Politics: More evidence of how organized crime, politicians, business enterprises and officials interact in Mexico
In this issue we continue the analysis we began last week in these pages with Part One of our analysis of violence, elections and political control, addressing the interrelated questions of organized crime, its effect on local governments and authorities, and politically motivated violence on the part of such criminal gangs. In this week’s second part, we direct our attention toward the specific dynamics in this regard of Andrés Manuel López Obrador, his collaborators, governing coalition and Morena party. We were aided in this task with the simultaneous release last week by three different media outlets —Tim Golden in ProPublica, Anabel Hernández in Deustche Welle and Steven Dudley in InSight Crime—of details of an investigation undertaken by DEA agents between 2010 and 2011 into claims that the Sinaloa Cartel had channeled 2 million dollars into López Obrador's 2006 presidential campaign, which we explore in greater detail.
But there exists a plethora of media articles, testimonies and studies we can draw on confirming the evolving ways through which criminal organizations shape and, in many cases, dictate the terms of candidate selection, neutralize campaigns they perceive as less advantageous to their interests, and cut deals with major power brokers, often in exchange for illicit sources of campaign funding. This week we draw on those sources to provide a more rounded analysis of the ways in which the relations between organized crime, government and entrepreneurs interact in relation to elections and governance in Mexico.
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