal and genocidal” plan to “asphyxiate” the Cuban economy, which is already struggling with blackouts and a lack of gasoline, among other shortages.

    Sheinbaum has also been engaged in strenuous efforts to dissuade Trump from following through on his threats to deploy U.S. military assets against cartels in Mexico. She has called any prospective U.S. strike on Mexican territory a violation of Mexican sovereignty.

    Mexican crude has taken on a new urgency for Cuba since the U.S. ouster this month of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, whose socialist government was long the major supplier of oil to Cuba. (Havana said 32 Cuban officers, members of Maduro’s security detail, were killed in the operation.)

    Maduro’s fall and the Venezuelan government’s subsequent submission to Washington has resulted in a cut-off of Venezuelan oil to Cuba. U.S. imports of Venezuelan oil, meanwhile, have soared.

    Mexico supplied Cuba with about 20,000 barrels a day of oil for much of 2025, said Jorge R. Piñon, an energy expert at the University of Texas. But shipments have declined drastically this year, apparently because of U.S. pressure.

    “The faucets are being shut off,” said Piñon. “Sheinbaum is walking a tightrope.”

    Without imports, he said, Cuba faces a daily oil shortfall of about 60,000 barrels to meet its energy needs. Other potential sources for Cuba include the oil-exporting nations of Russia, Angola, Algeria and Brazil, Piñon said, but it was unclear if any of those countries would be inclined to defy the White House and help bail out Cuba.

    Mexico’s support for the Cuban government has long been a point of pride here, a sign of a foreign policy independence from the United States, especially during the Cold War. Mexican leaders, including Sheinbaum, have repeatedly decried Washington’s more than half-century embargo of the island as an illegal blockade that punishes ordinary Cubans, not the country’s communist elite.

    It was from the Mexican coast that, in 1956, Fidel Castro sailed to Cuba along with Ernesto “Che” Guevara and other revolutionaries in the yacht Granma, launching an improbable but ultimately successful armed rebellion to overthrow U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.

    Former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador — Sheinbaum’s predecessor and political mentor — labeled Castro a “giant” and called Havana a “progressive” model for resistance to U.S. pressure.

    But the U.S. push to block Mexican oil exports to Cuba is also exposing divisions in the ruling Morena political bloc, which was founded by López Obrador.

    Leftists in Morena have assailed Washington’s attempt to halt Mexican oil exports to Cuba. But more conservative members of the ruling party have urged caution.

    Ricardo Sheffield, a prominent Morena senator who was previously a member of the center-right National Action Party, has called for a review of oil pacts with Cuba. In a recent speech, he acknowledged “the relationship and the history that unites” Mexico and Cuba, but warned: “If we continue giving away oil to Cuba, we will have more problems with our neighbors in the U.S.”

    Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.

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    Patrick J. McDonnell, Kate Linthicum

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  • Firmness, flattery and phone calls: How Mexico’s president won over Trump

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    MEXICO CITY — He has called Colombian President Gustavo Petro “a sick man” and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator.” He once slammed French President Emmanuel Macron as “publicity-seeking,” and former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “dishonest and weak.”

    President Trump is known for hurling scathing insults at world leaders.

    Then there’s Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum. The U.S. president has described her, at turns, as “fantastic,” “terrific” and “elegant.”

    In a social media post Thursday, he offered his most glowing compliments yet, extolling Sheinbaum as “wonderful and highly intelligent” and saying Mexicans “should be very happy” to have her as their leader.

    Trump’s emphatic praise for Sheinbaum is surprising, given their marked differences in temperament and politics.

    Sheinbaum, a leftist known for her patience and pragmatism, labeled Israel’s U.S.-backed war in Gaza a “genocide” and condemned the recent U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

    She disagrees with Trump on three of his firmly held beliefs: that the U.S. should raise tariffs on Mexican imports, expel migrants en masse, and attack drug traffickers inside Mexico.

    But Sheinbaum is keenly aware of how Trump’s actions on trade, immigration and security could plunge Mexico into turmoil, potentially threatening her own popularity and the legacy of the ruling party founded by her populist predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

    So she has tread strategically, requesting frequent phone calls with Trump, making concessions on issues such as security and heaping praise right back at him. She described her conversation with Trump on Thursday as “productive and cordial” and added: “I had the pleasure of greeting his wife, Melania.”

    So far, her tactics have worked. Trump’s repeated threats of sweeping tariffs on Mexican goods and drone attacks on cartel targets have not yet come to pass.

    Managing Trump has been one of the biggest — and perhaps most consequential — focal points of Sheinbaum’s presidency. “It’s not something that just happened today,” she said recently of her relationship with Trump. “Communication, coordination, and defending the people of Mexico … are constants.”

    Sheinbaum has been quelling nerves in Mexico since Trump’s election in late 2024, just weeks after she assumed the presidency. She promised to forge strong bonds with the incoming U.S. leader, who is widely disliked here for his diatribes against immigrants. Sheinbaum vowed to emulate Kalimán, a beloved Mexican comic-book superhero known for defeating villains with “serenity and patience.”

    She has sought to command Trump’s respect in other ways, holding massive public rallies that demonstrate widespread support for her government. “We will always hold our heads high,” she said at one event shortly before Trump took office. “Mexico is a free, independent, and sovereign country. We coordinate, we collaborate, but we do not submit.”

    In some ways, Trump has actually galvanized support for Sheinbaum by sparking a surge in nationalism. Polls show most Mexicans approve of her handling of the bilateral relationship. According to a poll conducted by El País newspaper, her approval rating soared to 83% in May after she persuaded Trump to postpone the implementation of heavy tariffs. It now stands around 74%.

    Still, some political analysts point out that Trump may like Sheinbaum because, despite her talk of defending Mexico’s sovereignty, she has actually acquiesced to him many times, particularly on issues of security.

    “The list of concessions to Trump accumulated in a single year far surpasses in scope and depth those made by supposedly more ‘subservient’ governments,” wrote columnist Jorge Lomonaco in El Universal newspaper.

    Sheinbaum has deployed Mexican troops to stop migrants from reaching the U.S. border. She has sent dozens of accused drug criminals to the U.S. to face trial there, sidestepping the standard extradition process to do so. She imposed tariffs on some imports from China and other countries, and her government reportedly paused shipments of oil to Cuba, signaling a possible end to what Sheinbaum had lauded as a “humanitarian” effort to aid the embattled island nation — another possible target of Trump.

    “In public, Sheinbaum’s government has maintained a sovereign and patriotic rhetoric, but it is evident that, in private, it has been very docile with the U.S.,” Lomonaco wrote.

    Trump’s discourse with Mexico continues to be infused with threats. While he calls Sheinbaum a “good woman,” he also said in May that she is “so afraid of the cartels she can’t even think straight.”

    Many believe Trump’s decision to send U.S. special forces to arrest Maduro and his wife in Caracas could embolden him to launch a U.S. military attack on cartels in Mexico — a move that Sheinbaum would clearly see as crossing a red line, and could probably ignite a political crisis here.

    “I do think there’s a real risk of a strike on Mexican soil against cartels, especially after what happened in Venezuela,” said Gustavo Flores-Macías, dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

    Mexico, he said, is attempting “a delicate balance of keeping U.S. authorities happy without falling into this perennial game of trying to appease the White House and do everything that Trump wants.”

    Trump has also threatened to pull out of a trilateral trade deal with Canada, which was negotiated during his first term. The U.S., Mexico and Canada must launch a joint review of the free trade pact by July 1, its sixth anniversary, to determine whether the nations intend to renew it for 16 more years or make modifications. Trump has called the deal “irrelevant,” but the pact is fundamental to a Mexican economy heavily dependent on cross-border trade.

    Meantime, a controversy arose last week surrounding the mysterious capture in Mexico of Ryan Wedding, the former Canadian Olympic snowboarder who faces federal charges in California of running a billion-dollar drug-trafficking ring.

    Sheinbaum dismissed reports that FBI agents on the ground in Mexico participated in the the arrest of Wedding, who, according to U.S. authorities, had been hiding for years in Mexico.

    Sheinbaum insisted that Wedding turned himself in at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and, at a news briefing, displayed a photograph that she said depicted Wedding outside the embassy.

    But Canadian media said the image was probably fake, a creation of artificial intelligence. Sheinbaum dodged questions about the image’s authenticity. Wedding’s lawyer, Anthony Colombo, disputed Sheinbaum’s account that Wedding turned himself in. “He was arrested,” Colombo told reporters outside the federal courthouse in Santa Ana, where Wedding entered a not guilty plea. “He did not surrender.”

    Sheinbaum was able to weather the dispute, but the episode again raised questions about how far the Mexican president is willing to go to keep Trump happy.

    “It would be very very concerning — and certainly illegal under Mexican law — if the FBI operated and arrested an individual on Mexican soil,” said Flores-Macías, who added: “I think there are some clear signs that this took place without the involvement of Mexican authorities.”

    Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.

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    Kate Linthicum, Patrick J. McDonnell

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  • Mexico’s president slams Trump’s attack on Venezuela, says it destabilizes the hemisphere

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    MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Monday again condemned the U.S. capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, criticizing the Trump administration’s aggressive foreign policy in Latin America for threatening the stability of the hemisphere.

    “We categorically reject intervention in the internal affairs of other countries,” Sheinbaum said in her daily news conference. “The history of Latin America is clear and compelling: Intervention has never brought democracy, has never generated well-being or lasting stability.”

    “Unilateral action and invasion cannot be the basis of international relations in the 21st century,” she said. “They don’t lead to peace or development.”

    Her comments came as Trump on Sunday threatened more military strikes on Venezuela — and raised the possibility of intervention in Mexico as well as in Cuba, Colombia and the Danish territory of Greenland. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump said drugs were “pouring” through Mexico and that “we’re going to have to do something.”

    He has been threatening action against cartels for months, with some members of his administration suggesting that the U.S. may soon carry out drone strikes on drug laboratories and other targets inside Mexican territory. Sheinbaum has repeatedly said such strikes would be a clear violation of Mexican sovereignty.

    “Sovereignty and the self-determination of peoples are non-negotiable,” she said. “They are fundamental principles of international law and must always be respected without exception.”

    Sheinbaum is part of a bloc of leftist Latin American leaders who have spoken out forcefully against the U.S. after its surprise attack on Caracas on Saturday morning. U.S. special forces abducted Maduro, Venezuela’s leftist president, and his wife, Cilia Flores, the former head of the National Assembly.

    Venezuela says at least 40 people were killed in the attack. The couple have been indicted in New York’s Southern District on drug trafficking charges.

    Right-wing leaders in the region, on the other hand, have cheered the removal of Maduro from power.

    At her news conference on Monday, Sheinbaum called for cooperation among countries in the region, at one point quoting Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.

    “Washington called for good faith and justice toward all nations, and for the cultivation of peace and harmony among all,” she said.

    Nations cannot impose their wills on other countries, she said, and do not have the right to their resources. That was a clear reference to Trump’s stated desire to exploit Venezuela’s vast oil reserves.

    “Only the people can build their own future, decide their path, exercise sovereignty over their natural resources, and freely define their form of government,” she said. “Each nation has the inalienable right to decide its political, economic, and social model, free from external pressure.”

    Sheinbaum warned that infighting among Latin American nations would hurt the region economically.

    “Global economic competition, particularly in the face of Asia’s growth, is not achieved through the use of force … but rather through cooperation for development, productive investment, innovation, education and social welfare,” she said.

    She said Mexico was committed to fighting organized crime, and reminded the U.S. that it fuels that dynamic.

    “The violence plaguing our country is partly caused by the illegal flow of high-powered weapons from the United States into Mexico, as well as the serious problem of drug consumption in our neighboring country,” she said.

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    Kate Linthicum

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  • The crime that haunts Mexico, sowing fear, disrupting life: extortion

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    MEXICO CITY — A shop owner facing threats shutters the clothing store that had been in his family for generations.

    A leader of a citrus growers association is kidnapped and killed after refusing mob demands for a cut of profits.

    Enraged peasant farmers fed up with paying graft turn on cartel thugs in a bloody showdown.

    In Mexico, these real-life incidents all arise from a signature offense: extortion.

    Gang shakedowns are rampant in Mexico, victimizing untold numbers — street vendors and taxi drivers, restaurateurs and farmers, factory owners and mine operators. All are coerced into paying tithes to criminal bands, sometimes the same cartels that run drugs.

    “It’s a very sensitive crime because of its social impact,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said last week. “It doesn’t only affect one person. It affects everyone.”

    An agent of the attorney general’s office in Mexican state of Michoacán inspects the area where vehicles were burned by members of criminal gang near the city of Quiroga in November.

    (Enrique Castro/AFP via Getty Images)

    Sheinbaum launched a high-profile crackdown against extortion, but her efforts face steep odds. Extortion, experts say, is a multibillion-dollar racket, perhaps even more lucrative than drug-trafficking. It sometimes is called “the invisible crime,” since most victims fail to report threats, fearing retaliation.

    Those targeted often confront a ghastly choice: accept ultimatums to hand over cash, property or other assets — or face death, a threat routinely aimed at family members as well.

    “Sure, I can say, ‘I won’t pay: They can go ahead and kill me,’ ” said Antonio, a floriculturist outside Mexico City who hands over almost $600 in derecho de piso [protection] at each flower harvest, the amount doubling in holiday seasons, including this month’s Virgin of Guadalupe feast. “But I cannot allow them to kill my kids. Or take my wife.”

    Like other victims who spoke to The Times, Antonio, 56, a father of four, asked that only his first name be used for security reasons.

    “We live in terror,” he said. “We have to work for these delinquents. And no one in the government helps us.”

    A man surrounded by flowers carries a bunch of cempasúchil flowers

    Farmer Jesús Cuaxospa works on his farm where he grows cempasúchil flowers in San Luis Tlaxialtemalco on the outskirts of Mexico City in October.

    (Claudia Rosel / Associated Press)

    Mexico and two other Latin American countries, Colombia and Honduras, are among the world’s five most extortion-scarred nations, according to the Global Organized Crime Index, an annual ranking from a Geneva-based research group. Filling in the top five are Somalia and Libya.

    Apart from the devastating impact on individuals and families, extortion exacts extreme societal costs: displacement, a profound sense of insecurity and the distortion of local economies.

    In Mexico, strong-armed extortion gangs have been accused of price-fixing, taking over industries, unions and transport routes, and running construction sites —and even setting prices for foodstuffs, building materials and other items.

    Sheinbaum regularly boasts of her administration’s success in curbing violent crime, especially homicides, down by more than one-third since she took office last year, according to official figures. But she concedes that extortion is on the rise, though there are no accurate metrics for an offense so hugely under-reported.

    Calling the eradication of extortion “one of the great challenges” facing Mexico, Sheinbaum pledged to bolster enforcement, stiffen penalties and increase safeguards for anyone receiving threats.

    She is championing a constitutional amendment to make extortion a federal crime and put the onus on law enforcement, not individuals, to hunt down violators. Prosecutors could pursue cases without victims having to file complaints.

    Since the inauguration of Mexico’s “National Strategy against Extortion” in July, authorities say police have arrested more than 600 suspects and fielded more than 100,000 calls to an expanded toll-free extortion hotline. Officials also moved to block cellphone access in Mexican prisons, where gangs specialize in “virtual kidnapping” — calling people on the outside and demanding ransoms for loved ones allegedly abducted.

    “Don’t answer a telephone number that you don’t recognize,” Sheinbaum warned people last week.

    In one notorious case, authorities say a prison gang targeted 14 nurses who were dispatched to Mexico City during the COVID-19 pandemic. Inmates using cellphones warned the nurses to stay in their hotel rooms and say nothing — they supposedly were under surveillance. Accomplices contacted relatives demanding cash. But police got wind of the scheme. No money was paid and no one was injured.

    Security forces stand guard following an operation at a butcher shop

    Security forces stand guard following an operation at a butcher shop allegedly linked to the La Familia Michoacana cartel in Sultepec, Mexico, in July.

    (Alfredo Estrella/AFP via Getty Images)

    Sheinbaum’s anti-extortion campaign faces a major barrier: Barring a massive culture shift, many victims will remain hesitant to approach the law, lacking trust in the system.

    “Making a complaint is not an option, because you never know if authorities are in collusion with the criminals,” said César, co-owner of a restaurant in downtown Mexico City.

    About two years ago, he said, one of his partners began to receive threats on his cellphone. The callers had the name of his wife and children. The partner was nervous but did nothing at first.

    “Then one day two South Americans arrived at the restaurant,” César recalled.

    Their message: Pay $2,500 a week to be “allowed to work in peace.”

    His partner soon abandoned the restaurant, and the city.

    Management hasn’t heard from the goons since.

    Even so, César, like the owners of many businesses, tries to keep a low profile; his name and those of associates aren’t on display at the restaurant. Staff is instructed not to blab to anyone.

    “Still, we live with uncertainty and worry all the time that these guys will come back,” César said. “We know that at any moment we could be victims.”

    Recent victims whose cases shocked Mexico include a successful young butcher entrepreneur in Tabasco state and a woman taxi driver in Veracruz state. Both were found dead after rejecting extortion threats, according to reports. The driver, Irma Hernández, 62, a retired teacher, was kidnapped and forced to make a jihadi-style video in which — surrounded by armed men — she implored her fellow cabbies: “Pay your cuota [fee] … or you’ll end up like me.”

    A private security force funded by avocado growers, on patrol.

    Avocado growers have received so many extortion demands from criminal gangs that some hired private security forces, like this one on patrol in Tancitaro, Michoacán, in 2019.

    (Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)

    Sometimes, though, the fed-up marks fight back.

    Two years ago the corn and bean growers of the impoverished hamlet of Texcapilla tired of paying annual protection fees of about $200 per planted acre and decided: No más. Armed with machetes and shotguns, the peasant farmers confronted enforcers of the dominant area cartel, La Familia Michoacana, on a soccer field outside a school. By the time the melee ended, authorities said, 14 were dead —10 gang members and 4 farmers.

    Carlos Manzo, the former mayor of Uruapan in Michoacán state, also pushed back. He blamed Sheinbaum’s government for not doing enough in Michoacán, where gangsters have long fleeced the booming avocado sector and other industries.

    “We are surrounded by criminal groups dedicated to extorting and killing,” Manzo told a crowd in May. “But we are going to confront them.”

    Manzo was assassinated last month at a Day of the Dead celebration in Uruapan.

    Less than two weeks earlier, Bernado Bravo, a leader of regional lime growers in Michoacán, also was shot dead. Bravo repeatedly had denounced extortion demands.

    With so much at risk, it’s not surprising that some potential victims bolt.
    .
    For more than 80 years, Vicente’s family ran a men’s clothing business in downtown Mexico City. He didn’t think much of it when, about four years ago, men began calling demanding money. Then one day three guys arrived at the shop.

    “They said if I didn’t pay, I would lack security, and if I lacked security, something might happen to my workers — if not to me, to my family,” Vicente recalled.

    Like many targets, Vicente hoped the threat would go away. But the menacing strangers kept barging in — and upping their demands, from $500 a month to $1,000 a month to $2,000 a month, all the way up to $10,000 a month.

    His sons urged Vicente to walk away: The business, however beloved, wasn’t worth a bullet to the head. Reluctantly, Vicente finally agreed. The shutdown left 15 people out of work, many of them longtime employees. Some ended up hawking clothing from street stalls.

    Vicente says he never reported the extortion attempt: Like César, he feared some crooked law enforcement insider would reveal his name and address to the mob. He has tried to put the experience behind him. But it hasn’t been easy. Three generations of family life revolved around that shop.

    “Because I refused to pay extortion I was forced to shut down the business that my grandfather founded in 1936, and that my father and I continued,” said Vicente, 67. “It was painful. Very painful.”

    McDonnell is a staff writer and Sánchez Vidal a special correspondent.

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    Patrick J. McDonnell, Cecilia Sánchez Vidal

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  • After Gen Z march in Mexico, government and critics spar as Trump cites ‘big problems’ south of border

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    MEXICO CITY — A weekend protest march convened to highlight the concerns of Mexico’s Generation Z has instead dramatized deep political divisions extending well beyond the needs of young Mexicans.

    The mostly peaceful demonstration in downtown Mexico City on Saturday culminated in several hours of clashes when small groups of protesters battled with phalanxes of riot police deployed to protect the National Palace in Mexico City’s central square, or zócalo.

    In the aftermath of the protests, Mexico’s leftist President Claudia Sheinbaum accused right-wing opponents of hijacking the demonstration to provoke unrest and smear her government.

    “A march that was supposedly called against violence utilized violence,” Sheinbaum told reporters Monday.

    But opposition leaders and other critics said the march reflected deep concern about alleged cartel infiltration in the government and charged that police brutalized young protesters.

    Among those who noticed the chaotic scenes from Mexico was President Trump, who, in Oval Office comments to the press on Monday, again raised the provocative specter of U.S. strikes on cartel targets in Mexico. The country is a major production site for fentanyl, amphetamines and other synthetic drugs bound for the U.S. market, and a transport corridor for South American cocaine.

    “I looked at Mexico City over the weekend. There’s some big problems there,” Trump said. “Let me just put it this way: I am not happy with Mexico.”

    Asked if he would contemplate U.S. attacks on cartel targets in Mexico, Trump responded: “Would I launch strikes in Mexico to stop drugs? It’s OK with me. Whatever we have to do to stop drugs.”

    Trump has charged that Mexico is “run by the cartels,” though he has praised Sheinbaum as a “very brave woman.”

    Sheinbaum has denied that cartels control Mexico. She has maintained a cooperative attitude with Trump on two contentious binational issues — drug trafficking and tariffs — but has said Mexico would not yield its sovereignty and agree to U.S. strikes.

    Saturday’s march — one of many similar protests across Mexico on that day — was originally called in support of Generation Z, after related demonstrations in Nepal and Morocco. Young people worldwide have decried a lack of economic and educational opportunities.

    But the rally in Mexico City became mostly a march against what many participants labeled the leftist “narco-government” of Sheinbaum and her ruling Morena party

    Many protesters hoisted banners declaring: “I am Carlos Manzo,” after the mayor of the western city of Uruapan, who was assassinated this monthin a shooting that authorities have blamed on organized crime.

    Manzo had accused Sheinbaum’s government of coddling criminals. Supporters of his so-called “White Hat” movement — after the popular mayor’s signature sombrero — took to the streets of Uruapan and other cities in Michoacán state this month by the tens of thousands to demand a crackdown on organized crime. Backers of the growing movement were also major participants in Saturday’s march in Mexico City.

    In the aftermath of the march, Sheinbaum’s opponents accused her government of repressing dissent.

    “They brutalized young people who only want a better Mexico,” Alejandro Moreno, president of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, charged on X. “They beat them because they are scared. They know that the power of an organized people is stronger than a cowardly narco-regime.”

    Mexican authorities denied allegations of brutality and said that at least 60 police officers were injured.

    A small minority of protesters, many wearing ski masks, tossed stones, bottles, fireworks and other improvised weapons at police. Police used both physical force and volleys of tear gas to push them back. Each side blamed the other for igniting the melees.

    “They wanted to generate this idea: ‘Chaos in Mexico!’ “ charged Sheinbaum, noting how the images of the clashes received widespread domestic and international attention in the press and social media.

    The president called for an investigation of the violence, which, she said, was funded by her opponents. She vowed that authorities would also investigate any allegations of police brutality. The great majority of protesters, she said, were nonviolent.

    Authorities said 17,000 marchers took place in Saturday’s demonstration. The opposition said the number was much higher.

    Opponents of Sheinbaum’s government have vowed additional protests. But many experts doubt that a deeply fractured opposition could do much to loosen Morena’s stranglehold on power.

    Sheinbaum’s predecessor and mentor, ex-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, faced much larger street demonstrations during his time in office, along with allegations of ties of drug traffickers. But neither seemed to dent his widespread popularity.

    Polls have shown Sheinbaum, who just completed the first year of a six-year term, with 70%-plus approval ratings. Her Morena party, with strong backing from poor and working-class Mexicans who have benefited from minimum-wage increases and social welfare programs, retains firm control of congress, the courts and most statehouses across Mexico.

    Security remains the major concern of most Mexicans, polls show, even as the president has touted decreases in homicides and other violent crimes. Sheinbaum has launched a crackdown on organized crime that has seen thousands of suspects arrested — including dozens expelled to face justice in U.S. courts.

    Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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    Patrick J. McDonnell, Kate Linthicum

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  • Tijuana assassination mystery deepens as Mexico arrests suspect in 1994 Colosio case

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    MEXICO CITY — A breakthrough in the decades-long investigation of a political assassination that convulsed the nation?

    Or a political stunt meant to distract from more pressing issues?

    Those are the questions that emerged in Mexico after the arrest last weekend of an alleged “second shooter” in the 1994 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was gunned down at a rally in the border city of Tijuana.

    His slaying is widely regarded as one of the most consequential — and contentious— events of recent Mexican history.

    Doubts and conspiracy theories have long swirled over Colosio’s killing, long blamed on a “lone gunman” who was captured at the scene. Many have compared the lingering uncertainty about Colosio’s demise to the never-ending debate in the United States surrounding the 1963 killing of President John F. Kennedy, an assassination also blamed on a lone gunman with ill-defined motives.

    Many in Mexico have disputed the prevalent theory: That an apparently nonpolitical factory worker, Mario Aburto, shot the candidate twice at point-blank range as Colosio mingled with citizens during the campaign event.

    “I looked up and saw the gun right in front of me,” Maria Vidal, who was walking with Colosio at the scene, told the Times in 1994. “Then I saw him fall to the ground. Blood was coming out of his head.”

    Colosio was shot once in the head and once in the abdomen, feeding speculation that a second gunman was involved.

    People place flowers on March 23, 2004, in tribute to Luis Donaldo Colosio during a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of his assasination in Tijuana.

    (David Maung / Associated Press)

    Aburto, who says he was tortured into confessing, continues to serve a 45-year prison sentence.

    The Colosio case generated tens of thousands of pages of testimony from hundreds of witnesses, along with books, documentaries, and a TV miniseries on Netflix, all examining the question: What actually happened in Tijuana on March 23, 1994?

    Speculation has fingered everyone from political insiders to drug traffickers as the ones behind Colosio’s assassination, which contributed to a sense of upheaval in Mexico. The year 1994 opened with a Zapatista rebellion in the south, soon followed by Colosio’s stunning murder, and culminated with a December collapse of the peso, triggering an economic crisis.

    More than a quarter-century after the killing, Mexican writer Cuauhtémoc Ruiz captured the ubiquitous sense of ambiguity in his 2020 book, “Colosio: Sospechosos y Encubridores” — roughly, “Colosio: Suspects and Cover-ups,”

    The Colosio case even spawned its own version of the Zapruder film, the storied home-movie sequence of JFK’s assassination in Dallas. Video clips from the fateful 1994 rally show Colosio, his curly black hair flecked with confetti, shaking hands and signing autographs as he winds his way through a gleeful political crowd.

    Suddenly, the image of a hand grasping a pistol emerges from the scrum. The gun fires directly into the right side of the candidate’s head. Chaos ensues.

    On Saturday ,according to reports here, federal prosecutors in Tijuana arrested a former intelligence agent, Jorge Antonio Sánchez Ortega, who had been wanted since last year in connection with Colosio’s killing.

    Sánchez Ortega, authorities say, was part of federal protection team assigned to Colosio’s rally in Tijuana’s Lomas Taurinas neighborhood, near the city airport. The agent was arrested shortly after the killing, but prosecutors now say he was freed and whisked away as part of a cover-up. The agent’s clothing was stained with the victim’s blood, and ballistic evidence indicated he had fired a weapon, authorities say.

    His new arrest stems from a bombshell about-face last year by the office of Mexico’s attorney general, which abruptly retreated from the lone-gunman allegation. Instead, prosecutors endorsed the hypothesis of a second shooter and named as a suspect “Jorge Antonio S.,” now identified as Sánchez Ortega.

    But the former agent’s arrest has left more questions than answers. Prosecutors have provided no overarching theory on why Colosio was targeted, and who was behind his slaying.

    Neither the ex-agent or his lawyer have commented since his arrest.

    Jesús González Schmal, attorney for Aburto, the convicted assassin, hailed the arrest as a step toward clarifying what really happened to Colosio.

    “This will open a horizon of knowledge about what occurred 31 years ago,” the lawyer said in a television interview.

    But some labeled the arrest a thinly disguised attempt to distract people from more pressing current issues of crime and corruption.

    The government of President Claudia Sheinbaum is using the memory of Colosio “to cover up its ineptitude,” Alejandro Moreno Cárdenas, president of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, declared on X. The president, he said, “has no shame and no idea of how to govern.”

    At the time of his slaying, Colosio was the presidential candidate of the PRI, which governed Mexico in authoritarian fashion for most of the 20th century. He was on track to be elected Mexico’s next president a few months later.

    Colosio, 44, was seen widely viewed as a charismatic and progressive voice inside the rigid hierarchy of the PRI. He vowed to institute reforms and clean up deeply entrenched corruption and cronyism. Some have speculated that hard-liners within the ruling party were behind his killing — a theory long rejected by the PRI leadership.

    After Colosio’s slaying, the PRI named Ernesto Zedillo, who had been Colosio’s campaign manager, as its candidate. Zedillo, a party loyalist and lackluster technocrat, won in a landslide and served a six-year term.

    But, these days, the PRI is a weakened minority player in opposition to the government of Sheinbaum, elected under the banner of the now-dominant Morena party.

    The arrest of an alleged accomplice in the Colosio killing comes days after another high-profile political assassination, this time of Mayor Carlos Manzo of the western city of Uruapan. He was gunned down at a Day of the Dead festival this month in what some call Mexico’s most sensational political assassination since Colosio’s slaying.

    The killing of Manzo — who assailed Sheinbaum’s government for not doing more to combat cartels — sparked massive protests in his home state of Michoacán, a cartel battleground. Many criticized Sheinbaum’s government for what they called its lax attitude toward organized crime, an allegation denied by the president.

    A generation after his assassination, Colosio’s slaying remains an epochal event that continues to cast a shadow over Mexican politics.

    Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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    Patrick J. McDonnell

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  • Slaying of Mexican mayor sparks national outcry over cartel power

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    MEXICO CITY — Carlos Manzo blazed a maverick path as he battled both cartels and what he called skimpy federal support for his crusade against organized crime in his hometown of Uruapan, in western Mexico.

    The “man with a hat,” after his signature white sombrero, was an annoyance to the power structure in Mexico City, but beloved among many constituents for his uncompromising stance against the ruthless mobs that hold sway in much of the country.

    “They can kill me, they can abduct me, they can intimidate or threaten me,” the outspoken Manzo declared on social media in June. “But the people who are sick of extortion, of homicides, of car thefts — they will demand justice.”

    He added, “There is an enraged tiger out there — the people of Uruapan.”

    That rage was on dramatic display last week, as tens of thousands marched through the streets of Uruapan and elsewhere in violence-plagued Michoacán state to denounce the slaying of Manzo, 40. He was gunned down Nov. 1 amid a crowd of revelers, including his family, at a Day of the Dead celebration, in a killing that reverberated nationwide and beyond.

    The assassinations of other public figures in recent years have also triggered outrage and dismay in the country, but Manzo’s death has unleashed something else: A divisive aftermath that has seen many questioning Mexico’s very ability to confront the rampaging cartels in places like Michoacán, where organized crime has a forceful grip on government, the economy and people’s daily lives.

    “This structural control of organized crime is deeply worrying for the entire country,” said Erubiel Tirado, a security expert at the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City. “It speaks of a crisis of legitimacy in terms of the government’s ability to function.”

    Legislators from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) placed hats painted like blood on their seats in condemnation of the murder of Uruapan Mayor Carlos Manzo during a session in the Chamber of Deputies on Nov. 4, 2025, in Mexico City.

    (Luis Barron / Sipa USA via Associated Press )

    Mexico, wrote columnist Mariana Campos in El Universal newspaper, “is fractured into zones where criminals set the rules, administer justice, charge taxes and decide who can be the mayor, who can be a businessman.”

    Less than two weeks before Manzo’s killing, police in Michoacán found the battered body of Bernardo Bravo, a renowned leader of regional lime growers who had pushed back against cartel extortion demands. Bravo was shot in the head and his corpse showed signs of torture, authorities said.

    For months, the government of President Claudia Sheinbaum has rolled out statistics showing nationwide reductions in homicides and other offenses, along with the arrests of hundreds of organized crime figures — among them dozens expelled to face justice in the United States.

    Yet polls consistently show many Mexicans remain unconvinced. The death of Manzo — who cut a national reputation by insisting that officials coddled criminals — only heightened a pervasive sense of vulnerability, especially in places like Michoacán.

    The picturesque region of verdant hillsides, pine-studded mountains and wild Pacific coastline has long been a hub of cartel violence. In 2006, then-President Felipe Calderón chose Michoacán as the place to declare Mexico’s ill-fated “War on Drugs.”

    That came a few months after an especially macabre incident in Uruapan: Cartel gunmen tossed five severed heads onto a nightclub dance floor.

    During the War on Drugs, the military was deployed to combat cartels, but the strategy backfired, significantly escalating violence nationwide and raising concerns about the militarization of the country and the trampling of human rights.

    Relatives pull the coffin of Mexican journalist Mauricio Cruz Solis during his wake

    Relatives pull the coffin of Mexican journalist Mauricio Cruz Solis during his wake in Uruapan, Michoacan state, on Oct. 30, 2024. Cruz was shot dead Oct. 29 in western Mexico, a local prosecutor’s office said, in a part of the country hit hard by organized crime.

    (Enrique Castro / AFP via Getty Images)

    According to many in Uruapan and across the country, things have only gotten worse since then.

    “Broadcast it to the entire world: In Mexico the narco-traffickers govern,” said Arturo Martínez, 61, who runs a handicraft shop in Uruapan, a city of more than 300,000 at the heart of Mexico’s multibillion-dollar avocado industry. “What can any average person expect if they kill the mayor in front of his family, in front of thousands of people? We are completely at the mercy of the criminals.”

    It is a frequently voiced viewpoint that meshes with President Trump’s comments that cartels exercise “total control” in Mexico — a charge denied by Sheinbaum, though others say the breakdown in Michoacán exemplifies a broader lack of control.

    Uruapan “has become a mirror of the country, a microcosm where the ability to govern goes off the tracks, [and] fear substitutes for the state,” Denise Dresser, a political analyst, told Aristegui Noticias news outlet.

    Manzo, an independent, broke with Sheinbaum’s ruling Morena party more than a year ago and charged that the central government had ignored his pleas for additional police firepower and security funding to confront organized crime.

    Following the mayor’s slaying, Sheinbaum ruled out a return to the militaristic War on Drugs, which cost tens of thousands of lives and, according to Sheinbaum and other critics, did little to halt drug trafficking.

    Police officers stand guard as protesters demonstrate against the assassination of Uruapan's mayor

    Police officers stand guard as protesters demonstrate against the assassination of Uruapan’s mayor at the Government Palace in Morelia, Mexico, on Nov. 3. The Mexican government reported Nov. 2 that the mayor of Uruapan, Carlos Manzo, who was killed the previous night during a public event in the western state of Michoacan, had been under official protection since December.

    (Jordi Lebrija / AFP via Getty Images)

    Manzo was the latest of scores of Mexican mayors and local officials assassinated in recent years, as cartels seek to control turf, trafficking routes, police departments and municipal budgets, while also bolstering extortion schemes and other rackets. Manzo’s death stood out because of his provocative media presence, as he demanded that authorities beat criminals into submission — or kill them.

    “In many places criminal groups control the police chiefs, the local treasuries, the mayors,” noted Víctor Manuel Sánchez, a professor at the Autonomous University of Coahuila. “Then there are mayors like Carlos Manzo who seek to break this circle — and they end up dead.”

    Sheinbaum assailed opposition critics who have blamed what they call her lax policies for the killing. She condemned the “vile” and “cowardly” attack on Manzo, and vowed to bring the killers to justice.

    The 17-year-old gunman who fatally shot Manzo was killed at the scene, according to police, who say two other suspects were arrested. Authorities call the operation a well-planned cartel hit, though there has been no official confirmation of which of the many mobs operating in the area was responsible. Also still unclear is the motive.

    In the wake of the mayor’s killing, the president is unveiling a “Plan Michoacán” in a bid to improve security. Many are skeptical.

    “It’s the latest of many such plans,” noted Tirado of the Iberoamerican University. “None have worked.”

    Taking over as mayor of Uruapan was Grecia Quiroz, the widow of Manzo, who vowed to continue her husband’s fight against cartels. As Quiroz lifted her right hand last week to take the oath of office, she cradled her husband’s trademark white hat in her left arm.

    “This hat,” declared the new mayor, “has an unstoppable force.”

    White hats have been a common sight at demonstrations denouncing his death, and a white hat graced Manzo’s coffin at his funeral.

    His widow’s well-choreographed swearing-in amid extra-tight security did little to alter the predominant mood of anguish and gloom in Uruapan. Hope is a commodity in short supply for the town’s despondent and fearful residents.

    “It’s the narcos who run things here, not the mayor, not the president,” said Martínez, the shop owner. “Carlos Manzo only wanted to protect his people. And look what happened to him.”

    Times staff writer Kate Linthicum and special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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    Patrick J. McDonnell

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  • Mexico’s president was groped on the street. Now she’s waging a war against rampant sexual harassment

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    MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum was strolling through her city’s capital this week, heading from one government office to another, when she stopped to take selfies with a crowd of admirers.

    A man approached from behind, slipped his arm around Sheinbaum’s shoulder, leaned in to plant a kiss on her neck and briefly grabbed her chest before an aide pushed him away.

    The groping incident, which was captured on video by bystanders Tuesday, sparked outrage nationally and put renewed focus on the rampant sexual harassment faced by women here.

    Sheinbaum, who last year was sworn in as Mexico’s first female leader, has seized the chance to raise awareness about the issue.

    “If they do this to the president,” she asked Wednesday, “what must happen to all the young women in the country?”

    Speaking at her daily news conference, Sheinbaum said that she had filed a criminal complaint against her aggressor, whom authorities reported was drunk at the time of the incident and had been detained.

    Sheinbaum said her government will also review state laws to ensure that street harassment is categorized as a crime throughout Mexico and launch a campaign to combat the phenomenon.

    “I decided to file a complaint because this is something … all women in our country experience,” Sheinbaum said. “I experienced it before I was president. It shouldn’t happen. No one should violate our personal space. No man has the right to violate that space.”

    Sheinbaum leaves a rally in Mexico City in 2023 while campaigning for president.

    (Eduardo Verdugo / Associated Press)

    Like her populist predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum often walks the streets without bodyguards, saying she likes to be close to the people.

    But the practice has come under scrutiny given the dozens of killings each year of Mexican political candidates and elected leaders. Over the weekend, the outspoken mayor of Uruapan, a city in Michoácan state, was gunned down at a public event celebrating the Day of the Dead holiday despite being protected by armed police and members of the National Guard.

    Tuesday’s incident in Mexico City provoked outrage across the country, with many women saying it embodied the street harassment that is commonplace in many parts of the country.

    “If the most powerful woman in Mexico experienced harassment, what can women who travel on public transportation or walk alone every day expect?” Congresswoman Ivonne Ortega wrote on X. “This is the reality that millions of women and girls face daily.”

    Feminist social movements have gained ground in Mexico in recent years, sparked by the #MeToo movement in the United States and Mexico’s high rates of violence against women. Each spring, hundreds of thousands of protesters take to the streets to demand gender parity and policies that protect women’s lives.

    Sheinbaum’s landslide victory in the 2024 presidential election highlighted the vast strides made by women in Mexican politics, a phenomenon aided by a law requiring that at least 50% of all candidates in federal, state and municipal elections are female.

    Sheinbaum has frequently described her win as a victory for all women. “I did not arrive alone,” she says. “We all arrived.”

    Yet violence against women persists, with an average of 10 women or girls slain nationwide each day, according to the government.

    And street harassment is still pervasive. A few years ago, the hashtag #MiPrimerAcoso — “my first harassment” — went viral, with tens of thousands of women sharing stories of the first time they were touched, stared at or verbally harassed in the streets.

    Writer Brenda Lozano said on X that Tuesday’s incident wasn’t due to alcohol or Sheinbaum’s lack of security. “The reasons she was harassed are patriarchy and sexism.”

    Mexican women march.

    Women march in Mexico City in a 2020 protest against gender violence.

    (Pedro Pardo /AFP via Getty Images)

    A United Nations report found that nearly half of Mexican women have been subjected to rape, groping or other forms of sexual violence. A 2014 survey of female transit riders in 16 cities around the world by the Thompson Reuters Foundation found that Mexico City had the biggest problem with sexual harassment, with 64% of respondents reporting having been victimized.

    The Mexico City government has long provided women-only subway cars, and has even sought to combat harassment by arming female commuters with rape whistles. Some feminists oppose those measures, saying it puts the onus on women to protect themselves instead of pushing men to change their behavior.

    Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada said on Wednesday that the man who groped the president would be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

    “‘We’ve all arrived’ is not a slogan,” said Brugada, a member of Sheinbaum’s Morena party. “It’s a commitment to not look the other way, to not allow misogyny to remain hidden in custom, to not accept one more humiliation, one more abuse, one more femicide.”

    While there were widespread expressions of support for Sheinbaum, there were also some on social media who criticized her for making too much of the incident. Others slammed Sheinbaum for smiling as she tried to slip away from the man’s grip, and for not pushing him away herself.

    At her news conference, Sheinbaum said she hadn’t realized the extent of the harassment until she saw a video of what had happened.

    She had chosen to walk between meetings rather than take a car for a simple reason. “We were running late,” she said. “It was faster.”

    Also on Wednesday, Sheinbaum voiced support for Mexico’s Miss Universe representative, Fátima Bosch, who made headlines when she walked out of the competition Tuesday after being publicly berated by a male pageant official, who called her “dumb.”

    Sheinbaum referenced a sexist saying that was once common in Mexico: “She’s prettier when she’s quiet.”

    “Women,” Sheinbaum said, “are prettier when we raise our voices.”

    Times staff writer Patrick J. McDonnell and Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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    Kate Linthicum

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  • Why the Mexican president refuses to restart the drug war despite mayor’s assassination

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    MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum ruled out a new “war on drugs” as a response to the assassination of a regional mayor who was shot at a Day of the Dead celebration, a brazen killing that has sparked national outrage.

    “Returning to the war against el narco is not an option,” Sheinbaum told reporters Monday, referring to the bloody anti-crime offensive launched almost two decades ago. “Mexico already did that, and the violence got worse.”

    The president spoke as the nation was reeling from the killing Saturday of Carlos Manzo, mayor of Uruapan in the west-central state of Michoacán, which has become an organized-crime battleground. She condemned the assassination as “vile” and vowed to track down his killers.

    While Mexican mayors and other local officials are frequent cartel targets — scores have been assassinated in recent years as gangs fight for control of city halls, budgets and police forces — the killing of Manzo struck a nerve nationwide.

    A crowd in Uruapan, Mexico, mourns Mayor Carlos Manzo, who was fatally shot over the weekend during a Day of the Dead celebration in the city.

    (Eduardo Verdugo / Associated Press)

    Manzo, 40, gained notoriety as an outspoken proponent of taking a hard-line against the cartels that have overrun many regions of Mexico. According to Manzo, police and prosecutors coddle criminals ill-deserving of legal protections.

    Manzo’s unyielding stance won him considerable popularity in a nation where polls show security remains citizens’ major concern — despite Sheinbaum’s frequent citing of official figures showing that homicides and other violent crimes are decreasing.

    “The murder of the mayor is a clear signal of what we all know but what the government of President Sheinbaum denies: The country is governed by narco-traffickers,” Felipe Rosas Montesinos, 45, a flower salesman in Mexico City, said. “And if anyone challenges el narco, like the mayor of Uruapan did, they will kill him.”

    Added Gilberto Santamaría, 37, a mechanic: “This makes one feel defeated, losing hope that anything will ever change.”

    Manzo — who split with Sheinbaum’s ruling, center-left Morena party — was among a number of voices across Latin America who have called for more aggressive tactics to combat crime. Some labeled Manzo the “Mexican Bukele,” after Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who has locked up tens of thousands of alleged gang members, many without due process, according to human rights advocates.

    The mayor’s killing “feels like a terror movie in which the bad guys win,” said María Guadalupe Rodríguez, 51, a nurse. “The sad part is that it’s not a movie: It’s what we live with in Mexico.”

    A day after Manzo’s killing, protesters filled the streets of Uruapan and Morelia, the capital of Michoacán state. Many condemned Sheinbaum and her Morena party for what they called a permissive attitude toward crime.

    While the protests were mostly peaceful, authorities said, some demonstrators broke into the state government palace in Morelia and trashed offices and other installations. Police responded with tear gas and arrested at least eight vandalism suspects.

    Manzo was shot multiple times Saturday at a candlelight Day of the Dead festival that he was attending with his family in downtown Uruapan. One suspect was killed and two accomplices arrested, police said.

    The killing was a well-planned cartel hit, Security Minister Omar García Harfuch told reporters.
    The suspects managed to circumvent Manzo’s contingent of bodyguards, García Harfuch said. Authorities were investigating which of the area’s many mobs were behind the slaying.

    Uruapan, a city of more than 300,000, is situated in the verdant hills of Michoacán, where most of Mexico’s avocados are grown. The lucrative industry — “green gold” generates $3 billion annually in exports to the United States — has for years been the target of a patchwork of armed groups who extort money from growers, packers, truckers and others.

    Almost 20 years ago, then-President Felipe Calderón chose Michoacán as the launching pad for a nationwide war on drugs, deploying troops to combat the growing power of cartels. That strategy is widely believed to have had the unintended consequence of increasing violence: Gangs acquired ever-more powerful weapons to match the firepower of the armed forces, while cartel infighting accelerated as police captured or killed capos.

    Upon taking office in 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised a different approach, saying the military deployment had turned Mexico into a “graveyard.” He instructed troops to refrain from direct confrontations with cartels, when possible, and vowed to attend to poverty and other underlying social-economic social forces behind the violence.

    Critics labeled López Obrador’s “hugs not bullets” strategy a disaster, as violent crime spiked.

    Sheinbaum, a protege of López Obrador, embraced her predecessor’s approach but sought to improve Mexico’s intelligence-gathering and investigatory powers and strengthen the rule of law. Her government has aggressively arrested thousands of cartel suspects, several dozen of whom were sent to the United States to face trial.

    For Manzo, however, Sheinbaum’s strategy was a rebranded incarnation of “hugs not bullets.”

    The war on drugs, experts say, did nothing to cut the flow of cocaine, synthetic opiates like fentanyl and other substances to the United States, the world’s major consumer. And Mexico’s cartels, by all accounts, have only gotten stronger in recent years, despite the take-down of numerous kingpins.

    Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed.

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    Patrick J. McDonnell, Kate Linthicum

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  • Mexican mayor who waged war on cartels is slain while celebrating Day of the Dead

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    MEXICO CITY — Carlos Manzo was famous in Mexico for saying what few other politicians would: That cartels operated with impunity and needed to be confronted with brute force. The mayor of a city in an avocado-growing region beset by crime and violence, Manzo suggested authorities should beat criminals into submission — or simply kill them.

    It was a provocative message that resonated in some sectors of a country long afflicted by drug war bloodshed. Many here viewed Manzo, with his trademark white cowboy hat, as a hero.

    But his iron fist rhetoric and criticism of the federal government’s security strategy also earned him enemies. Manzo acknowledged as much, saying he knew he could be targeted by organized crime. “I don’t want to be just another murdered mayor,” he said last month. “But it is important not to let fear control us.”

    Manzo, 40, was gunned down Saturday night as he presided over a public celebration of Day of the Dead in a central square in Uruapan, a city of 300,000 in the western state of Michoacán. One suspected gunman was killed and two others arrested.

    The slaying, captured on video, provoked outcry throughout Mexico and in Washington.

    Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, with whom Manzo often sparred on issues of security, mourned an “irreparable loss.” U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted a photograph of Manzo smiling and holding his young son just moments before the attack. “The U.S. stands ready to deepen security cooperation with Mexico to wipe out organized crime,” Landau wrote.

    Manzo was a part of a new wave of leaders throughout the Americas who have called for a hard line against criminals.

    It’s a club that includes President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, who has locked up tens of thousands of people accused of gang ties, with little to no due process, and President Trump, who has pushed a more militaristic approach to combating cartels, saying the U.S. should “wage war” on drug traffickers.

    The U.S. military has killed 65 people in recent months who it alleges were smuggling drugs in the Caribbean and the Pacific, including several attacks off Mexico’s coastline. Trump administration leaders have warned of the possibility of U.S. attacks on cartel targets on Mexican soil.

    Calls for a violent crackdown on organized crime are at odds with the security strategy embraced by Sheinbaum and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Both emphasized the need to address root causes of violence, including poverty and social disintegration.

    López Obrador, especially, vowed to break with the confrontational approaches of past Mexican administrations, whose military operations he said failed to weaken cartels and only fueled violence. What Mexico needed, López Obrador often said, was “hugs, not bullets.”

    Manzo — who got his start in politics as a member of López Obrador and Sheinbaum’s Morena party but later became an independent — fiercely criticized that mantra.

    “Hugs … are for Mexicans who live in extreme poverty,” Manzo said. “Criminals, assassins … they deserve beatings and the full force of the Mexican state.” He encouraged police officers in Uruapan to use lethal force against criminals who resist arrest.

    The mayor frequently criticized Sheinbaum for not doing more to confront cartels, even though there has been a decrease in homicides and an uptick in drug seizures and arrests since she took office. Sheinbaum has said that security in Mexico depends on reinforcing the rule of law, including giving suspects a fair trial.

    The son of a community activist, Manzo became mayor of Uruapan in 2024. The city has been the site of some of Mexico’s worst drug war atrocities — kidnappings, bombings, bodies hung from highway overpasses — as a volatile mix of criminal groups battle for control of trafficking routes and profits from the lucrative avocado industry.

    Manzo appeared Saturday with his family at a crowded public event in Uruapan’s central plaza to mark the Day of the Dead holiday. He posed for photographs with fans and broadcast the candle-lighting event live on social media, sending “blessings to all.”

    When a journalist asked about security at the event, Manzo responded: “There is a presence from different levels of government. We hope everything goes well, is peaceful, and that you enjoy the evening.”

    Minutes later, shots — then screams — rang out. Manzo lay on the ground, bleeding. Nearby lay his white cowboy hat.

    Security consultant David Saucedo, who said Manzo was accompanied at the event by local police and 14 members of Mexico’s national guard, described the killing as a “kamikaze attack,” saying it was clear the shooter would be killed.

    Manzo, Saucedo said, had been “brave but reckless” in his quest to confront organized crime. “Carlos lacked the human, financial, and material resources to defeat the cartels,” Saucedo said. His killing “makes it clear that even with political will, defeating the cartels at the municipal level is an impossible mission.”

    The mayor’s slaying was the latest in a string of violent incidents in Michoacán. Last month, officials announced they had discovered the body of Bernardo Bravo Manríquez, the head of a lime growers association who had repeatedly denounced extortion demands against agricultural producers.

    Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in The Times’ Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.

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    Kate Linthicum

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  • Mexican president’s popularity endures despite rising corruption concerns

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    MEXICO CITY — Tens of thousands of Mexicans are set to gather downtown Sunday in a choreographed tribute to President Claudia Sheinbaum, who closed out her initial year in office with approval ratings north of 70%.

    Apart from her personal popularity as Mexico’s first woman president, polls show strong support among poor and working-class Mexicans for her continuation of social-aid programs launched by her predecessor and mentor, ex-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

    Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum screams during the annual shout of Independence (Grito de Independencia) as part of Mexico’s Independence Day celebration on Sept. 15 in Mexico City.

    (Hector Vivas / Getty Images)

    Sheinbaum, who took office last Oct. 1, has embraced and expanded López Obrador’s leftist social agenda, often repeating his mantra: “For the good of all, the poor first.”

    But, amid the plaudits, there is also a disconnect: Polls and interviews show deep concerns about crime, the economy and, increasingly, the defining issue of corruption — the elimination of which is a central plank of the president’s Morena movement, founded by ex-president López Obrador.

    Almost three-quarters of respondents (73%) gave Sheinbaum’s government a negative rating for its handling of corruption, the poorest mark to date for its anti-corruption efforts, according to a poll last month from the newspaper El Financiero.

    We are seeing the same corruption as in past governments, it’s very disappointing

    — Lorena Santibañez, medical student

    While crime remains Mexicans’ most pressing concern, many cite corruption as a core issue that could eventually erode trust in the administration of Sheinbaum, whose term lasts five more years.

    “We are seeing the same corruption as in past governments. It’s very disappointing,” said Lorena Santibañez, 25, a medical student. “I want to give la presidenta the benefit of the doubt — it’s her first year. But I don’t have much hope.”

    Almost daily headlines here highlight instances of alleged graft, nepotism and other questionable behavior within Sheinbaum’s ruling circles. Some reports have focused on relatives or close associates of the retired López Obrador, whom Sheinbaum regularly extols as a visionary and exemplar of moral integrity.

    The corruption revelations tend to range from the somewhat venal — party bigwigs living on limited government salaries enjoying lavish lifestyles — to more insidious allegations of Morena officials in league with organized crime.

    Making a social media splash this summer were news reports on the ritzy vacations of various Morena heavyweights, notably Andrés Manuel López Beltrán, the son of the ex-president, who serves as Morena’s party secretary.

    His stay at a $400-a-night Tokyo hotel and reported $2,600 restaurant bill sparked outrage in a nation where many earn $10 a day or less. Amid the escalating reports of Morena officials enjoying the high life abroad, Sheinbaum signaled her disapproval.

    “Power must be exercised with humility — that is my position and always will be,” she told reporters. “We have a responsibility with the movement we represent, and the principles that we represent.”

    No allegations have touched Sheinbaum, a scientist and longtime academic known for her austere lifestyle and serious demeanor.

    “We haven’t heard of any scandal about her, of corrupt relatives, or family members in public office doing business,” said José Farías, 54, a bus driver. “That has helped her remain popular, along with the fact that people view her as well-prepared, intelligent and honorable.”

    Sheinbaum, who was recruited into public service by López Obrador while she was an obscure academic and he the mayor of Mexico City, is now the standard-bearer for Morena. It is a movement that, in little more than a decade, has become a juggernaut.

    Morena dominates government, the judiciary and other facets of Mexican life in a way that has drawn inevitable comparisons to a previous Mexican political colossus — the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, which ruled Mexico in authoritarian fashion for much of the 20th century.

    The PRI is now greatly diminished, and Morena’s model differs from the PRI playbook of rigged elections, institutionalized graft, repression and an all-powerful president. But many of Morena’s old guard, including López Obrador, earned their stripes as PRI operatives.

    “It’s very hard to explain Morena’s hegemony without acknowledging that it cannibalized a lot of what was left of the PRI,” said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a political analyst. “And a lot of what was left of the PRI was criminal governance and complicity with criminal organizations.”

    Such complicity has become more problematic as the Trump administration has essentially declared war on drug cartels, designating a half-dozen Mexican crime syndicates as terrorist groups. Several recent scandals have suggested Morena politicians were in cahoots with organized crime.

    Morena’s top member of the Senate, Adán Augusto López Hernández — a former interior minister, ex-governor of Tabasco state and lifelong associate of López Obrador— has publicly denied links to a mob known as La Barredora (The Sweeper). The alleged leader of La Barredora, a former security chief in Tabasco, is now imprisoned in Mexico after being arrested as a fugitive in Paraguay.

    It was López Hernández who, while governor of Tabasco, appointed the alleged mob chieftain to the security post. The senator says he knew nothing.

    Even the Mexican navy, ranked among the nation’s most-trusted institutions, has been implicated in a far-reaching fuel-theft scheme, with 14 suspects arrested so far. One is a nephew of the admiral who served as secretary of the navy under López Obrador. In response, Sheinbaum defended the admiral and said he helped denounce the thievery.

    Repeatedly, Sheinbaum has been put in the position of declaring that no one is above the law. “We won’t cover up for anyone,” has become a presidential mantra.

    Some reformers have credited Sheinbaum with confronting corruption, while others say she has been too cautious, too hesitant, to take on a problem deeply entrenched in Mexican politics.

    “A lot of people inside Morena are saying, ‘Let’s push out the bad apples,’ “ noted Bravo Regidor. “But what’s rotten is the barrel, not the apples.”

    Earlier this year, the president publicly pressured Morena to institute a strict anti-nepotism policy. But her plan ran into strong headwinds in a party where patronage is rampant.

    Luisa María Alcalde Luján, a lawyer who presides as president of Morena, has been mocked for declaring that the party is nepotism-free. Both of her parents were prominent in the government of López Obrador, and her sister is the attorney general for Mexico City.

    “It’s so false when politicians from Morena say there is no corruption,” said Miguel Angel García, 32, a salesman. “Yes, Sheinbaum is more honest. But she has a lot of work to do.”

    Special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal contributed to this report.

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    Patrick J. McDonnell, Kate Linthicum

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  • Mexico’s Jewish president calls on Israel to end ‘genocide in Gaza’

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    MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Monday called Israel’s siege on the Gaza Strip a “genocide,” marking a decisive shift in her government’s stance on the conflict — and putting it at odds with the United States.

    Sheinbaum, who is one of a handful Jewish heads of state, has come under increasing pressure from members of her leftist coalition to more forcefully condemn Israel’s assault on the small Palestinian enclave, where at least 65,000 people have died and more than half a million are trapped in famine.

    Speaking to journalists at her daily news conference, Sheinbaum said Mexico stands “with the international community to stop this genocide in Gaza.”

    Claudia Sheinbaum, 63, is the first Jewish leader of Mexico, a nation that is overwhelmingly Catholic.

    Her comments came amid a meeting in New York of the United Nations General Assembly, where several countries, including France, Britain, Canada and Australia, have formally recognized Palestine as a state. Mexico has formally supported Palestinian statehood for years.

    Sheinbaum, 63, is the first Jewish leader of Mexico, a nation that is overwhelmingly Catholic. She grew up in a secular household and rarely talks about her Jewish identity.

    Sheinbaum, who entered politics from the world of leftist activism, has long supported the Palestinian cause. In 2009, she wrote a letter to Mexican newspaper La Jornada fiercely condemning Israel’s actions in an earlier war with Gaza, where 13 Israelis and more than 1,000 Palestinian civilians and militants had been killed.

    Sheinbaum evoked the Holocaust, saying “many of my relatives … were exterminated in concentration camps.”

    “I can only watch with horror the images of the Israeli bombing of Gaza,” she wrote. “Nothing justifies the murder of Palestinian civilians. Nothing, nothing, nothing, can justify the murder of a child.”

    The latest conflict broke out in 2023 after Hamas fighters broke through a border fence encircling Gaza and killed more than 1,000 Israelis, most of them civilians.

    Israel responded with a punishing assault on Gaza from air, land and sea, displacing nearly all of the strip’s 2 million people and damaging or destroying 90% of homes.

    Since taking office last year, Sheinbaum has repeatedly called for a cease-fire and reiterated Mexico’s support for a two-state solution in the region, but until Monday she had refrained from categorizing what is unfolding in Gaza as a genocide.

    That was possibly to avert conflict with the United States, which has given more foreign assistance to Israel than any other country globally in the decades since World War II, and which has supported the war on Gaza with billions of dollars in weapons and other military aid.

    Sheinbaum, whose nation’s economy depends heavily on trade with the U.S., has spent much of her first year in office seeking to appease President Trump on the issues of security and migration in order to avoid the worst of his threatened tariffs on Mexican imports.

    Her comments on Gaza come amid growing global consensus that Israel is committing genocide.

    The world’s leading association of genocide scholars has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

    The International Assn. of Genocide Scholars recently passed a resolution that says Israel’s conduct meets the legal definition as spelled out in the United Nations convention on genocide.

    And this month, a U.N. commission of inquiry also found Israel has committed genocide.

    An Israeli flag

    An Israeli flag waves over debris in an area of the Gaza Strip, as seen from southern Israel last month. Israel’s assault on the Palestinian enclave has killed at least 65,000 people.

    (Maya Levin / Associated Press)

    “Explicit statements by Israeli civilian and military authorities and the pattern of conduct of the Israeli security forces indicate that the genocidal acts were committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as a group,” the commission wrote.

    It added that under the Genocide Convention, other nations have an obligation to “prevent and punish the crime of genocide.”

    Israeli officials dismissed the report as “baseless.”

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    Kate Linthicum

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  • Mexico’s first female president completes first year with high approval, but challenges loom

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    MEXICO CITY — Each September, Mexico’s president appears before a crowd of tens of thousands in the nation’s central square to perform the grito, the shout of independence commemorating the country’s break from colonial rule.

    This year, for the first time, a woman will lead the masses in chants of “Long live Mexico!”

    Monday’s ceremony in Mexico City’s main plaza will be a historic moment for the nation and for President Claudia Sheinbaum, who, in her first year as the country’s first female leader, has maintained remarkably high marks despite a spate of domestic and international challenges.

    Supporters take selfies with the new president of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum, after her swearing-in ceremony in Congress in 2024.

    (Felix Marquez / Picture Alliance / Getty Images)

    Sheinbaum, 63, who took office last Oct. 1, boasts approval ratings above 70% and has notched multiple victories: winning passage of major constitutional reforms, overseeing unprecedented judicial elections and deftly negotiating with President Trump, making concessions on immigration and security to avert the worst of his threatened tariffs on Mexican goods.

    She has also overseen a 25% drop in homicides, an impressive feat in a country exhausted by drug violence that she chalks up to her administration’s aggressive new crackdown on organized crime.

    “We’re doing well and we’ll get better,” Sheinbaum said this month during a speech to Congress, where members of her political party, which controls both houses of the legislature, cheered her with shouts of “Long live Claudia!”

    But perhaps Sheinbaum’s biggest feat has been emerging from the long shadow cast by her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a hero among the working class whose support was crucial to her election.

    As a candidate for López Obrador’s Morena party, Sheinbaum promised to continue his populist project, which sought to reduce poverty and shift power away from traditional economic and political elites.

    In this aerial view people queue to vote at a polling station in the Cabanas Cultural Center during the general election

    Mexicans line up at a polling station in Guadalajara on June 2, 2024, the day voters cast ballots to elect Claudia Sheinbaum the president of Mexico.

    (Ulises Ruiz / AFP via Getty Images)

    After she won in a landslide, she faced criticism that she would be his “puppet,” a discourse she dismissed as sexist.

    Still, there’s no question that Sheinbaum has had to walk a tricky line: defining her presidency on her own terms while also demonstrating loyalty to the political movement that got her there.

    As López Obrador has retreated from public life, retiring to his ranch in southern Mexico, Sheinbaum has embraced many of his signature policies, including a popular welfare program that distributes cash to youth, people with disabilities and senior citizens.

    She has continued López Obrador’s practice of daily morning news conferences, where she often pays lip service to the former president and repeats his signature phrase: “For the good of all, the poor first.”

    Political analyst Jorge Zepeda Patterson said that Sheinbaum has successfully outmaneuvered other Morena party members, including several former political rivals, to be seen as the new voice of López Obrador’s movement.

    “She is the heir, she is the interpreter of the entire movement, and that is no small thing,” he said.

    Supreme Court President Hugo Aguilar Ortiz receives a traditional purification ceremony

    Supreme Court President Hugo Aguilar Ortiz receives a traditional purification ceremony from representatives of Indigenous communities during the swearing-in ceremony at the Supreme Court building on Sept. 1 in Mexico City.

    (Hector Vivas / Getty Images)

    Sheinbaum also muscled across the finish line one of his most controversial undertakings: an overhaul of the judicial system that mandates judges be elected by popular vote. Critics argue the move was designed to concentrate power in the hands of Morena and opens the door to corruption.

    “That’s something dictators only invent to control the judiciary,” said Ernesto Zedillo, a former president and leader of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

    But while furthering López Obrador’s agenda, Sheinbaum has also quietly been carving her own path.

    While he was combative and highly ideological, railing for hours at his news conferences against neoliberalism and the “power mafia” that he said long controlled Mexico, Sheinbaum has embraced a more diplomatic tone. She says Mexico’s future depends on its entrepreneurs. In her news conferences, she chooses her words carefully, a serene smile on her face.

    Her most significant departure from her mentor has been on matters of security.

    As part of his “hugs not bullets” policy, López Obrador scaled back security cooperation with the U.S., ordered soldiers to stop confronting cartels and put an emphasis on new social programs. Throughout his six-year term, homicides hovered near record highs and criminal groups expanded their control.

    Sheinbaum, under pressure from Trump to clamp down on drug trafficking, has changed tack, dismantling fentanyl labs, carrying out major drug busts and sending dozens of accused cartel leaders to the U.S. to face justice.

    Despite those wins, major challenges loom.

    The biggest one is Trump.

    Trucks queue near the Mexico-US border before crossing the border at Otay Commercial crossing in Tijuana

    Trucks queue near the Mexico-U.S. border before crossing the border at Tijuana on March 4.

    (Guillermo Arias / AFP via Getty Images)

    Mexico’s economy was already on the rocks when the U.S. president began issuing tariff threats, spooking overseas investors who once viewed Mexico as a pipeline to move products into the U.S. tax-free. As a result, growth has slowed.

    Sheinbaum and Trump have yet to meet, but have spoken several times in phone conversations both leaders have described as successful. “More and more, we are getting to know and understand each other,” Trump said in August.

    For Sheinbaum one constant pressure is the threat of U.S. military action in Mexico.

    Trump recently signed an order allowing the Defense Department to use force against Latin American drug cartels, which he has designated as foreign terrorist groups. The U.S. military recently destroyed a Venezuelan boat it said was trafficking drugs, killing 11.

    President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum and President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador pose during the half-mast raising
    President-elect Claudia Sheinbaum and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador attend a ceremony on Sept. 19, 2024, commemorating lives lost during major earthquakes that have hit Mexico on Sept. 19 in 1985, 2017 and 2022.

    (Guillermo Arias / AFP via Getty Images)

    Carlos Bravo Regidor, a Mexican political analyst, said much of Sheinbaum’s first year has been dominated by two men: Trump and López Obrador, who is commonly known by his initials, AMLO.

    “She’s trapped between the legacy of AMLO and the reality of Donald Trump,” he said.

    Sheinbaum’s posture on possible U.S. military action embodies how she’s dealt with Trump. She’ll speak plainly — “There will be no invasion” and Mexico is “not a colony of anyone” — but resists engaging in tit-for-tat remarks to stoke Trump’s ire.

    More than once, when asked to respond to Trump’s latest hyperbolic comment, she’s replied: “President Trump has his own way of communicating.”

    President Sheinbaum, speaks during the first State Of The Union Report

    President Sheinbaum speaks during the first State of the Union report of her tenure at Palacio Nacional on Sept. 1 in Mexico City, Mexico.

    (Manuel Velasquez / Getty Images)

    Still, there’s little doubt that Sheinbaum has benefited from the wave of nationalism that has surged here in the face of an American president who persecuted Mexican migrants living in the U.S. and threatened drone strikes on Mexican territory. That sentiment is likely to be on display on Monday, when Mexicans don the red, white and green of their flag and convene in the Zócalo for the independence celebrations.

    There will also be a strong current of feminism.

    Sheinbaum has often repeated the mantra she first spoke the night she won office: “I didn’t arrive alone, I arrived with all Mexican women.”

    For many Mexicans across party lines, her presidency has been transformative.

    Mexico City resident Esther Ramos, 40, said she planned to take her young daughters to see Sheinbaum deliver the grito, not as a lesson in politics, per se, but as a lesson in what is possible.

    “My two daughters will see that a woman is capable of achieving whatever they want,” she said.

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    Kate Linthicum

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  • U.S., Mexico pledge deeper ties as Trump defends strike on alleged cartel boat

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    MEXICO CITY — U.S. and Mexican officials agreed Wednesday to bolster cooperation on a range of joint security concerns — including drug smuggling, illegal migration and arms-trafficking — as Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended President Trump’s controversial decision to order an attack on an alleged smuggling boat in the Caribbean Sea.

    The top U.S. diplomat held his first meeting with President Claudia Sheinbaum a day after the dramatic Pentagon strike provided a potential portent of what many Mexicans fear — a unilateral U.S. military attack on suspected cartel targets inside Mexico.

    Tuesday’s action on a vessel that had departed Venezuela killed 11 sea-born “narcoterrorists” who were transporting drugs destined for the United States, said Trump, who released what he described as a video of the attack.

    In Mexico, Rubio hailed the strike, stating that traditional interdiction efforts had failed to stop the flow of drugs via the Caribbean. “What will stop them is when you blow them up,” Rubio told reporters in Mexico City. “You get rid of them.”

    Such strikes may be ongoing and will likely continue, Rubio said, providing no additional details.

    The secretary of State sidestepped a question about whether the action, which critics denounced as illegal under international law, signaled a return to “gunboat diplomacy” in a region where U.S. interventions have historically stoked resentment.

    Secretary of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, Juan Ramón de la Fuente, (left) and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wave during Rubio’s arrival Tuesday in Mexico City for a meeting with Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Wednesday.

    (Hector Vivas / Getty Images)

    While Trump said Tuesday’s attack took place in international waters, he has not ruled out strikes inside Mexico, where his administration has designated half a dozen cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. He has pushed for the use of the military against drug smugglers. Trump has reportedly issued a secret order directing the Pentagon to strike at Latin American cartels.

    According to the Trump administration, its ongoing deployment of warships in the southern Caribbean is aimed at deterring drug-trafficking from Venezuela — not toppling the government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. U.S. prosecutors have accused Maduro of being a cartel leader, a charge dismissed as propaganda by the Venezuelan leader.

    But the naval buildup in the Caribbean has also raised concerns in Mexico, which is the primary conduit of cocaine, fentanyl and other illicit drugs entering the United States.

    Many observers in Mexico view the designation of cartels as terrorist groups — which the Mexican government vociferously opposed — as providing a possible justification for attacking cartels on Mexican territory.

    The strike in the Caribbean shows “the type of attacks that could be directed to Mexican people and vehicles,” wrote columnist Julio Hernández López in Mexico’s La Jornada newspaper. “One can only hope that the president can avoid as much as possible the political, economic, and even ballistic barrage from Trump and his hawks.”

    Rubio’s first trip to Mexico as secretary of State has long been anticipated in Mexico, where Sheinbaum has been walking a fine line. Mexico’s first woman president, a lifelong leftist, has endeavored to placate Trump on drug-smuggling, tariffs and other contentious issues, while also assuring her nationalist base that she is not caving to U.S. demands.

    Sheinbaum has rebuffed Trump’s offer of direct U.S. military aid to assist Mexico combat cartels. Her decision, according to Trump, was based on her fear of organized crime. Trump has charged that organized crime pervades Mexico’s government, a charge denied by Sheinbaum.

    On Wednesday, when asked about Trump’s assertion that she feared the cartels, Sheinbaum answered in characteristically non-confrontational fashion.

    “It’s not true … but we maintain good relations,” Sheinbaum responded. “We have great respect for the Mexican-United States relationship, and for President Trump.”

    A joint U.S.-Mexico statement on binational cooperation stressed “respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity … as well as mutual trust.” But Mexican commentators pointed out that there was no guarantee that the Trump administration would not strike unilaterally against cartel targets in Mexico.

    The goal, the statement said, “is to work together to dismantle transnational organized crime through enhanced cooperation.”

    Despite rising tensions in U.S.-Mexico relations, Rubio was effusive in his praise of Mexican law enforcement efforts. He cited Mexico’s recent decision to turn over to U.S. prosecutors dozens of jailed suspects wanted in the United States.

    “That’s not an easy thing to do,” Rubio said, appearing at a joint news conference with his Mexican counterpart, Juan Ramón de la Fuente.

    On an issue of particular concern to Mexico — the southbound traffic of arms, including assault weapons, grenade launchers, mines and other military-grade weapons — Rubio said U.S. authorities were determined to “put a stop to it.” He pointed to the danger of drones in the hands of organized crime, “threatening states, threatening security forces.”

    Both diplomats praised the binational efforts that have helped reduce illicit crossings along the U.S.-Mexico border to levels not seen in decades. Mexico has deployed thousands of its troops to its border with the United States. They are tasked with reducing illicit immigration, drug-smuggling and other crimes.

    But Rubio offered little hope to Mexico on another crucial issue: Tariffs. In July, Mexico won a 90-day reprieve on a Trump administration plan to impose 30% tariffs on Mexican imports. Rubio voiced the hopes that ongoing talks between Mexico and the United States could result in a successful trade deal.

    Special correspondent Sánchez Vidal reported from Mexico City and Staff Writer McDonnell from Boston.

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    Patrick J. McDonnell, Cecilia Sánchez Vidal

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  • No evidence of politicians linked to Sinaloa cartel, Sheinbaum says

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    MEXICO CITY — Mexican investigators have found no evidence that sitting Mexican politicians or military commanders are collaborating with the Sinaloa cartel, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said Wednesday.

    “We don’t have at this time any proof against any public servant, or member of the Army [or] Navy,” Sheinbaum responded Wednesday when asked about allegations from Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, co-founder of the Sinaloa cartel.

    But she vowed that Mexico would prosecute any officials found to be on cartel payrolls. “We won’t cover up for anyone,” the president said at her regular morning news conference.

    Upon entering a guilty plea Monday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, Zambada cited a decades-long culture of official graft as essential to the success of the Sinaloa cartel, one of the world’s richest crime syndicates.

    “The organization I led promoted corruption in my home country by paying police, military commanders and politicians,” Zambada, 75, declared, in comments widely publicized in Mexico. “It goes back to the very beginning when I was a young man starting out, and it continued for all these years.”

    Zambada’s comments — citing cartel payoffs across the rule of all major Mexican political parties — added yet another layer of corroboration to what has long been public knowledge: Organized crime has thrived thanks to collaboration with Mexican lawmakers, police officers and soldiers.

    In comments Monday, U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said that Zambada “operated with impunity at the highest level of the Mexican drug trafficking world, by paying bribes to government officials, by bribing law enforcement officers.”

    Zambada’s charges come at an extremely sensitive moment, as the Trump administration weighs the possibility of unilateral U.S. military strikes against cartel targets. Sheinbaum has said repeatedly that her government views any unilateral U.S. action on Mexican territory as an egregious violation of sovereignty.

    Zambada’s comments in court have reverberated in Mexico, where Sheinbaum marks her first year in office on Oct. 1.

    Commentators have speculated about whether Zambada’s case and those of other alleged high-level traffickers in U.S. custody — including two sons of the imprisoned Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, Zambada’s former partner in founding the Sinaloa gang — may produce fresh corruption allegations against “narco-politicians,” including members of Sheinbaum’s ruling Morena political bloc.

    Critics here have assailed Sheinbaum’s government for not moving to prosecute Morena bigwigs with purported ties to organized crime.

    “Mexico was once again shown to be a country without rule of law,” wrote columnist Pascal Beltrán del Río in the Mexican daily Excélsior, following the announcement of Zambada’s plea. “If Mexico does nothing … it runs the risk that the United States — out of its own interests — will begin to take in hand the arsenal of information that El Mayo and the rest of the captive capos are surely providing.”

    Sheinbaum regularly touts what she calls an ongoing cartel crackdown. She has dispatched thousands of troops to Mexico’s northern border with the United States, jailed hundreds of alleged trafficking operatives and turned over dozens of suspects over to U.S. authorities. Her political rivals say it’s mostly show to appease the Trump administration.

    While no current lawmakers or military brass had been implicated in corruption, some municipal and state police had been tied to cartel activity, Omar García Harfuch, Sheinbaum’s security chief, told reporters.

    “If an investigation shows any politician or public functionary linked to any criminal group, the complaint would be presented and an investigation started,” said García Harfuch, whose official title is secretary of security and civilian protection. “But we don’t have any proof at this time.”

    Zambada was arrested by U.S. authorities last year during the final year of the administration of ex-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum’s predecessor and founder of the ruling Morena political party.

    Jeffrey Lichtman, the attorney representing El Chapo’s sons in their U.S. cases, has explicitly called out Sheinbaum in recent weeks, alleging that she has been “acting as … the public relations arm of the Zambada drug trafficking organization.” Sheinbaum subsequently filed a defamation lawsuit against Lichtman in a Mexican court. Lichtman fired back in a post on Instagram, calling the president’s lawsuit “a cheap effort to score political points.”

    Sheinbaum has insisted that official corruption has largely ended since López Obrador took office in 2018 — an assertion dismissed as absurd by opposition lawmakers. López Obrador repeatedly rejected allegations that drug-trafficking money helped fund several of his political campaigns, but he charged that graft was rampant in past administrations.

    The most notorious case was that of Genaro García Luna, a former federal security chief who is serving a 38-year prison term in the United States after his conviction for receiving millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa cartel. García Luna served under former Mexican President Felipe Calderón, political arch-enemy of López Obrador.

    As part of his plea agreement, U.S. authorities said, Zambada also agreed to hand over $15 billion in alleged drug-trade proceeds generated since the 1980s. While experts said it’s unlikely that the massive sum will ever be collected, Sheinbaum said Wednesday that Mexico would demand a part of any such haul “for the people of Mexico.”

    Many questions still remain about the mysterious operation that culminated in the arrest of Zambada in July 2024.

    Sheinbaum has complained that Washington has yet to provide any clarification about the sequence of events that led to Zambada and Joaquín Guzmán López — a son of El Chapo Guzmán — being flown from Mexico to the United States. The two were arrested outside El Paso after arriving on a private plane that reportedly took off from outside Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state.

    Zambada has said that he was set up and kidnapped by Guzmán López, a former head of the Sinaloa cartel faction known as Los Chapitos.

    Ken Salazar, the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, told reporters last year that Zambada was brought to the United States against his will — but that no U.S. personnel, resources or aircraft were involved. U.S. authorities were “surprised” when Zambada and Guzmán turned up on the U.S. side of the border, Salazar told reporters.

    But Mexican officials are skeptical. They suspect that Washington orchestrated the entire operation, likely enlisting the support of El Chapo’s son to abduct Zambada and transport him to U.S. territory.

    The apparent kidnapping of Zambada triggered a bloody civil war within the Sinaloa cartel — pitting Zambada loyalists against supporters of Los Chapitos — that has left hundreds dead. The intra-cartel struggle continues to claim casualties in Sinaloa state.

    Staff writer Keegan Hamilton in Brooklyn and special correspondent Cecilia Sánchez Vidal in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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    Patrick J. McDonnell

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  • Contributor: No military strategy can stop Mexico’s cartels

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    On Aug. 13, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration corralled 26 narcotraffickers onto planes destined for the United States, where they will be prosecuted for a litany of drug and violent offenses. One was wanted in the killing of a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy nearly two decades ago. This wasn’t the first prisoner transfer from Mexico to the United States. In February, Sheinbaum handed over 29 cartel figures to the U.S. Justice Department.

    All of this is coming at a time when the Mexican security forces are accelerating counter-narcotics operations throughout the country. According to Mexico’s secretary of public security, homicides have declined by more than 25% during Sheinbaum’s first 10 months; more than 1,200 drug labs have also been dismantled.

    If the Trump administration is impressed with the progress, officials haven’t shown it. In fact, Washington is enlisting the U.S. military to help with the problem of cartel violence next door. President Trump signed a directive ordering the Defense Department to begin using force against Latin American drug cartels that Washington previously designated as foreign terrorist organizations. Six of those cartels are in Mexico. As if to underscore the point, the Pentagon ordered 4,000 Marines and sailors to the waters of Latin America and the Caribbean, alongside Navy destroyers, reconnaissance aircraft and a nuclear-powered missile cruiser.

    None of this is exactly a surprise. Trump, after all, flirted with bombing cartel fentanyl labs in Mexico during his first term. His senior advisors, from Vice President JD Vance to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, have broached the possibility of using U.S. military force to degrade the cartels’ power. And the Central Intelligence Agency, with the cooperation of the Mexican government, has increased surveillance flights over cartel-dominated territory to better map the terrain.

    But let there be no mistake: pulling the trigger on U.S. military force inside Mexico would be about as effective as putting a Band-Aid over a gaping wound.

    We can say this with a high degree of confidence because military force has already been deployed against the cartels for years, with no discernible impact other than more violence, death and a continuation of the very drug trafficking the United States wants to stem. Successive Mexican governments since the turn of the century bought into the notion that, with the right amount of military pressure, the cartels would either fold up shop, bargain with the state or collapse under their own weight.

    In 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared a full-scale war against narcotrafficking organizations, complete with the deployment of tens of thousands of Mexican troops to the country’s most violent states and looser rules of engagement. Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, had implemented the same strategy with a special emphasis on targeting the cartels’ leadership structure. Even Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who campaigned on a “Hugs, Not Bullets” approach, came to rely on the Mexican army during the latter years of his presidency.

    The result was precisely the opposite of what Mexico hoped to achieve. Although some high-profile narcotraffickers were captured, the cartels as a whole increased violence against the state and did so more brazenly. Politicians, police officers, soldiers and senior government officials have all been targeted by the cartels, and the massacre of civilians is now the norm. Last year, Mexico experienced its deadliest election campaign in history, with around 200 politicians, candidates and public servants murdered in the lead-up to June elections.

    The so-called “kingpin strategy,” centered on neutralizing cartel leadership, has also fractured Mexico’s cartel landscape, making it even more difficult for the state to contain the problem. As my colleague Chris McCallion and I wrote in a new paper, taking out senior cartel figures tends to cause intense internal competition within the targeted group and between replacements who fight among themselves for power. Smaller groups affiliated with larger cartels may use the absence of authority at the top to go their own way. As a consequence, more people have died; areas of Mexico previously insulated from the cartels are now on the front lines. And states like Sinaloa that have been at the epicenter of the drug trade have seen an exponential rise in killings. In 2006, when Calderón declared war on the cartels, Mexico registered approximately 10,000 homicides; today, the figure has more than tripled.

    If the Trump administration green-lights military operations, the United States is unlikely to mimic the Mexican government’s heavy-handed strategy entirely. U.S. troops won’t be patrolling on Mexican soil anytime soon. It’s more likely the United States will stick with airpower; indeed, U.S. military officials have already discussed the option.

    Airstrikes, however, won’t be any more effective at degrading the cartels or diminishing the flow of drugs into the United States than ground operations would be. Bombs can destroy labs and kill cartel members but are highly unlikely to alter the profit motives these criminal organizations operate on. The drug business is, in a word, big. The cartels rake in billions of dollars every year from the trade. The rate of return, particularly on fentanyl, is huge; according to a 2023 indictment, hundreds of dollars in precursor chemicals can net profits 200 to 800 times larger. It’s very difficult to believe the Sinaloa cartel, the New Jalisco Generation cartel or any other criminal group would give all of this up, particularly when competitors are waiting in the wings to increase their own market share.

    There is no magic bullet to stopping the drug trade. Washington has been pursuing a war on drugs for decades now, and the verdict is pretty clear: The drugs have won.

    This doesn’t mean the United States should be complacent. For instance, the Drug Enforcement Administration should come out of Washington’s budget fights adequately resourced. Border control officers need more technology to detect drug shipments. Washington and Mexico City must strengthen their bilateral intelligence cooperation, which has already picked up during the first 10 months of Sheinbaum’s term. And while sanctions aren’t a panacea, they can deter some Americans from working with the cartels.

    Bombing Mexico, however, won’t do anything but jeopardize the very relationship with Mexico the Trump administration needs to contain the problem.

    Daniel R. DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities.

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    Daniel R. DePetris

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