Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday demanded a response from the United States to a report that it examined claims his allies accepted drug cartel money after he took office.
According to the New York Times, US law enforcement officials spent years looking at allegations that people close to Lopez Obrador took millions of dollars from criminal gangs.
The newspaper reported that the United States decided not to open a formal investigation because there was “little appetite to pursue allegations against the leader of one of America’s top allies.”
While US officials identified possible links between drug cartels and people close to Lopez Obrador, they did not find any direct ties between the president himself and criminal groups, it said, citing US records and unidentified sources familiar with the matter.
The information was hard to corroborate because much of it came from informants, according to the newspaper.
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Lopez Obrador described the accusations as “slander” and urged the US government to respond.
“If they don’t want to say anything, if they do not want to act with transparency, that’s their business, but any democratic government, defender of freedoms, would have to inform” people about the claims, he said.
It is the second time this year that Lopez Obrador, who took office in 2018, has faced such claims in the US media.
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Last month he rejected allegations in an article published on the ProPublica news site that drug traffickers helped to fund his first presidential campaign in 2006.
The report said that it was unclear whether Lopez Obrador — who narrowly lost the race — sanctioned or was even aware of the funding.
He described those allegations as “completely false” and portrayed the claims as a political attack by his opponents ahead of presidential elections in June, which he hopes to see his close ally Claudia Sheinbaum win.
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