A gunshot, a murdered rival and a kidnapped drug lord: Mexico's ruling party faces growing scandal

MEXICO CITY — It was strange and surprising when Mexico's most wanted drug lord landed at an airfield near El Paso, Texas, in July, but the story of how he got there is now spiraling into a scandal that also threatens senior figures in Mexico's ruling party.

At issue is whether Rubén Rocha – the governor of the cartel-dominated state of Sinaloa and a close ally of the president – ​​may have held meetings with top politicians of the Sinaloa cartel, the main producer of the deadly fentanyl that kills 70,000 Americans each year.

The saga is riddled with racketeering worthy of a 1940s film noir, but it threatens to undermine the central message of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who refuses to confront the Mexican drug cartels but also refuses to do business with them.

On Thursday, federal prosecutors said Sinaloa state officials mishandled evidence in an apparent attempt to cover up the July 25 murder of Héctor Cuén, a politician who allegedly helped lure drug lord Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada to a meeting where he was expected to meet Governor Rocha. Instead, Zambada was kidnapped by another drug lord and flown to the United States, where he was arrested.

Zambada said in a letter released by his lawyer that Cuén was murdered in the house where the kidnapping took place. Governor Rocha insisted that Cuén was killed by gunmen during a botched robbery at a gas station later that day, and he even provided security camera footage of the alleged attack.

But federal prosecutors quickly realized something was wrong: Autopsy reports showed that Cuén's body had four gunshot wounds, while surveillance camera footage showed only one shot, and gas station employees said they did not hear a shot.

And federal authorities said Sinaloa state officials violated all murder investigation regulations by allowing Cuén's body to be cremated. Governor Rocha denies having planned a meeting with Zambada, but as the dispute over the events of that day continues, the drug lord's version of events now appears more credible. The attorney general of Sinaloa state resigned on Friday.

“It seems that in Sinaloa, as so often happens, they tried to cover up the crime,” said Mexican security analyst David Saucedo.

López Obrador acknowledged on Friday that there were “contradictions in the case from the beginning” and promised to get to the bottom of them. The federal prosecutor's office has taken over the case and the president said “the Attorney General's Office shows that some things do not add up.”

Governor Rocha is a champion of López Obrador's “hugs not bullets” policy, which aims to avoid confronting drug cartels; his state is home to Mexico's most powerful drug gang.

The governor has accompanied the president on his most controversial trips: the president's six visits to Badiraguato in the state of Sinaloa, the hometown of imprisoned drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

At one point, Lopez Obrador even stopped to chat with Guzmán's now deceased mother. Badiraguato is also the birthplace of Governor Rocha.

The Mexican president's drug policy is based on a series of cumbersome theses: there is no point in arresting drug lords because new ones will always appear. López Obrador claims that the arrests of high-profile cartels were a policy imposed on Mexico by the United States; refusing to continue them is a victory for national sovereignty.

The president claims that Mexican cartels do not produce fentanyl (which is true, and senior Mexican officials have acknowledged this) and that the fentanyl crisis is not the fault of the Mexican cartels, but of social problems in America.

López Obrador says drug cartels are essentially “respectful people” who “respect citizens” and mostly kill each other. The only solution to Mexico's staggeringly high murder rate, he says, is to use job training programs to reduce the pool of potential recruits for the drug cartels.

All of these claims are based on a central assumption that now appears to be in question: While the government does not attack cartels, it also does not do business with them. While no one has provided credible evidence that the president has met with drug lords, analysts say Governor Rocha, a member of the president's Morena party, has.

“It's no longer a suspicion, it's a certainty,” Saucedo said. “It's become clear that the government has intermediaries who negotiate with the Sinaloa cartel.” Rocha has denied having met or done business with drug lords.

Saucedo points out that this is not the first time that Mexican governors or their relatives have met with drug lords; one of them was caught on video at one of these meetings in 2014.

The arrest of Zambada and El Chapo's son Joaquín Guzmán López at the end of July was embarrassing for Mexico from the start, because the Mexican government was not even aware of it.

But it was Zambada's later account of being framed by the younger Guzmán – who always intended to surrender to U.S. authorities and apparently took Zambada, who had a $15 million bounty on his head, as a reward – that sent Mexico's political establishment into turmoil.

Zambada has stated that Guzmán, whom he trusted, invited him to the meeting to resolve the bitter political rivalry between Cuén and Governor Rocha. Zambada was known for evading capture for decades because he had an incredibly tight, loyal and sophisticated personal security apparatus.

The fact that he deliberately left all that behind to meet with Governor Rocha means that Zambada believed such a meeting was credible and feasible. The same goes for the idea that Zambada, as leader of the oldest wing of the Sinaloa cartel, could act as an arbiter in the state's political disputes.

Governor Rocha has denied knowing about or attending the meeting where Zambada was kidnapped. In a strange piece of political theater, Rocha released the flight plan of a plane he was supposedly taking to leave the state that day for a family vacation. He even released a video that day in which he stated precisely, “I am not in the state.”

But in the central dispute over the events of that day, Zambada's version seems more credible.

“It seems to me that El Mayo Zambada's version is much more credible,” Saucedo said. “It all makes sense.”