MEXICO CITY—The U.S. warned Mexico it experienced imperiled the sharing of facts on the country’s drug cartels by releasing a confidential dossier supplying evidence that Mexico’s former protection minister was in the pay back of drug kingpins, pushing bilateral antidrug cooperation to its least expensive issue in several years.

Mexico’s action “calls into issue no matter whether the United States can continue on to share facts to help Mexico’s have prison investigations,” the Justice Office explained late Friday, including that the release of the 751-page dossier on Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos was a violation of bilateral treaty obligations on facts sharing.

The U.S. response arrives following Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador accused the Drug Enforcement Administration of fabricating charges from Gen. Cienfuegos, who was exonerated of drug trafficking and bribery by Mexico’s attorney general’s place of work Thursday. Gen. Cienfuegos was arrested in the U.S. at the request of the DEA past calendar year and then sent again to Mexico next a diplomatic uproar.

The Justice Department’s response may mark the least expensive issue in bilateral cooperation from prison companies since the abduction and killing of the DEA agent Enrique “Kiki” Camarena by Mexican drug capos in 1985. It arrives as Mr. López Obrador’s administration has struggled to incorporate the mounting political and territorial clout of drug cartels and surging prison violence.

“This opens the doorway to tremendous mistrust,” explained Raul Benitez, a stability analyst at Nationwide Autonomous University of Mexico. “If stability relations deteriorate and intelligence sharing is constrained, the only winners will be drug trafficking cartels.”