U.S. prosecutors accused a Mexican governor and nine other current and former Mexican officials of participating in a broad conspiracy to help a powerful Mexican cartel import drugs into the United States in exchange for bribes and votes.
In an indictment unsealed on Wednesday, U.S. prosecutors said that the governor of the Mexican state of Sinaloa, Rubén Rocha Moya, had accepted bribes and help getting elected in exchange for protecting his state’s dominant criminal organization, the Sinaloa cartel, which has terrorized his constituents for years.
Prosecutors alleged that the other current and former Mexican officials — including a Mexican senator and prominent mayor — had also taken bribes to shield cartel members from arrest and feed them information.
In a statement, Mr. Rocha denied the charges as “entirely false and without foundation,” and said that they were an effort by the United States to violate Mexico’s sovereignty and attack its leftist political movement, which is led by President Claudia Sheinbaum.
The indictment is the Trump administration’s most significant step yet in cracking down on the government corruption that it has said is at the heart of Mexico’s cartel problem.
Mr. Rocha is the highest-ranking member of Mexico’s dominant political party, Morena, to be indicted by the United States. The move could drive a wedge between the U.S. and Mexican governments just as they are deepening cooperation on combating the cartels that have killed thousands of Mexicans and made fortunes by smuggling drugs into the United States.
Mr. Rocha, 76, is a party ally of Ms. Sheinbaum and her predecessor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. As Mr. Rocha had faced intensifying accusations of corruption in recent months, he had been publicly backed by Morena officials.
Ms. Sheinbaum has led an aggressive campaign against Mexico’s cartels, but it has mostly focused on criminal leaders and operatives versus the elected officials they have long been shown to corrupt. She has said that her government is rooting out corruption, including by uncovering major fuel theft and tax fraud in the Mexican Navy, but President Trump has said that more must be done.
Mexican officials suspected the United States was preparing indictments against officials in the country after the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson, gave a fiery speech in Sinaloa last week about corruption in the state, which seemed aimed at Mr. Rocha, according to two people familiar with the matter who spoke anonymously to describe private conversations.
Trade between Mexico and the United States “requires our governments to criminalize bribery and corruption and enforce codes of conduct for public officials,” said Mr. Johnson, speaking at the opening of a factory in Sinaloa.
“We may soon see significant action on this front,” the ambassador added. “So, stay tuned.”
After the speech, Mexican officials asked their American counterparts to warn them about any indictments they were preparing against sitting government officials so that they could manage the fallout nationally and within Morena, Ms. Sheinbaum’s party, according to these people.
On Tuesday evening, Mexican officials received an extradition request from the U.S. government for “various individuals,” the Mexican government said in a statement on Wednesday. The request “did not contain sufficient evidence to establish the responsibility of the individuals” targeted for extradition, the Mexican government said, adding that its attorney general’s office was evaluating the request. Ms. Sheinbaum did not comment on the indictment on Wednesday.
The indictment of sitting government officials within her own party could create a predicament for Ms. Sheinbaum. She has sought to maintain a good relationship with Mr. Trump while standing firm in protecting Mexico’s sovereignty. She also faces the political realities of managing her sprawling party, which includes many officials deeply skeptical of Mr. Trump and some who are worried they could also be in the cross hairs of the U.S. justice system.
Mr. Johnson, the U.S. ambassador, said in a statement on Wednesday that both the United States and Mexico wanted to fight corruption. “The United States will continue to work with Mexico’s leadership to advance accountability, strengthen institutions and promote security,” he said.
The indictment builds on earlier charges filed by the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan against “Los Chapitos,” the sons of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the imprisoned drug kingpin known as “El Chapo,” who founded the Sinaloa cartel.
From its earliest days reaching back to the 1980s, the Sinaloa cartel has paid off officials at all levels of the Mexican government and military in order to expand its criminal empire, according to court records. But even amid that long history of graft, the indictment on Wednesday was remarkable for accusing the highest levels of the Sinaloa government of essentially being part of the Sinaloa cartel.
Mr. Rocha, a former teacher and university leader, was born in the same mountainous region of Sinaloa as El Chapo. In 2013, he published a novel titled “The Deception: How the Narco Was Born,” which tells the story of how organized crime emerged in Sinaloa.
By 2021, Mr. Rocha was running for governor when, according to U.S. prosecutors, he met with his state’s most important power brokers: leaders of the Sinaloa cartel.
During a meeting guarded by men with machine guns, two of El Chapo’s sons, Ovidio Guzmán López and Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, told Mr. Rocha that they could ensure he won the election, according to the indictment. In exchange, Mr. Rocha responded that he would install officials across the state who would allow the cartel to operate with impunity, according to the indictment.
U.S. prosecutors said that the cartel then helped elect Mr. Rocha by stealing ballots and kidnapping and intimidating opposition candidates to drop out of the race. Mr. Rocha and the cartel then put in place corrupt officials across the Sinaloa state government and local municipalities, the indictment said.
Over the next several years, Mr. Rocha and other officials enabled the cartel to smuggle “massive amounts” of fentanyl, heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine into the United States in exchange for “millions of dollars in drug money,” the indictment said.
The other indicted officials include the current mayor of Sinaloa’s capital, Culiacán; the state’s deputy attorney general; and several former top law enforcement officials from the state.
One of those officials is Juan Valenzuela Millán, a police commander in Culiacán, the cartel’s stronghold. U.S. prosecutors say the cartel paid him $41,000 a month to distribute among himself and other police officers in order to allow the cartel to freely transport fentanyl and methamphetamine — and sometimes even to lend the cartel patrol cars and police radios.
Mr. Valenzuela, the indictment said, also assisted the cartel in the killing of a confidential source of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the source’s relatives, including a 13-year-old boy. Under Mr. Valenzuela’s orders, police officers stopped the source and his family and handed them over to the cartel, prosecutors said.
U.S. prosecutors said that Enrique Díaz Vega, Sinaloa’s former finance minister, gave the cartel the names and addresses of Mr. Rocha’s political opponents in 2021 so the cartel could target them. The prosecutors said that Dámaso Castro Zaavedra, Sinaloa’s current deputy attorney general, also took monthly bribes to tip off the cartel about U.S.-backed raids on drug labs.
Ms. Sheinbaum has publicly praised Mr. Rocha’s work in the past, and this week denied having information about the U.S. revoking the governor’s visa, after a report in The Los Angeles Times.
On Tuesday, asked about comments attributed to Mr. Trump by a Fox News anchor that “Mexico is lost, and the United States is its only hope,” Ms. Sheinbaum brushed them off.
“The only one in charge in Mexico is the Mexican people, and no one else,” she said. “Certainly no one from abroad.”
Paulina Villegas contributed reporting from Mexico City, and Alan Feuer from New York.
