MEXICO CITY — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is weathering the most turbulent stretch of public opinion of her presidency, as alarm over corruption climbs to the highest point of her term and a United States indictment of a powerful governor from her own party refuses to recede.
Concern about graft has surged in recent weeks. Some 62 percent of Mexicans named corruption the country’s most pressing problem in May, according to the LatAm Pulse survey that the pollster AtlasIntel conducts for Bloomberg News, up three points from the previous month and 16 points since February. That figure is a record for Sheinbaum’s tenure. Her approval rating has lingered near the lowest readings of her presidency in the same poll, even as other surveys still put her support above 60 percent.
The pressure traces back to Rubén Rocha Moya, the 76-year-old governor of Sinaloa and a veteran of Sheinbaum’s governing Morena movement. On April 29, a federal grand jury in Manhattan unsealed a five-count indictment charging Rocha Moya and nine other current and former Sinaloa officials with drug trafficking and weapons offenses. The defendants partnered with the “Los Chapitos” faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, run by sons of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, to move fentanyl, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine into the United States, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York said in announcing the charges.
Prosecutors allege the arrangement reached back to Rocha Moya’s 2021 campaign, when cartel operatives are said to have helped him win by kidnapping and intimidating opponents and stealing ballots cast for rivals. In exchange, the indictment says, he shielded the group from arrest and installed friendly figures across the state’s police and prosecutors. One defendant, a former Culiacán police commander, faces additional charges tied to kidnappings that ended in the deaths of a Drug Enforcement Administration source and a relative. Those charged face 40 years to life if convicted. It is the first time American prosecutors have charged a sitting Mexican governor.
Rocha Moya has rejected the accusations as baseless and politically motivated. “My conscience is clear,” he said in a video message announcing he would take temporary leave on May 1, a step that also stripped him of the immunity he held as a sitting governor. Born in Badiraguato, the same mountainous municipality that produced El Chapo, he has long brushed off cartel rumors with a single refrain, that he is an academic and not a narco. State lawmakers named a Rocha ally, Yeraldine Bonilla Valverde, interim governor. In the weeks since, the once combative governor has largely vanished from public view, El País reported, as questions about his ties intensify.
For Sheinbaum, the case strikes at the two pledges that defined the movement she inherited from her mentor, former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador: clean government and national sovereignty. She has refused to surrender the indicted politicians without what she calls clear and irrefutable evidence, casting the charges as an attempt by Washington to set the terms. “We will not shield anyone who has committed a crime,” she said, adding that if there is no clear evidence, the aim of the charges by the Department of Justice is political. She has directed Mexico’s attorney general to open a parallel investigation and pressed a constitutional change to stiffen penalties for foreign interference.
The governor’s case is the loudest note in a chorus of scandals straining the deepening corruption crisis inside her own Morena movement. A sprawling fuel-smuggling scheme has implicated navy officers, customs agents and businessmen, and a party mayor was arrested on extortion charges. Both López Obrador and Sheinbaum built their careers on rooting out graft, yet Mexico’s standing on international corruption-perception measures has slipped across their combined time in office, a gap between promise and perception that opponents have been quick to exploit.
The indictment also feeds Washington’s drive to brand Mexican officials as terrorism suspects, part of a harder line under which the Trump administration has designated the Sinaloa Cartel a foreign terrorist organization, sanctioned a network of suppliers and revoked visas linked to the group. President Donald Trump has framed the campaign bluntly. “If they don’t do the job, we will,” he said of Mexican enforcement. Sheinbaum has tried to absorb the pressure without ceding ground, permitting U.S. surveillance flights, abandoning López Obrador’s “hugs, not bullets” doctrine and transferring scores of accused traffickers north, while holding a hard line against extraditing elected officials.
Analysts expect the standoff to sharpen. Charging elected officials marks a dramatic escalation, the Brookings Institution’s Vanda Felbab-Brown told Al Jazeera, describing it as a move long seen in Washington as close to a nuclear option. She said further indictments were likely, and that extraditing those already named could hand U.S. investigators a fuller map of corruption inside Morena. Two officials charged alongside Rocha Moya, a former state security chief and a former finance official, have already turned themselves in to American authorities.
The political arithmetic is delicate. For now, Mexicans are not pinning the blame on Sheinbaum herself, and her personal standing has proved sturdier than the corruption numbers would suggest; she remains among the most popular Mexican presidents in recent memory. But officials privately worry that each new case chips at the anti-corruption brand that carried Morena to power, and that Washington’s appetite for naming names is only growing. With more indictments rumored and an extradition fight looming, the governor of Sinaloa may be the first measure of how much strain the president’s popularity can bear.
