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The Claudia Sheinbaum administration’s demand for “irrefutable” proof before handing over a top elected politician to the U.S. over alleged drug cartel dealings reveals how the Mexican government applies a double standard in its stated battle against organized crime, experts say.
The United States unveiled an indictment on April 29 and requested the extradition of Rubén Rocha, at the time the sitting governor of Sinaloa, along with the mayor of state capital Culiacán, a Sinaloan senator and seven other former officials and law enforcement officers.
The Mexican government initially balked at the demand, saying that the U.S. did not provide any proof in its request that Rocha and the others be detained and processed for extradition. Sheinbaum said during a news conference that Mexico needed “overwhelming and irrefutable proof” before moving against Rocha and the others.
“Under no circumstances are we going to permit the intrusion or interference of a foreign government in the decisions that belong exclusively to the people of Mexico,” she said.
The Attorney General’s Office has said it is investigating the U.S. allegations.
But Marco Antonio Avilés, a Mexico City lawyer and expert on extraditions, said the burden of proof that Sheinbaum’s administration set in the Rocha matter went far above the standard normally used in extradition cases or in recent mass transfers of people wanted by U.S. authorities.
Over roughly the past 15 months, the Mexican government, operating outside the extradition or any judicial process, has sent 92 individuals to face U.S. courts on cartel-related indictments. It’s a practice that is akin to sending someone into forced exile, violating the constitutional rights of Mexican citizens and international law, Avilés said.
“For everyone else, there has always been a very low standard to meet the evidence requirement,” he said. “But in this [Rocha] case, they raised it to the maximum, as if the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs and the Attorney General’s Office had to conduct a full trial themselves.”
Mexico looking to strike agreement
The unsealed U.S. indictment alleges that Rocha made a deal with the sons of jailed Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, receiving their help to win the 2021 governor’s race in exchange for giving them a free hand to run their affairs throughout the state.
Rocha, who stepped down from the governor’s post on Friday and has denied the charges, is a member of the governing National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party to which Sheinbaum belongs. He is also reportedly close to Sheinbaum’s predecessor, former president and party founder Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Morena controls 22 of the country’s 31 state governor posts, the mayorship of Mexico City and both chambers of the Congress of the Union.
David Saucedo, a Mexico City-based security analyst, said the U.S. has never moved against a sitting, publicly elected, top politician in Mexico. Instead, previous U.S. administrations have used evidence gathered against government leaders in backrooms to pressure Mexico on other matters like trade and migration, he said.
Now, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, as part of its aggressive hemispheric security agenda, is targeting members of Mexico’s ruling party, Saucedo said.
“Trump is also doing this for political ends. He is seeing a major drop in his popularity, and his party is facing midterm elections [in November],” he said.
Saucedo said that while Sheinbaum has publicly taken a strong, nationalist position on the Rocha case, behind the scenes her team is trying to reach a compromise deal with the U.S.
“They are making a counter-proposal to the U.S. that the 10 accused individuals from Sinaloa should be investigated, processed, judged, sentenced and jailed in Mexico, not the U.S.,” he said.
“We will have to wait and see on the response.”
Under pressure from U.S.
Mexico has been under increasing pressure from the second Trump administration over the flow of people and narcotics crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. The U.S. president and his officials have even mused about using military strikes against suspected cartel operations on Mexican soil.
The Sheinbaum administration has responded, throttling the flow of migration and targeting top organized crime bosses like Nemesio Rubén “El Mencho” Oseguera, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG). He died during a Mexican special forces operation meant to capture him in February. The CJNG is arguably the most powerful criminal paramilitary organization in the country.
Mexican authorities also captured one of El Mencho’s probable successors, Audias “El Jardinero” Flores Silva, the day before the U.S. released Rocha’s indictment.
Yet one of the Mexican government’s most dramatic moves to appease the Trump administration came with the transfer of 92 people, in three waves beginning in February 2025, who were wanted by the U.S. The transfers were executed through an opaque mechanism under the guise of national security with no chance of appeal.
“There’s a big argument saying, well, this is illegal, and the legal rights of those individuals were trampled for them to be taken to U.S. custody,” said Ioan Grillo, an author and journalist who has written extensively on organized crime in Mexico.
“But who in Mexico wants to stand up and defend Z-40, who’s accused of ordering hundreds of people to be kidnapped and murdered and their bodies dissolved in barrels?”
Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, also known as Z-40, was one of the leaders of Los Zetas, a brutal paramilitary group originally formed by U.S.-trained Mexican special forces soldiers.
Treviño Morales, who was one of the 92 sent to the U.S., has been linked to at least two massacres in the states of Tamaulipas and Coahuila in 2010 and 2011, with a combined death toll amounting to hundreds of people.
Mexico compromised human rights: lawyer
Mexico City lawyer Avilés, who has clients among the 92, said there are fundamental principles at play around protecting the human and constitutional rights of Mexican citizens against forcible exile.
He said the transfers created a precedent where a federal government could use the same opaque mechanism to get rid of politically undesirable opponents.
The Mexican government is also compromising its sovereignty by trampling the rights of its citizens to appease a foreign government, Avilés said. “The Mexican government has never handed people over under the circumstances that it does now.”
Deputy Arturo Ávila Anaya, a spokesperson for the Morena caucus in the Chamber of Deputies, said the transfer of the 92 was carried out under the federal government’s constitutional authority over national security matters.
Ávila Anaya said that Mexican institutions — its courts and prison system — could not handle these organized crime figures, who represented an ongoing threat to national security.
“We have suffered the consequences of being a country that, geopolitically, is in a transit zone for drugs where we have a neighbour to the north who is the principal consumer of drugs,” he said. “I don’t believe this determination [to transfer the 92] violated the constitution, but instead it ensures that these generators of violence can no longer operate.”
Violence roiled several states across Mexico, including in Jalisco and its coastal city of Puerto Vallarta, as Mexican authorities confirmed that the leader of one of the country’s most powerful criminal organizations had died following a clash with special forces operatives.
However, Avilés said that the Rocha case exposes the government’s double standard.
The indictment against Rocha and the other nine, including former high-ranking state and Culiacán police officers, involves allegations linking them to the kidnapping and murder of a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration informant and their family member.
“In the case of the 92 group, it seems the legal and political will was, ‘Give them to me,’ and [Mexico said], ‘Here they are.’ And we skipped the entire extradition process,” Avilés said.
“But here [with Rocha], the political will is, ‘I want him,’ and [Mexico said], ‘I won’t give him to you.’ And there is a significant bias toward not even processing the extradition request.”
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