The Narco Scandal Shaking Mexican Politics

Times are tough for Claudia Sheinbaum.

In addition to deep concerns about tariff threats from the Trump administration, the Mexican president finds her party, Morena, embroiled in a narco scandal involving one of her top party officials in the Senate, Adán Augusto López. The situation threatens to profoundly undermine both the Mexican public’s confidence in the party and the United States’ confidence in the government.

The scandal erupted the weekend of July 12, when the regional military commander in the Mexican state of Tabasco made public that he had a warrant to arrest Tabasco’s ex–secretary of security, Hernán Bermúdez Requena. Bermúdez was appointed to head the state’s security portfolio in 2018 by López, who was then serving as the Governor of Tabasco.

Unfortunately for López, it has since come out that the ex-secretary also happened to be known as Comandante H, leader of the cartel La Barredora in Tabasco. A number of other high-profile members of the state police and prosecutor’s office were also involved with the gang.

Naturally, this has raised a number of very uncomfortable questions for López. Was he complicit with his old security chief? It would not be unprecedented for a corrupt politician in Mexico to purposely put cartel leaders in positions of power in government, either to avoid threats or blackmail or to profit from the association. But if he was not complicit, then was he simply incompetent? Having appointed a cartel boss to chief of public security is not exactly a shining achievement on a political resume. López thus finds himself caught between a rock and a hard place: He will come off as either corrupt and vicious or dangerously foolish.

So far, his response has been to hide and hope the problem goes away. When the news broke that the military was seeking Bermúdez, who is presumed to have fled the country for Brazil, López practically disappeared from the public eye. After a few days he released a single statement under pressure from Sheinbaum, declaring that he has placed himself at the disposal of authorities and will cooperate with any investigation into the matter. Then he plunged back into obscurity. It’s probably the best approach he could take, but regardless of what López and other members of Morena hope, the scandal is not going to go away.

The matter has particular resonance for Morena because of López’s position, not just as the party’s top man in the Senate but because of his close association with its founder, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. López was a friend and strong supporter of López Obrador—both arising from the relative backwater of politics in rural southern Mexico to national prominence. In 2021, López left his governorship in Tabasco and travelled to Mexico city, where his old friend López Obrador appointed him head of the Ministry of the Interior. In 2024 he parlayed his power in López Obrador’s new political party into a cinch campaign for Senate on the party list and an appointment as Morena’s political coordinator in the upper house of the legislature, cementing his status as one of the more powerful politicians in the party.

Now López has become a major liability. One of Morena’s main attractions as a party is the perception that it is relatively free from the kind of corruption that has continually dogged the opposition PAN and PRI. During his presidency, López Obrador made political hay with his program of “republican austerity,” cutting the wages and most of all the miscellaneous benefits accumulated by politicians and bureaucrats, who were widely viewed as fattening themselves from the public purse. Finding that a top party official was suspiciously close to being in bed with the cartels is a blow to that perception—and that could worsen, depending on how Sheinbaum and the rest of the party decide to handle it.

The resolution of the scandal will be a major test of Sheinbaum’s political chops. The president finds herself in as much of a dilemma as López—will she try to throw the Senator under the bus to save Morena’s public image? That would be a major blow to the party, and López has plenty of friends who could make things difficult for her if any such move was attempted. But if she doesn’t do something to address the allegations, López could become a weight on the party’s prospects going forward. The party might hope that time will push the incident out of the news cycle and out of the public mind, but, if no action is taken and Morena protects its leader in the Senate, the scandal will never end. It will always lurk under the surface, ready to blow open again whenever López reenters the news cycle or whenever an opposing politician decides to make it an angle of attack.

What choice the president will make is yet to be seen. The party at large has instinctively closed ranks around López; when he entered the Senate for the first time after the scandal broke he was greeted with shouts of “we’re with you!” from his fellow senators. But it was at Sheinbaum’s prompting that López announced he would cooperate with authorities; the president said that “if the prosecutor general has evidence against someone, whether they are a partisan of Morena or not, proceed, continue the investigation.”

If there is any hard evidence of López’s complicity, it hasn’t yet been forthcoming. Both the federal prosecutor’s office and that of the state of Tabasco are controlled by Morena, so the disposal of evidence and any future investigation will probably lie largely within the party’s hands.

Despite the inherent difficulty of the situation, Sheinbaum seems to have a handle on it for now. Her measured approach, including reassuring the public that the party will support any investigation if sufficient evidence is found, will buy the party some time to sort things out—including, perhaps, whether López is in fact seriously compromised. There will always be the temptation to close ranks around López. But it would not be surprising if Sheinbaum, whose political instincts have been superb since her inauguration, finds a neat way both to soothe the public confidence concerning Morena’s peccability and to begin trimming away some of the ties that bind the party so tightly to their top man in the senate.

Adán Augusto López might have been unassailable while his blustery brother-in-arms López Obrador was in office, but Sheinbaum is a different kind of politician. A quiet relegation to the outskirts of the party, without the open scandal of a major criminal investigation, would be in line with the subtle Sheinbaum way.