Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum is cleaning house and consolidating power

On February 3, Mexican authorities arrested the mayor of Tequila, Jalisco, along with three other local officials, on charges of extorting beer and tequila companies and collaborating with the powerful Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG). This was just one move in the Claudia Sheinbaum administration’s efforts to dismantle the collusion networks of politicians, criminals, and businesses. That same week, Adán Augusto López, Mexico’s former interior secretary and coordinator of Morena’s Senate caucus, submitted his resignation due to corruption scandals and mounting tensions with Sheinbaum.

For months, the Sheinbaum administration has faced intense pressure from the United States to pursue politicians with ties to organized crime, although Sheinbaum has repeatedly denied the existence of such U.S. requests. Yet her government’s recent actions suggest she is acting on Washington’s demands, in part to prevent U.S. unilateral military actions in Mexico and to counter claims that criminal groups “run” Mexico.

Sheinbaum’s strategy of prosecuting criminal-political networks at the local level and negotiating golden parachutes for politicians with too many reputational liabilities also allows her to consolidate her power over the Morena party and reduce the still-large influence of her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. If Sheinbaum is successful, the payoff could define her legacy—reducing the power of the narcos to whom López Obrador gave just about free rein and crucially strengthening the rule of law. If it backfires, Sheinbaum could gravely weaken her currently powerful presidency, with Morena fracturing and the narcos doubling down on their efforts to influence elections in Mexico.

Operation Swarm hits the basement

The arrest of Tequila’s mayor is part of a broader federal crackdown on the crime-politics nexus at the municipal level known as Operation Swarm (Operación Enjambre). Launched in November 2024, well before the U.S. threats, it is part of the Sheinbaum administration’s national security strategy, which identifies corruption and socioeconomic inequality as structural drivers of violence.

In November 2024, the first phase unfolded across 10 municipalities in the State of Mexico following joint investigative work by the state attorney general’s office and the federal security cabinet led by Mexican Security Secretary Omar García Harfúch. The arrested officials were accused of collaborating with criminal organizations in murders, kidnappings, and extortion, and facilitating criminal financing and governance. The operation was later expanded to Oaxaca, Puebla, Tlaxcala, and Chiapas.

Since its launch, some 60 individuals across six states have been arrested, including sitting and former mayors and municipal security directors. Many of the detained are from Morena, showing Sheinbaum’s willingness to clean up her own party, something her predecessors, Presidents López Obrador and Enrique Peña Nieto were unwilling to do. López Obrador notoriously directed anti-corruption campaigns against his political rivals.

Importantly, as of January 2026, some 30% of those arrested under Operation Swarm—18 individuals—have been convicted. That’s crucial, and unusually high. Even for serious crimes, successful prosecution rates in Mexico rarely top 7%. Prior prosecution efforts against politicians colluding with criminals, such as during the Felipe Calderón administration under Plan Michoacán between 2006 and 2012, often dramatically collapsed in the courts. But the amount of cleanup still needed is massive.

Not just the foundation, but also the roof of the house

Sheinbaum has also begun to remove senior political figures with significant reputational liabilities, including some of López Obrador’s closest allies. Rather than arresting them and sending them to courts, as the United States would prefer, Sheinbaum has negotiated their exits, often providing them with golden parachutes. Even those measures are a major break with the López Obrador era.

The departure of Adán Augusto López from his role as Morena’s senate caucus coordinator is one example. López Obrador’s former interior secretary, López received the senate coordination post as a consolation prize after failing to secure Morena’s presidential nomination in 2023. But growing controversies, including corruption allegations and increasingly visible clashes with Sheinbaum, finally drove him out. Pressure on López intensified particularly after the September 12, 2025, arrest of Hernán Bermúdez Requena, his former secretary of public security when López was the governor of Tabasco.

Bermúdez Requena was charged with leading a Tabasco cell of CJNG known as “La Barredora,” and had reportedly been under federal investigation for years. While no formal charges have been brought against López himself, the Bermúdez case raised questions about his complicity. Separately, the U.S. Court of the Southern District of Texas also allegedly linked López to Pemex corruption schemes. Revelations that he had failed to disclose to the Mexican Congress millions of pesos in income broke the camel’s back. And claims by Morena’s coalition partner, the Green Party, that he was obstructing the electoral reforms desired by Sheinbaum didn’t help him. The man whom Sheinbaum chose as López’s replacement, Ignacio Mier, Morena’s deputy coordinator in the senate, is much closer to her than to López Obrador, enabling her to tighten control over Morena’s top cadres.

Sheinbaum has pursued a similar strategy within the judicial branch. Several months ago, and still two years before the end of his constitutionally mandated term, Mexican Attorney General Alejandro Gertz Manero was finally pushed out by Sheinbaum. During his tenure, Gertz faced persistent accusations of politicizing and personalizing the justice system, pursuing personal vendettas, and selectively targeting López Obrador’s political opponents, including scientists and journalists. Although López Obrador was pleased, the United States was also highly frustrated with his perfunctory investigation into U.S. allegations that Mexico’s former secretary of defense, General Salvador Cienfuegos, was a drug cartel’s enabler.

From the get-go, Gertz had a tense relationship with Sheinbaum, with the two disagreeing over his handling of sensitive files and strategic leaks of information from high-profile cases.

The last straw for Sheinbaum was a revelation that Gertz canceled an arrest warrant for Raúl Rocha Cantú and instead authorized a legal cooperation agreement with him. The businessman had been accused of leading a network involved in illegal fuel trafficking, arms dealing, and money laundering. But Rocha Cantú failed to comply with the legal deal, misleading prosecutors and absconding.

Although Sheinbaum finally gave Gertz the shove, she also handed him a golden parachute by appointing him ambassador to the United Kingdom. As her new attorney general, Sheinbaum appointed Ernestina Godoy, her longtime ally.

Similarly, the López Obrador-installed head of the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU), Pablo Gómez Álvarez, had long been accused of politicizing the FIU’s work to target López Obrador’s political rivals and, much to the dismay of the United States, underperforming against criminal networks. He also resisted Sheinbaum’s efforts to remove him. To restore confidence in U.S.-Mexico bilateral anti-money-laundering cooperation, Sheinbaum finally kicked him upstairs to the Presidential Commission for Electoral Reform.

To the FIU, Sheinbaum appointed Omar Reyes Colmenares, a close ally of Security Secretary Omar García Harfúch.

At the municipal level, the problems are even more acute and challenging. The matter is not just one of succumbing to corruption, but also intimidation. Mexico’s criminal groups routinely threaten to inflict torture and death not just on local government officials, but also on their families. These days, they don’t just wait for candidates to assume offices before they threaten them; they do so early in the electoral campaigns. Simply prosecuting coopted officials will not be sufficient: the Mexican government will also need to become far better at protecting them.

Will the clean-up last?

At all levels of Mexico’s government, allegations of criminal collusion have swirled around officials. Such suspicions run from Tamaulipas to Sinaloa, from Quintana Roo and Chiapas to Guerrero and Michoacán. Reshuffling problematic officials around doesn’t necessarily end their problematic behavior; it can merely spread criminal corruption and collusion to other places. Effective judicial prosecution is very politically costly, but a far better deterrent and mechanism to strengthen the rule of law.

How far Sheinbaum’s clean-up efforts will go, and at what speed, will in part depend on whether Morena or López Obrador’s other cadres mount a pushback, such as by trying to revoke Sheinbaum’s presidential mandate by triggering the popular referendum on her tenure that López Obrador instituted halfway through a presidential term. They will also depend on pressure from Washington, and whether the United States undercuts its leverage by actually mounting unilateral military strikes in Mexico and triggering a nationalist backlash.

Moreover, even successful purges of corrupt officials and units and the dismantling of entire institutions because of their infiltration by criminal actors are not a one-time deal. During the Felipe Calderón administration, key institutions such as the office of the attorney general went through clean-up operations, literally called limpiezas, several times. Yet supposedly cleaned-up institutions later on again proved to have been infiltrated and corrupt. In fact, since the late 1980s, every Mexican administration dismantled and reformed corrupt police and judicial agencies, yet those that were created in their stead subsequently also proved to be corrupt and coopted by criminals again and again. Many a drug trafficker and government official have figured out that the best way to be a drug trafficker is to be the minister of counternarcotics or the top cop.

Maintaining clean institutions requires persistent, widespread, and systematic vetting, not just of new recruits and appointees, but also of standing officials. They also need strong internal affairs units and strict, reliable punishment of officials who become corrupt.