The US attorney for the Southern District of New York said 10 people, including governor Ruben Rocha Moya, are accused of working with the Sinaloa cartel to distribute “massive quantities” of narcotics to the US.
Without mentioning this indictment, Mexico’s foreign ministry said it received US extradition requests for “various people”.
It complained that cases like this are normally handled confidentially under bilateral treaties rather than being announced publicly first and said it would send a note of protest to the US embassy “over the way it was announced”.
The ministry said the Mexican attorney general’s office will determine whether there is enough evidence to extradite Rocha Moya and the other suspects to the US.
The governor himself denied the drug charges “categorically and absolutely” in a statement on X.
“This attack isn’t only against me, it’s against the Fourth Transformation,” Rocha Moya said, referring to Mexico’s governing, left-leaning Morena party, which has been in power since 2018.
Rocha Moya has governed the conflictive state of Sinaloa since 2021. It has been battered by a war between two factions of the cartel of the same name that has left thousands of people dead.
The governor has a long history in public life that included stints as a state congressional lawmaker in the 1980s, the head of the University of Sinaloa in the 1990s, the advisor of two governors in the 2000s and, then, a state coordinator for Morena.
The officials accused alongside Rocha Moya include a senator for Morena, the municipal president of the state capital of Culiacan, and the deputy prosecutor for the state attorney general’s office.
“These politicians and law enforcement officials have abused their authority in support of the cartel, exposed and subjected victims to threats and violence,” the US indictment reads.
It said the defendants were mostly aligned with a faction of the Sinaloa cartel known as the ‘Chapitos’, loyal to the sons of cartel co-founder Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who is serving a life sentence in the US.
The Sinaloa Cartel is one of six Mexican narcotrafficking groups designated as foreign terrorist organisations by the administration of US President Donald Trump.