The Rocha
File

The entire file is understood through a map. Three points. One line of continuity. The operation did not begin in 2021 with the Rocha Moya election. It began fifteen years earlier, at a restaurant table in Polanco, where representatives of the Sinaloa Cartel sat with political operators to agree on a payment of between two and four million dollars to the presidential campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

The second point is Culiacán, November 1, 2021. On the day of Rocha Moya's inauguration as governor, according to the SDNY indictment, the new chief executive met with Iván and Ovidio Guzmán, escorted by sicarios armed with machine guns. Formal pact. Total operational protection in exchange for budgetary impunity.

The third point is Mazatlán, where a single construction firm — Majolva — accumulated $244 million pesos in municipal contracts between 2022 and 2024. Together with Remco ($261M), they total more than half a billion pesos in public works concentrated in two companies linked to the governor's family network.

Ricardo and Rubén Rocha Ruiz, the governor's sons, head a financial network of thirty members across fourteen boards of directors. Through just five companies, that network would have bled more than six hundred and twenty million pesos in public funds during the first three years of their father's administration. The structure is simple: the sons found companies, the partners enter government from the Secretariat of Health, SOPAS, ISSSTE, IMPLAN, and from there assign contracts to those same companies. Closed loop.

The most documented case is Pinturas Mobil de Culiacán, owned by Manuel Ángel Rivera Urbina. His partner at Manocash, Eduardo Aguirre Medina, is director of Sinaloa Health Services. Aguirre assigned eighteen contracts to Pinturas Mobil between 2022 and 2024 for $15.74 million pesos. Seventeen of those eighteen were direct awards without bidding. He assigned contracts to his own business partner.

The other end of the network is Cano Félix, the governor's son-in-law. A federal ISSSTE official with four ASF audits documenting $417 thousand pesos in patrimonial damage and $114 million in unverified software. He contributed $55,867 to Claudia Sheinbaum's presidential campaign: 31% of the private donations reported to the INE. The number-one donor of the ruling-party candidate was the son-in-law of the governor indicted by the DOJ.

The act that defines the file occurred on February 15, 2025, at Rubén Rocha Moya's private residence in Culiacán. Andrés Manuel López Beltrán, organization secretary of Morena and son of the former president, traveled personally to the state and personally delivered the affiliation credential to the governor. There is a public photograph. It was covered by El Universal, Proceso, Infobae and LatinUS.

What is not public — but documented by El Siglo de Torreón in the "Doble Fondo" column of May 2, 2026 — is that Andy had read since October 2024 a SEDENA intelligence file documenting Rocha's presumed closeness to criminals since the 2021 campaign. The file circulated in the inner circle: AMLO, Claudia Sheinbaum, Mario Delgado and María Luisa Alcalde were informed. The collective response was public silence and private endorsement.

Four months after reading the file, Andy delivered the credential. Seventy-three days after the delivery, the DOJ filed formal charges.

The six actions the Mexican State must execute

The legal precedent exists. The Superior Chamber of the Federal Electoral Tribunal (TEPJF) recognized in SUP-JRC-166/2021 that organized crime can invalidate elections. In the Michoacán 2021 case, the Chamber ruled that violence was not determinative. In Sinaloa, with the governor himself indicted by the DOJ as an active partner of the cartel, the ruling would have to be different. The position, by definition, would be spurious.

What happened in Sinaloa in 2021 was not improvisation. It was the fifth replica of a protocol. The first documented attempt was Tabasco 2012. The most violent, Guerrero 2018. The best financed, Veracruz 2024. The precedent that officially recognized organized crime coercion, Michoacán 2021. The constant in all six cases is the same: a local cartel offers electoral coercion in exchange for free operational territory during the following six-year term. The political intermediary, in all cases, is Morena's national leadership.

The pattern is recognizable by six markers. First: kidnapping of opposition operators during the 50 critical hours before the election. Second: armed convoys patrolling capitals on election day. Third: Morena candidate with an anomalous margin. Fourth: president or Morena organization secretary traveling to the state to deliver a credential within the first 90 days post-election. Fifth: wave of public works concentrated in the elected governor's family companies. Sixth: SEDENA file shelved in the National Palace without federal investigation.