Very few people know that Terrence Terry C. Cole, the current DEA administrator, was the agency’s acting regional director for Mexico, Canada, and Central America from the embassy on Paseo de la Reforma until his retirement in 2020. He was reinstated in 2025 by President Donald Trump, who appointed him general administrator of the agency.
This coincided with the first two years of López Obrador’s administration, and he, who had participated in the location and destruction of some twenty fentanyl laboratories, which the president always denied existed in Mexico, had strong disagreements with him, which he made public from the National Palace by declaring war on the organization and in particular on Cole, whom he disqualified, disavowed, and even canceled the hangar they had had at the AICM since the 1990s, where the CIA and FBI also operated, in 2019.
In reality, the conflict arose from a difference of opinion: while López Obrador repeatedly stated that fentanyl was not produced in Mexico, Cole and his followers located and destroyed drug labs across the country; while the president repeated the official slogan “hugs, not bullets,” Cole saw how organized crime was spreading and diversifying, increasing the production of this lethal opioid and its transfer to the United States, where one hundred thousand addicts died in one year, with little done there either to prevent consumption.
Cole even went so far as to say publicly that drug cartels here worked hand in hand with corrupt, high-level Mexican government officials, something López Obrador consistently denied, demanding proof.
And it’s unlikely that now, with Cole now the top boss of the DEA and the Mexican drug traffickers under investigation in the US as cooperating witnesses, the evidence that López Obrador and now President Sheinbaum have rightly demanded of this complicity between drug traffickers and Mexican authorities will begin to emerge.
SCRAPS
- COMPLICITY. Wednesday’s session at the Electoral Tribunal, which declared the judicial elections legal, was a cesspool. The three regime-aligned judges rejected the annulment proposal by Judge Reyes Rodríguez, supported by Janine Otálora, and everything is now behind us, though not forgotten;
- BRUSH. Vidulfo Rosales, who for a decade served as the lawyer for the parents of the 43 disappeared from Ayotzinapa, yesterday dismissed them to go work for the new president of the Court, Hugo Aguilar; and
- BIS. A repeat of the operation George W. Bush announced and launched against Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega on December 20, 1989, could be imminent, but this time with different dates and names: Trump for Bush, Venezuela for Panama, and Noriega for Maduro.
Source: milenio
