President Claudia Sheinbaum said former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was concerned about the role the United States may have played in the capture of Ismael 'El Mayo' Zambada, responding to claims published in a forthcoming book by former U.S. ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar.
“If AMLO had any concern, it was the involvement of a U.S. agency in the capture of El Mayo Zambada in Mexico,” Sheinbaum said. “It was not about what he might say. Rather, he put his relationship with Ken Salazar on hold because it was never made clear how El Mayo Zambada was taken, or what role a U.S. agency or the U.S. government may have played, given the implications for Mexico’s sovereignty and concerns about foreign interference.”
The president made the remarks in response to reports suggesting that López Obrador feared statements Zambada could make after his arrest.
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Speaking during her daily press conference, known as La Mañanera, Sheinbaum said she would wait for the publication of Salazar’s memoir, Borderlands: My Fight for an Inclusive America, excerpts of which have already been reported by several media outlets.
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According to advance excerpts published by international news organizations, Salazar writes that López Obrador was worried about information U.S. authorities might obtain from Zambada, one of the founders of the Sinaloa Cartel.
The former ambassador claims that a businessman close to López Obrador told him the former president was particularly attentive to any intelligence the United States could gather following El Mayo’s capture.
Background
Sheinbaum clarified that during the transition period between the López Obrador administration and her incoming government, the former president told her that his primary concern involved the operations of U.S. agencies such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) or the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in Mexico.
She also said that López Obrador had effectively cooled relations with Salazar. In his book, the former ambassador writes that after he publicly criticized Mexico’s proposed judicial reform, López Obrador stopped communicating with him.
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