The National Action Party (PAN) has filed a complaint against Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) with the International Criminal Court (ICC), alleging that the former president forged pacts with criminal groups during his 2018-24 presidency.
The PAN — Mexico’s main opposition party — announced in a statement on Sunday that it filed a complaint with the Hague-based court “against the ex-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and various criminal organizations so that possible individual criminal responsibilities derived from criminal-political pacts are investigated.”
Among the criminal groups named in the PAN’s 82-page complaint are the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, the Sinaloa Cartel, the Northeast Cartel and La Nueva Familia Michoacana, all of which were last year designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.
“In the territories under their control, these organizations have carried out, against specific civilian populations, a systematic pattern of conduct that includes murder, enforced disappearances, torture, forced displacement, forced recruitment and trafficking, as well as persecution of identifiable groups and other inhumane acts as defined in Article 7(1) of the [Rome] Statute,” states the complaint.
“… Elected political authorities and public officials of the Mexican state have engaged, in a systematic and deliberate manner, in acquiescence, tolerance, and, in numerous cases, both active and passive complicity with the perpetrating criminal organizations,” it says.
In its statement, the PAN said that its complaint sets out “possible crimes against humanity” allegedly committed by AMLO and others, “reflected in more than 200,000 homicides, over 150,000 missing persons, the forced recruitment of young people, the displacement of entire communities, and large regions of the country under the control of drug cartels.”
The party, which was last in government at a federal level during Felipe Calderón’s 2006-12 presidency, said that its complaint argues that Mexico’s current insecurity “is not the result of chance or isolated criminal developments.”
Rather, it is the result of “deliberate, calculated, and systematic permissive collaboration by the Mexican state, which allowed — or even invited — the establishment and hyper-empowerment of organized crime in Mexico,” the PAN said.
The party alleged that “different Morena [party] governments (mainly the 2018-24 federal government)” established a “political pact” with organized crime.
“The complaint also maintains that between 2018 and 2024, a deliberate policy of cession of sovereignty to organized crime was implemented, with emblematic cases in Sinaloa” — where one of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán’s sons was released shortly after he was arrested in 2019 — “Tamaulipas and Michoacán, among other states,” the PAN said in its statement.
“The narco-pact known as ‘hugs, not bullets‘ — the nickname of AMLO’s security strategy — “allowed criminal groups to expand their territorial, economic and political power, while the state relinquished full exercise of its authority,” the party said.
“The advancement of organized crime was not only tolerated, but it was allowed to replace the state in large areas of the country,” the PAN asserted.
Presentamos ante la Corte Penal Internacional una denuncia para que se investiguen las posibles responsabilidades de Andrés Manuel López Obrador por presuntos Crímenes de Lesa Humanidad.
Compartimos el boletín, la denuncia y el acuse de recibido. 📄
Consulta toda la información… pic.twitter.com/YXEArk26wc
— Acción Nacional (@AccionNacional) June 7, 2026
In its statement, the party also mentioned “allegations and investigations about presumed ties between Morena actors and criminal organizations in entities such as Sinaloa, Sonora and Tamaulipas.”
The PAN said that “the cases” of Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha Moya, who U.S. prosecutors accuse of drug trafficking in league with the Sinaloa Cartel, as well as Sonora Governor Alfonso Durazo and Tamaulipas Governor Américo Villarreal, who are reportedly under criminal investigation in the United States, “have deepened concern about the penetration of organized crime in political power.”
“For that reason, we turned to the International Criminal Court, in the face of national institutions that are increasingly less capable of guaranteeing independent investigations,” it said.
The PAN concluded its statement by pledging to “continue denouncing everything that has to be denounced.”
“We are and we always will be the voice of millions of people who clamor for justice for their loved ones and who know that a supposed transformation [promised by Morena] betrayed them. The victims deserve truth, justice and accountability. And sooner or later justice will catch up with the criminals,” the party said.
On its website, the PAN published a document confirming that its complaint had been received by the ICC. It would appear unlikely that the ICC would promptly launch, or launch at all, an investigation into AMLO’s alleged wrongdoings.
The National Action Party’s accusations against López Obrador and Morena are essentially the same allegations AMLO (and current President Claudia Sheinbaum) have made against the PAN and former president Calderón. López Obrador claimed that Mexico was a “narco-state” during Calderón’s presidency, pointing to accusations, and subsequently a conviction, against former Security Minister Genaro García Luna, who in February 2023 was found guilty of colluding with the Sinaloa Cartel.
AMLO also asserted that the militarized “war” against drug cartels launched by Calderón shortly after he took office in late 2006 was the main cause of the high levels of violence in Mexico that persisted during his six-year term in government.
Mexico News Daily
