In 2010, DEA agents received an explosive tip about a Mexican politician whose presidential election campaign had allegedly taken millions of dollars from one of the country’s most notorious drug cartels. That politician is now the current president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, popularly known as AMLO.
Based on more than a dozen interviews, including with several current and former law enforcement officials and diplomats with knowledge of the investigation, this is the story of what happened next, as the DEA recruited informants and set up stings in their efforts to build a case against one of the most prominent Mexican politicians of the last 20 years. It also details how the case was ultimately derailed as agents attempted to navigate a bureaucratic minefield colored by the United States’ fraught history of political meddling and US law enforcement overstepping in its pursuit of Latin American organized crime.
