López Obrador stopped combating illegal fentanyl trafficking in 2019, and seizures plummeted to a third with the launch of the strategy known as “hugs, not bullets.”
New information from Guacamaya Leaks, the anonymous group that hacked the emails of the Ministry of National Defense, outlines what the information on its servers, extracted for public release, could reveal when fully analyzed and decrypted.
This is what emerges after scanning a single email disk containing 2.2 million messages, of which only half could be examined because the rest was encrypted and would require a scale of budget for technology and human capital that normally only governments that would allow them to be decoded have.
Of that total, 430,000 were cleared for reading, and 411 emails were found containing the word “fentanyl,” a deliberately searched word given the current context of relations with the United States. The results provide information that leads to the conclusion that former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador systematically lied about the opiate’s popularity in Mexico and concealed data on the increased trafficking of the drug to the United States, which was occurring in that country years before he finally accepted the reality last year.
Silencing and covering up the trafficking of this drug caused a breakdown in the relationship with President Joe Biden’s administration and has been the main driver of President Donald Trump’s hostility and tariff retaliation against Claudia Sheinbaum’s administration. The new revelations in Guacamaya Leaks also reveal another facet of fentanyl trafficking during López Obrador’s administration, where it flourished hand in hand with the different factions of the Sinaloa Cartel, on routes connecting Mexico City, Sinaloa, Sonora, and Baja California.
The information is not conclusive. The emails are contained on one of the discs containing information released by Guacamaya Leaks from 2017 to 2020. Originally, it was understood that the information covered the period from 2016 to 2022, but among the 430,000 emails that were analyzed, there are communications from the Ministry of National Defense dating back to 2012. In other words, what has been found so far reveals 16 years of hacked emails, spanning Enrique Peña Nieto’s entire administration.
Fentanyl trafficking became a significant health problem in the United States starting in 2019. Before that year, deaths from the opioid had only been recorded in states east of the Mississippi River—for example, a line from Minneapolis to New Orleans, all the way to the Atlantic—but it began to spread westward, coinciding with the surge in illegal trafficking of the drug to California in 2018, as seizures increased during the meteoric transition of power from Peña Nieto to López Obrador. An analysis by José Luis Sabau, published in February of last year in Nexos using data from Mexico United Against Crime, shows that the number of confiscated fentanyl jumped from 94 kilos in 2017 to 321 kilos in 2018.
López Obrador stopped combating illegal fentanyl trafficking in 2019, and seizures plummeted to a third, with the launch of the strategy known as “hugs, not bullets.” There was a jump of almost 300 percent in seizures in 2020 and another significant increase the following year, coinciding with the dramatic increase in fentanyl-related deaths in the United States, which rose from 35,871 in 2019 to 70,601 in 2021, and to 74,225 in 2022, when hugs spread in Mexico and seizures fell to 125 kilos, according to the DEA’s National Drug Threat Assessment, in 2024.
The 411 emails reviewed with the word “fentanyl” provide timely and accurate information from the Ministry of National Defense, recorded in a format called “minuteXminute.” It shows that, as soon as they had the official report, they transmitted it to Lomas de Sotelo, placing them in the “zmt.sedena.gob.mx” folders. The acronym ZMT stands for Maritime and Terrestrial Zones under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense. Information about fentanyl from other agencies likely increases the scale of trafficking and the former president’s lies.
López Obrador acknowledged that fentanyl was being produced in Mexico until last year, following complaints from the United States government and Congress, and reports in both countries about laboratories producing it, particularly in Sinaloa. But since August 12, 2020, according to the emails reviewed, seizures of precursors for its manufacture were recorded at Mexico City’s Benito Juárez Airport, particularly one that stood out: 220 kilos from Spain, the exact origin of which was not specified.
These emails alone record hundreds of thousands of pills and kilos of fentanyl and precursors seized in the first two years of López Obrador’s administration. López Obrador denied the drug’s production here since the morning press conference on March 16, 2023, when he said that only “metal stamps” were used in Mexico. He also asserted that more illegal fentanyl was arriving in the United States through Canada and the United States itself. However, seizure statistics indicate that 98% of the drug enters through Mexico.
The emails reviewed record a shipment of fentanyl pills from the Querétaro airport and a seizure in Nuevo León. There is no information about fentanyl in Chihuahua, whose border with Texas the DEA identifies as the second with the highest number of seizures, after the Tijuana-San Ysidro-San Diego border. The Culiacán-Ciudad Juárez corridor was controlled by two factions of the Sinaloa Cartel: Los Chapitos, the sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.
The Guacamaya Leaks hack is beginning to reveal López Obrador in full for what he truly is: a lawbreaker, by omission or commission, and a benefactor, intentionally or not, of the Sinaloa Cartel. The hacked Army emails will reveal this, although history will be the one to take charge of him, because it won’t be this regime.
With information from El Financiero
