Mexico has assigned elite federal agents to hunt for Canadian fugitive Ryan Wedding, CBC News has learned.
Their involvement in the search for the former Olympian — one of the FBI’s 10 most-wanted fugitives — signals a continued thaw in relations between Mexican authorities and their U.S. counterparts, who previously accused local officials of helping Wedding evade capture.
Wedding, who competed for Canada as a snowboarder at the 2002 Olympic Games in Utah, is accused of running a $1-billion US criminal enterprise that routinely smuggles truckloads of cocaine, fentanyl and methamphetamine across North America. Mexico has also linked Wedding’s network to international arms trafficking.
The Thunder Bay, Ont., native and his second-in-command, fellow Canadian Andrew Clark, are charged with orchestrating four murders between them in Ontario, including the mistaken-identity shootings of a couple visiting from India.
The FBI has suggested Wedding may be living in Mexico under the protection of the Sinaloa cartel, once led by notorious drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Mexico’s FGR, a federal law enforcement agency affiliated with the country’s attorney general, confirmed “[it is] searching for Mr. Wedding.”
An FGR representative provided the six-word statement to CBC News through the Mexican Embassy in Ottawa. In a sign of the secrecy surrounding the operation, the agency declined to be contacted directly.
A task force leading the search for Wedding, 44, likely also involves Interpol and the Mexican navy. Both agencies took part in Clark’s arrest last year in a dramatic daytime operation at a restaurant in the Guadalajara area.
Clark is awaiting trial in California, after Mexico handed him over in February, amid a large-scale transfer of suspected cartel figures.
Under pressure from the Trump administration, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s government has sought to crack down on major drug cartels, which the U.S. and Canada consider terrorist organizations.
Mexico has been “making strides under the Sheinbaum administration, but… for decades, government officials have been in bed with the criminal underworld,” U.S. State Department official F. Cartwright Weiland said in a recent interview.
Weiland and the FBI have both suggested Wedding benefits from high-level connections in Mexico.
“The story thus far has been one in which those two facets of society — the cartels and government officials — are working in tandem to allow for him to evade capture,” Weiland said.
The State Department is offering a reward of up to $10 million US for information leading to Wedding’s arrest.
The FBI recently revealed it was focusing information-gathering efforts on a region surrounding Mexico City, with investigators seeking tips from locals through a social media campaign. CBC’s visual investigations unit determined a 2024 photo of Wedding, published by the FBI, was taken in the Mexican capital.
The U.S. agency has also suggested Wedding may have since undergone plastic surgery in an effort to change his appearance.
“They will get him eventually,” said former DEA international operations chief Mike Vigil. “If he is in Mexico, he’s going to stand out,” Vigil said of the six-foot, three-inch former athlete.
CBC News visual investigations team, in partnership with international researchers from the Bellingcat Discord community, located the exact spot where one of the last images of Ryan Wedding was taken. Wedding, an alleged Canadian drug lord, is among the FBI’s top 10 most-wanted fugitives. CBC is the first to report and confirm these findings.
Wedding was previously jailed in the U.S. over a cocaine-smuggling conspiracy involving a Vancouver-based criminal network, but has been on the run since the RCMP laid further charges against him in 2015.
Prosecutors in Los Angeles named him as the lead defendant last fall among 16 charged in Operation Giant Slalom, which sought to dismantle what authorities called the “Wedding Drug Trafficking Organization.”
The RCMP has since acknowledged his network remains active, while U.S. prosecutors have warned Wedding likely has access to a “network of hitmen” while on the lam.
Alleged accomplices fight extradition
A court in Toronto this week heard lawyers for two of Wedding’s alleged accomplices, Hardeep Ratte and Gurpreet Singh, are seeking disclosure of further evidence as they fight extradition to the U.S.
Ratte and his nephew Singh, both from the Toronto area, face charges over allegations they co-ordinated Wedding’s bulk cocaine shipments from California to Canada, for a flat rate of $220,000 per truckload.
Singh’s lawyer, Brian Greenspan. says he wants to hear more about law enforcement’s knowledge of his client’s kidnapping last year. According to court documents, Singh was held by cartel members in Mexico over a $600,000 drug debt, until Wedding purportedly negotiated his release.
Greenspan also pointed out some of the evidence for the U.S. case was gathered in Canada, including the police recording of a key meeting involving Singh, Ratte and an FBI informant at an auto body shop in Brampton, Ont.
Greenspan questioned how the case would proceed amid reports the informant was assassinated earlier this year in Colombia.
“That person met his death in the interim and is no longer available as a witness,” he told the hearing in Ontario Superior Court on Monday.
U.S. prosecutors have said in court records the informant trafficked drugs with Wedding for more than a decade, and agreed in 2023 to help investigators in the hope he wouldn’t face charges himself.
“There’s never been an admission that, in fact, he’s dead,” Greenspan said, “but we all know he’s dead.”
