A federal grand jury in New York has indicted Ruben Rocha Moya, the sitting governor of Mexico’s Sinaloa state, along with nine current and former Mexican government and law enforcement officials on drug trafficking and weapons charges, the Justice Department announced Wednesday. The 34-page indictment, unsealed in the Southern District of New York, accuses the defendants of conspiring with the Sinaloa Cartel to ship fentanyl, heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine into the United States in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes and cartel-backed political support.
The indictment alleges that the cartel’s most powerful faction — led by the Chapitos, the sons of convicted drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman Loera — worked directly with Rocha Moya to help secure his 2021 gubernatorial victory. Prosecutors allege the Chapitos kidnapped and intimidated Rocha Moya’s rivals during the campaign, stole ballots from opposing parties, and furnished him with names and addresses of political opponents so they could be pressured to withdraw. In exchange, Rocha Moya allegedly promised to install cartel-friendly officials throughout Sinaloa’s government and law enforcement agencies and to allow the Chapitos to operate without interference.
U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton said the indictment exposes how drug trafficking organizations rely on corrupt foreign officials to sustain their operations, sending a warning to any official worldwide who works with narco-traffickers. DEA Administrator Terrance C. Cole said the case demonstrates that the Sinaloa Cartel — which the Trump administration’s State Department formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization in 2025 — uses corruption and bribery to generate profit while enabling a pipeline of deadly drugs into the country.
Among the nine co-defendants are a sitting Mexican senator, the mayor of Culiacan, Sinaloa’s former secretary of administration and finance, the state’s deputy attorney general, several former senior law enforcement commanders and a former high-level municipal police commander named Juan Valenzuela Millan. Millan faces two additional counts beyond the three shared by all defendants: kidnapping resulting in death and conspiracy to commit kidnapping resulting in death. Prosecutors allege that in October 2023, officers under his command stopped a DEA confidential source and a relative in a patrol car, then turned both victims over to cartel operatives who tortured and killed them. One victim was 13 years old.
Deputy attorney general Damaso Castro Zaavedra is accused of receiving approximately $11,000 per month from the Chapitos in return for alerting cartel members to imminent U.S.-backed law enforcement operations and shielding them from arrest and prosecution. All ten defendants collectively received millions of dollars in drug proceeds, according to the indictment. None are currently in U.S. custody. Mexico’s foreign ministry acknowledged receiving extradition requests but said the documents do not contain sufficient evidence, leaving any decision on extradition to the country’s attorney general’s office.
The charges are the latest in a series of Southern District of New York prosecutions since 2023 that have targeted more than 30 members and associates of the Sinaloa Cartel, including cartel leadership. Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, one of the cartel’s co-founders, pleaded guilty last year in the Eastern District of New York and is expected to face life in prison at sentencing next month.
The indictment carries direct implications for South Carolina, where the fentanyl crisis has taken a severe toll. State vital statistics from South Carolina’s 2023 drug overdose report show 2,157 overdose deaths that year, with 1,550 of those involving fentanyl — a drug the Sinaloa Cartel is alleged to have been trafficking with the active protection of the officials named Wednesday. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee and has long pushed for cartels to be treated as terrorist organizations, introduced the Ending the NARCOS Act in 2023 specifically naming the Sinaloa Cartel as a group that should face foreign terrorist organization status, arguing that cartel corruption extends into the halls of government and sustains the flow of fentanyl killing Americans across the country — including in South Carolina. The Trump administration acted on that framework in 2025 when it formally designated the Sinaloa Cartel as a foreign terrorist organization, a designation that underpins the federal strategy now producing these indictments.
