The news was explosive and injected a fresh layer of tension in relations between the United States and Mexico.
U.S. prosecutors accused the sitting governor of Sinaloa state, Rubén Rocha Moya, and nine other officials of helping a powerful cartel move vast quantities of drugs into the United States in exchange for bribes and political support.
The accusations have caused a political crisis for President Claudia Sheinbaum, while Mr. Moya has denied any wrongdoing and accused the United States of attacking Mexico’s sovereignty.
But in Sinaloa, where cartel violence is lived nearly every day, the news landed less as a shock than as a long-needed reckoning.
For years, residents have traded in rumors and quiet certainties of collusion between the Sinaloa cartel and those in the upper echelons of power. When the indictment came, many said, it merely put into writing what had long been whispered.
“We have always known it, we all knew it was true, and it was about time this happened,” said Omar Trejo, a salesperson. He added that the suspected ties between the governor, other officials and the cartel were an “open secret” here, a phrase repeated over and over by residents.
“It might be news to the world, but not to us,” said Jesús Tirado, as he polished shoes in the main plaza in Culiacán, the state capital.
A few steps away, beneath the city’s cathedral, a wall was covered with posters bearing the faces of the missing, victims of Sinaloa’s violence. Nearby, in bright silver paint, a blunt verdict was written: “narco-estado cómplice,” Spanish for “complicit narco-state.”
For nearly two years, internecine warfare between rival factions of the Sinaloa cartel has turned daily life into a landscape of fear and attrition, with shuttered businesses, empty streets and self-imposed curfews.
Families continue to search for more than 3,600 people who have disappeared just in the past 20 months, a period that has also seen more than 3,000 people killed.
Against that backdrop, more than a dozen residents described the indictment as both politically seismic and deeply personal. For many, the possibility that the governor and senior officials may have aligned with one of the very groups driving the bloodshed provoked a mix of anger, grief — and, for some, a grim sense of confirmation.
“It’s not just about corruption,’’ said Adrián López Ortiz, editor of Noroeste, a leading newspaper in Culiacán. “It’s about the possibility that the person responsible for solving the violence and navigating the crisis was, at the same time, part of it.”
“As a Sinaloan, it is deeply saddening,” he added. “If confirmed, it would mean that those at the top — sitting in the throne, the governorship and even the mayor’s office — were directly entangled with these groups.”
The accusations also suggest something even more sobering, Mr. López said.
“If those responsible for making decisions are themselves part of the problem, then when, and how, can it ever be resolved?” he said.
As for Mr. Rocha, just a day after U.S. authorities leveled the serious accusations, he sought to project a calm tone.
“He who fears nothing lives at ease; he who owes nothing has nothing to fear,” the governor told reporters on Thursday when asked about the indictment, exhibiting a sense of business as usual even as the accusations threatened to upend his administration and strain U.S.-Mexico relations.
Just a day earlier, Mr. Rocha, in a statement, denied the charges as “entirely false and without foundation,” and said they were an attempt by the United States to attack Mexico’s leftist political movement, led by Ms. Sheinbaum.
The other indicted officials include the current mayor of Culiacán, the state’s deputy attorney general, and several former top law enforcement officials in Sinaloa.
The fact that top-ranking government officials, not just the governor, were indicted, pointed toward a broader systemic problem, some Sinaloa residents said.
The charges “laid bare the rooted problem of narco-politics in Mexico,” said Miguel Clouthier, a businessman and former federal lawmaker. “Organized crime groups have flourished and can only exist with the support and collaboration of those meant to contain it.”
“It is the original sin,’’ he added, “when governors and officials establish ties with drug-trafficking groups in order to get to power, and once they get elected they can’t escape from it anymore.”
Still, in a country where corrupt officials have long provided the scaffolding for criminal groups to thrive, Mr. Clouthier said he hoped an indictment that sought to establish a link between government and crime, would in some way weaken it.
“We have learned how to take care of ourselves here,’’ he said, adding that survival had long meant not challenging criminal elements that plainly existed.
“But we are also tired that nothing happens,” Mr. Clouthier added. “So I hope this forces us to stop lying out of fear.”
Even as the indictment dominated headlines on Thursday, the pace of violence in Sinaloa continued largely unchanged. That morning, a local labor union leader, Homar Salas Gastélum, was shot dead inside his home. His bodyguard was also killed. After a group of armed men shot up his residence right following his electoral victory in February, he told local reporters that he was aware “there are interests that didn’t want us to get here.”
Elsewhere that day, seven more people were slain and the remains of two unidentified victims were discovered in the city.
U.S. prosecutors say Mr. Rocha accepted bribes from a faction of the Sinaloa cartel known as Los Chapitos, the state’s dominant criminal organization, in exchange for protecting the group. The faction is led by the sons of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Sinaloa cartel’s founder who is known as “El Chapo.”
The indictment described a meeting in which two of Mr. Guzmán’s sons, Ovidio Guzmán López and Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar, told Mr. Rocha they could secure his electoral victory. He, in turn, agreed to install officials who would allow the cartel to operate with impunity, the indictment says.
Prosecutors say the cartel then helped deliver the election by stealing ballots, kidnapping opposition candidates and pressuring others to drop out of the race. Once in power, Mr. Rocha and his allies placed officials across state and municipal governments to help the cartel, according to the charges.
For some in Sinaloa, the indictment brought grim feelings of vindication.
Paola Gárate, a local congresswoman and one of Mr. Rocha’s most vocal critics, said she was among dozens of opposition candidates and political operatives abducted on Election Day in 2021. She was held for nine hours by masked gunmen, she said, along with other candidates and operatives, until voting ended.
The news, she said, left her with conflicting emotions.
“A sense of satisfaction on one hand, sadness on the other,” Ms. Gárate said. “But above all, it confirms that the rule of law does not exist in Mexico, that it was not Mexican authorities who bring these accusations forward, but they are the ones who should have acted earlier, and they did not because they are part of the problem.”
“Here being part of the opposition will cost you your life,” she added, her voice breaking.
