Trump is Preparing Coup Against Sheinbaum & the Fourth Transformation

ByPedro Mellado Rodríguez

This editorial by Pedro Mellado Rodríguez originally appeared in the May 8, 2026 edition of Sin Embargo. The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of Mexico Solidarity Media or the Mexico Solidarity Project.

Infamy advances, evolves, has new faces and assumes new perverse strategies in Latin America, which has become a space of dispute against governments that are not aligned with the administration of Donald Trump and to satisfy the appetites of the predatory empire of the north that always seeks to seize, without shame or restraint, the riches of other countries.

Lawfare is a political war waged through the judicial and media channels, with economic, political, and geopolitical interests deliberately hidden from the public eye. Some political conflicts and tensions are resolved through the legal system. Initially associated with a supposed war on corruption, lawfare has expanded to encompass electoral processes and financial institutions, at times even including the narrative of combating drug trafficking and terrorism. It is a long-term process that goes beyond the mere manipulation of the judicial system for political ends.

In the case of Mexico, there is a form of Narcolawfare that is based on the universal and extraterritorial application of US laws to destabilize President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo and the government of the Fourth Transformation, which strongly irritates US President Donald Trump and the native right wing of Mexico and the international right wing, warns the Lawfare Observatory, coordinated by Silvina Romano, of the Institute of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, of the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Lawfare is a political war that involves judges, media corporations, journalists and opinion leaders, police, embassies , and intelligence agents (both local and foreign). It is characterized by the abuse of pretrial detention, plea bargains, and verdicts before due process, through harassment and demoralization via the media.

The specialists at the Lawfare Observatory explain that this strategy of destabilizing governments includes manipulation and the spread of fear among those involved in certain political processes. In recent years, these tactics have been used against dozens of leaders, former government officials, and activists in Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, and El Salvador, all linked to governments, programs, or projects that challenge, to varying degrees, the neoliberal orthodoxy defended by the President of the United States, the governments subserviently allied to his cause, such as that of Javier Milei in Argentina, and the international right wing, particularly the Mexican right wing.

The Lawfare Observatory includes in this strategy the formal accusation that the United States Department of Justice published on April 29, 2026 against 10 public officials of the government of the state of Sinaloa, including Governor Rubén Rocha Moya and Senator Enrique Inzunza Cázarez, both from Morena, whom it accuses of being involved with the criminal activities of the “Los Chapitos” Cartel.

That indictment is based in the Southern District of New York, where Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Congresswoman Cilia Flores, are on trial; and where drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, and other Mexican drug traffickers have been sentenced. Similarly, a comparable case is being brought against Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has been repeatedly accused of receiving drug money and engaging in acts of alleged corruption.

Notably, the Lawfare Observatory points out, the accusations against 10 Mexican officials from Sinaloa, including Governor Rubén Rocha Moya of the Morena party, were made just days after it was revealed that CIA agents participated clandestinely, and in violation of the Constitution and laws of the country, between April 17 and 19, in an anti-narcotics operation in the border state of Chihuahua, governed by the PAN party’s María Eugenia Campos Galván. This could be interpreted as a media operation and pressure tactic against the Mexican government, just weeks before the renegotiation of the trade agreement with the United States and Canada.

Extraterritoriality of the law

The pressure against Mexico is part of a US foreign policy strategy that aims to apply its laws outside its territory to the governments of countries it considers contrary to its interests. The most recent example is the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and the presidential pardon granted by Donald Trump to Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado, the former president of Honduras. The US Department of Justice released Hernández Alvarado, and it is now presumed that Israel negotiated his release with the United States with the aim of restoring him to the presidency.

The pardon of Orlando Hernández came just days before the presidential elections that resulted in the victory of Nasry Asfura, an ultra-right-wing politician aligned with Donald Trump, in an obvious act of interference that aimed to attack Honduran stability and discredit the progressive government led by Xiomara Castro, of the Libre Party.

The United States and Israel, with the help of Honduras, are allegedly positioning themselves on the geopolitical chessboard to control spheres of influence in Latin America. The Latin American newspaper El Diario Red and the website Hondurasgate have revealed, in an investigation based on leaked audio recordings, the interventionist intentions of global right-wing leaders, as reported by the Spanish newspaper El País on Wednesday, May 6, 2026 , in an article by reporter Andrés Rodríguez.

One of the pieces of evidence revealed at the end of last April claims that former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández Alvarado, pardoned by Donald Trump from his 45-year sentence for drug trafficking, with the support of the US president himself, his Argentine counterpart, Javier Milei, and the current administration of Honduras, are conspiring to create a channel for disseminating fake news with the intention of misinforming and destabilizing the governments of Colombia and Mexico, adds the newspaper El País.

The second installment of the Hondurasgate scandal, of the three released as of Wednesday, May 6, 2026, records an alleged conversation between Hernández Alvarado, who had become an operative for Donald Trump in the region, and the current President and Vice President of Honduras, Nasry Asfura and María Antonieta Mejía, respectively. The objective: to undermine the administrations of Claudia Sheinbaum and Gustavo Petro, both of whom adhere to leftist ideology, according to the Spanish newspaper.

Meanwhile, the Lawfare Observatory of Buenos Aires explains that the extraterritoriality of the law applied by the United States includes, among other measures: economic, financial, political and diplomatic sanctions for alleged violations of the rules of Public International Law and/or non-compliance with international treaties.

Along with the extraterritoriality of the law is the designation of several drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, which enables the narrative of narcoterrorism as a threat to US national security and military invasions under the argument of “law enforcement,” as happened in Venezuela and as would be intended to happen in Mexico and Colombia.

In Latin America, there are several cases in which former presidents or progressive politicians have been accused of being narco-terrorists. The case of Evo Morales stands out; after the 2019 coup, he was accused of narco-terrorism in 2020 by the de facto government of Jeanine Añez. Currently, there is the case of Gustavo Petro, who is linked to drug trafficking.

These plea bargains offered by protected witnesses or the figure of the “repentant” criminal are precisely the components of most lawfare cases in the region.

In the case of President Nicolás Maduro, the US representative to the United Nations Security Council, Michael Waltz, accused him of being an “illegitimate narco-terrorist,” even though the Justice Department changed the sentence against the Venezuelan president and considered the Cartel of the Suns nonexistent, a creation that also had the support of hegemonic media.

The case against the Governor of Sinaloa and nine other current and former officials of that state bears similarities to a case in Argentina known as “The Notebooks,” a legal case in which a protected witness allegedly wrote down in a notebook what he remembered hearing about businesspeople apparently paying bribes to members of Cristina Fernández’s government. Or the notebook of an official close to Rafael Correa in Ecuador, who wrote from memory, during a one-hour trip, all the alleged acts of corruption with detailed sums, down to the cent. Experts say that these plea bargains offered by protected witnesses or the figure of the “repentant” criminal are precisely the components of most lawfare cases in the region.

The Lawfare Observatory emphasizes that it is significant that the public release of information by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the publication of the request for provisional arrest for extradition purposes of 10 Sinaloa politicians violated existing international treaties establishing “the confidentiality of information.” For this reason, the Mexican government sent a formal protest to the U.S. Embassy. Furthermore, it constitutes a violation of due process, another characteristic of lawfare cases in Latin America, thus demonstrating a clear political agenda and a strategy of maximum pressure against Mexico.

The same narrative is applied against Mexico as in Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, or Ecuador: the supposed fight against drug trafficking and corruption that justifies interventions against countries that prioritize sovereignty and a welfare model different from neoliberalism.

Argentine researchers summarize: “As we have described in the Lawfare Observatory, narcolawfare is an extremely dangerous label that is part of a multidimensional strategy that seeks to delegitimize sovereign projects and apply the extraterritoriality of US law, including military interventions or destabilization operations, combined with a security discourse and an exceptional use of power and the violation of international law.”

And they make a pertinent observation: “As in Colombia, this type of legal case [as is happening now with Mexico] comes at election times to influence the perception of the population and achieve a change in the future elections of 2027 and in the review of the Free Trade Agreement.”

Sovereignty

That is why the message delivered by the President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, on Tuesday, May 5, 2026, in Puebla, during the commemoration of the battle in that city, in which the French invaders were defeated on May 5, 1862, is so important. This occurred after other traitorous Mexicans went to Europe to beg for the imposition of an Austrian emperor in our country: “Let us never forget that Mexico’s independence has been built on the heroism of a people who have conquered it time and again. It is written with pain, sacrifice, and the unwavering will of generations who refused to surrender their destiny.”

“Let us never forget,” Sheinbaum Pardo added, “that our history is marked by resistance against foreign invasions and also by the internal betrayals of those who, from a conservative standpoint, have sought to subjugate the people and surrender the nation.”

The President rebuked: “To those who seek foreign intervention in Mexico, to those who today boast of and defend interference, to those who applaud foreign television networks when they speak ill of Mexico; to them we say, with truth and justice: that those who seek external support because they lack popular support in our country are destined for defeat. To those who think the President is kneeling: they are destined for defeat.”

The President included a message to the northern empire: “To any foreign government we are clear and forceful: history tells us that the people of Mexico are not wrong when it comes to defending national sovereignty […] no foreign power is going to tell Mexicans how to govern ourselves.”

Last Wednesday, May 6, 2026, the President said in her morning press conference that “there is an alliance between what is called ‘the international right wing’ and the Mexican right wing. They have many digital media outlets, especially: there’s La Derecha Diario and others, which criticize us all the time with pure lies, by the way, but their objective is to undermine the President and the Transformation project in Mexico.”

“If you look closely,” the president explained, “it’s the same thing that’s happening with the pundits, the Mexican right wing. Apart from three or four media outlets, they’re all on the attack. Those who think that using foreign interference in Mexico will get them anywhere are very wrong; they’ve been defeated.”