Mexico's security chief meets DEA head, reviews extraditions
Omar García Harfuch said the meeting was set in late October and that actions on Mexican soil belong to Mexican authorities alone.
Mexico's security secretary, Omar García Harfuch, met with Terrance Cole, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the two went over information sharing, financial investigations and pending extradition cases. Harfuch announced it Monday in a post on X, which the security ministry's account shared.
Harfuch's account is the only version of the meeting. He said it had been scheduled since late October, but he did not say where or when it took place, and he announced no agreements, arrests or specific cases.
Among the topics, he said, were criminal structures, collaboration requests still waiting for an answer and the handling of extraditions "through the competent authorities."
The two sides share the aim, Harfuch said, of stepping up investigations into criminal networks that drive violence and moving on priority targets for both countries. They also want to curb the flow of weapons into Mexico and cut off drug-sales money that reaches criminal groups.
He framed the talks around four principles: sovereignty and territorial integrity, shared responsibility, mutual trust, and "cooperation without subordination." Hence his point that actions on Mexican territory "belong exclusively to Mexican authorities."
That is the language Mexico's government uses to describe its security relationship with Washington, where extraditions and shared intelligence on criminal networks are the main measures of progress.
It is not the first contact this year. Harfuch and Cole met in Washington on March 16, and two days later he met with the FBI director, according to his own posts.
