Yves here. John Ruehl describes below how president Claudia Sheinbaum is trying to manage domestic opinion as Trump threatens military action to try to push Mexico around. The CIA is already deeply embedded in Mexico, which almost certainly limits her freedom of action.
By John P. Ruehl, an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022. Produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute
FBI Director Kash Patel’s announcement on January 23 regarding the arrest of Canadian drug trafficker Ryan Wedding in Mexico led to immediate diplomatic tension between Washington and Mexico. Wedding, a former Olympic snowboarder turned international drug trafficker, was taken into custody in Mexico City before being flown to the United States in what U.S. officials described as a joint operation.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum instead declared that Wedding had voluntarily surrendered at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, adding that this information had been provided to her government by the United States. Wedding’s lawyer disputed this, saying his client was arrested and handcuffed by U.S. personnel, which was a violation of Mexican law prohibiting foreign officers from participating in law enforcement operations on the country’s soil.
The conflicting narratives reveal much more than just a simple disagreement over procedure. Patel’s framing reflects Washington’s increasingly assertive approach to security operations in the Americas and a willingness to carry out unilateral military action. Weeks before, on January 3, U.S. forces carried out a high-profile operation to abduct Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from a Venezuelan military base.
The trajectory is worrying for Mexico, which last faced direct U.S. military intervention during the 1916-1917 Punitive Expedition against Mexican revolutionary leader Pancho Villa. The country has long prohibited the establishment of U.S. military bases but shares a 2,000-mile border with the U.S. and is home to some of the world’s most powerful criminal networks that Washington is eager to target.
Days before Wedding’s arrest became public, President Sheinbaum sought to calm domestic concerns after the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration warned airlines to “exercise caution” over airspace near Mexico, as well as parts of Central and South America, “citing military activities,” according to the Associated Press. Viral images of a U.S. military transport plane on a Mexican runway fueled further speculation of U.S. military action.
President Trump’s threat, on January 29, to impose “new tariffs” on any country importing oil to Cuba, which Mexico does, added to the anxieties over escalating U.S. pressure. “Sheinbaum is in a particularly tough spot… She has to appease Trump but also keep the peace within her left-wing party Morena, which has historically aligned with Cuba’s communist regime,” stated the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
U.S.-Mexico security ties have traditionally been quiet and cooperative since the mid-20th century, first in the context of the Cold War and later to combat drug trafficking. After Mexico formally declared war on the cartels in 2006, cooperation intensified with the 2007 Mérida Initiative, a multibillion-dollar security partnership involving training, intelligence sharing, and institutional reform. U.S. agencies helped professionalize select Mexican units while creating long-term dependency on U.S. logistics and intelligence.
Over time, Washington began applying lessons from the war on terror to Mexico’s drug war. Private military and security contractors were incorporated into Mérida-related programs, expanding notably after 2011. That same year, Operation Lowrider began using aerial surveillance techniques refined in Iraq and Afghanistan to track cartel movements.
Concerns about cartel evolution quickly grew. Groups such as Los Zetas, whose members included former Mexican “elite military troops” trained in the U.S., became notorious due to their brutality as well as growing connections with Hezbollah. Despite these dangers, U.S. involvement in Mexico continued to deepen through new deployments.
Cooperation Between Agencies in the U.S. and Mexico
The U.S. has forged strong ties with agencies in Mexico to combat the flow of arms, weapons, and illegal immigrants. The FBI has traditionally focused on fugitives, kidnappings, and transnational criminal cases, particularly those involving U.S. citizens. Its Hostage Rescue Team was responsiblefor capturing Wedding in January. The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) is also active in Mexico. Having developed a strong relationship with the Mexican Army and Navy special forces, it participates in arrests and raids alongside them.
The CIA is generally considered the primary U.S. agency operating in Mexico. It concentrates on signals intelligence, aerial surveillance, and liaison with vetted Mexican units that are trained and equipped by the U.S., according to former U.S. and Mexican officials.
Other agencies like Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), and local police departmentsmaintain extensive cooperation with Mexican counterparts on smuggling routes, weapons flows, and financial crimes.
Corruption has complicated efforts to reduce the power of organized crime networks. Mexican political and security institutions have been deeply infiltrated by cartels, but there is no shortage of U.S. complicity in intelligence, political, and law enforcement circles for decades. Corruption on both sides has made it essential to rely on tightly vetted special units and to strictly compartmentalize sensitive operations so that only a small number of trusted officials know the full details.
A Harder American Stand on Drugs Could Spell Trouble for Mexico
Operations like Fast and Furious (2009-2011), run by the ATF, meanwhile, allowed weapons to pass into cartel hands in a failed tracking effort, resulting in civilian deaths and those of government officials in both countries.
Even scandals of this magnitude were not enough to disrupt bilateral cooperation until the Trump administration. Rising cartel violence and fentanyl deaths were deemed national security issues and have prompted a more aggressive American approach aimed at reducing U.S. drug fatalities but have often come at the cost of greater instability in Mexico.
As pointed out in a January article in the Americas Quarterly, “Over the past year, Washington has increased pressure on Mexico to take decisive action against drug cartels, including proposals that could involve some form of U.S. military presence on Mexican territory. These demands have been paired with repeated warnings from the White House that the status quo is no longer acceptable. The question isn’t whether U.S. pressure will intensify, but how far it might go—and whether Mexico is ready for the scenarios now being openly discussed.”
When former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in 2018, he pledged to de-escalate the drug war and reduced DEA-Mexican Navy cooperation. In October 2019, a CIA-vetted Mexican army unit called GAIN captured major trafficker Ovidio Guzmán, but after cartel gunmen threatened mass violence and an assault on a housing complex where soldiers’ families were located, López Obrador made the controversial decision to release Guzmán to avoid casualties.
By then, the Mérida Initiative was largely unraveling and was replaced with the Bicentennial Framework under President Biden to preserve and reorient cooperation. Trump’s return has turned U.S. policy back toward a more aggressive stance, this time now backed by broader Republican consensus. Project 2025 explicitly called for a “creative and aggressive approach” to combat cartels, including the use of active-duty military personnel and National Guard units at the border.
Operations in Mexico are a central part of the Trump administration’s strategy to refocus on the Americas, justified by the threat of drug and cartel invasions. The administration declared a national emergency at the southern border on day one, and secret drone surveillance flights over Mexico also increased, while several cartels were designated as foreign terrorist organizations in February 2025.
In April, a national security memorandum titled “Military Mission for Sealing the Southern Border of the United States and Repelling Invasions” put active-duty and reserve forces on border patrol, and border crossings were treated as threatening U.S. sovereignty under it.
In November, the administration began formal planning to send U.S. troops and intelligence officers into Mexico to combat cartel leadership, according to multiple serving and former American officials. The following month, the administration classified fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, significantly broadening the legal authorities available for use. Parallel proposals circulated to place certain missions under Title 50 authority, bringing military personnel under intelligence community oversight to expand operational flexibility.
Plans appeared to stall briefly, but after the Maduro raid in January 2026, the administration began renewing its efforts, the New York Times reported. This could allow for a substantial military buildup along the border, similar to how there was an increased presence of U.S. forces in the Caribbean in the weeks before the Venezuela operation.
Despite clear political sensitivities, Mexico has attempted to continue cooperating. Since Trump’s second inauguration, more than 50 cartel members have been extradited to the U.S., including Rafael Caro Quintero, responsible for the death of a DEA agent in 1985, satisfying a decades-long demand from Washington. And while President Sheinbaum strikes a firm public tone about defending Mexican sovereignty, she has quietly accommodated many U.S. requests to keep bilateral relations stable.
Whether she can prevent a turn toward overt, unilateral U.S. military action remains in doubt. Even without full intervention, the diplomatic risks are rising, not least due to entrenched corruption. Washington revoked visas for dozens of Mexican officials over alleged cartel ties in October 2025, while corruption cases in the U.S., including the arrest of more than a dozen Mississippi law enforcement officers in a drug sting that same month, show how deeply institutions are corrupted on both sides of the border.
There is also the serious danger of reigniting full-scale conflict with the cartels. The current uneasy equilibrium rests on a rough restraint by both state and criminal actors, keeping violence relatively contained. Expanded U.S. involvement, including direct strikes, could push Mexico back into widespread instability, especially since there is no guarantee that Washington intends to sustain the kind of long campaign such a strategy would require.
Any significant miscalculation would predictably strain U.S.-Mexico relations and could leave cartels more emboldened, not weaker. In practice, measures like reducing U.S. drug demand and tightening gun laws that feed southbound weapons flows are more likely to undercut cartel power than cross-border raids. Beyond potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives at home, such steps would also matter in Mexico, where a huge number of people have been killed by the drug war and where civilians will bear the brunt of any failed gambit or flawed policies.
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When speaking about corruption on both sides please keep in mind that “Silver or Lead ?” really means something around here.
If you are told that, lookout. No one can help you.
A lot depends on what Trump and his friends want to do with Mexico as it is too big to ignore what with putting together Fortress America. So perhaps the idea is to eventually make it some sort of American Protectorate with the US military having the right to enter Mexican territory and conducting ‘policing’ operations. The fear here is reigniting full-scale conflict with the cartels but for the Trump White House, that might be a good thing. It would demonstrate that Mexico cannot bring these cartels under control so Trump would try to force Mexico to accept direct US military help. It would be the Godzilla problem all over again-
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/02/25/if-every-debate-about-us-interventionism-was-about-godzilla-instead/
The article is decent, but there’s a weird reference to a connection between the cartels and Hezbollah. I checked the link and it looks pretty unsubstantiated. The paper linked just asserts the connection, references some obscure case from Sweden. It feels like a Russia-gate-style narrative where authorities and academics use their prestige to assert something repeatedly and just act as if it’s long-established fact and doesn’t need to be proven.
I think you are being overly charitable – I would call this blithely ignorant at best, most likely a limited hangout – government sponsored fake “independent media”. Completely ignoring the political side: that there are no cartels outside the US (see Drug Cartels Do Not Exist), that the CIA and DEA not only have no interest in “reducing drug fatalities” or preventing the flow of drugs, but are major, probably dominant drug traffickers (see The Fort Bragg Cartel).
Considering the information that has been pouring out about the general moral condition of the western ruling classes, I think it is not at all an exaggeration to say that the “war on drugs” is about re-enslaving the populations of North, South, and Central America, both to refill the corporate plantations in the South, and destroy people and communities in poor sections of the North that are flooded with drugs with government support.
Kudos!
That Hezbollah reference presented as a given was where I stopped reading.
I’d wager that the CIA is most definitely involved with promoting drug trafficking. In the recent book Narcotopia the author describes the then newly formed DEA going into Burma in the early 70s (why the DEA was allowed to do law enforcement in another sovereign nation to begin with is a very good question) all gung ho to eradicate the heroin trade only to find that the CIA was already entrenched there promoting the drug trade, and they had zero intention of stopping it. I’m sure the DEA’s initial good intentions wore off quite some time ago.
If the US stops any drug trafficking in Mexico, it will only be those operations that refuse to cooperate with the US spooks.
Thanks for the reference to Harp’s book – adding that one to the reading list.
I’d go more for drug-induced ravings. Written by the same person who described Saddam Hussein’s alliance with Al-Qaeda?
Furthermore, the author ends the article by saying that the best solution would be to combat drug addiction in the US and to stop the flow of arms to Mexico as if these were his ideas instead of giving credit to Lopez Obrador and Sheinbaum for consistently confronting the US with its hypocrisy.
In my opinion in the long-term Mexico will bend. For you to win against USA is to concentrate on local economy and minimize USA export. Mexico depends too much on USA. Good example is Mexico oil to Cuba, they stopped it after trump threatened them. I dont even understand why Cuba dint build oil reserves for this day.
My best understanding of how the US engineers instability and control over Mexico is to kind of follow the model of how the British broke Mughal power in India.
The Brits trained and equipped lots of mercenaries in various states in India. When they needed them, they could hire them. But, also, when they cut them lose, you got the side benefit of creating large numbers of well-equipped, well-trained groups of soldiers that could make a play for grabbing money and power. They could shake down a local lord for cash, or try and take power themselves. This had the effect of breaking down the centralized control the Mughals had via satrap type arrangements. The locals couldn’t maintain order and the central government with the real professional army couldn’t be everywhere at once in a large country like India.
The US loves doing these training/equipping programs knowing full well that many of these units will go rogue and use their training/equipment to work for existing cartels, or start up their own operations and compete for control with state and local authorities in Mexico.
Think of all those stories about how the cartels are better armed than the local/state police. That’s a feature, not a bug. How do they make their money to sustain themselves? They need the US market for their product and they need US supplied weapons/ammo.
What’s the solution for the central government in Mexico? Ahhh…well, you’ve got to turn to the US to help you get a grip on all these powerful local outfits that are contesting power in all the various states and localities.
But, of course, the solution only further entrenches the problem and deepens the dependency. Here’s a good quote from the article:
“U.S. agencies helped professionalize select Mexican units while creating long-term dependency on U.S. logistics and intelligence.”
Today’s professional, elite units are inevitably going to become tomorrow’s rogue entrepreneurs that get into drug trafficking. That’s a feature, not a bug!!!
You remind me of the story about former French colony, Chad, expelling the French soldiers garrisoned in their country. The pretext for the soldiers was that they helped keep down terrorism. Then Chad discovered that the French were also funding the terrorists. Perhaps this African pattern is yet to happen in Mexico.
Remember when JD Vance asked a Pentagon official how come so many African coup leaders had been originally trained by the US?
Yup, same model in Africa. The idea is just get lots of money and weapons out into the wild to create chaos and instability and then go to the heads of state and offer a ‘fix’ to their problems. The ‘fix’ inevitably makes the problem worse, of course.
Speaking of JD Vance, he was just at the opening of the Milan opening to the Winter Olympics and when the US team came out, they showed him on the big screen and he was loudly booed and jeered by the audience-
https://www.rt.com/news/632142-trump-surprise-vance-olympics/
Another nation came out later and they were booed too but I will let you guess who.
Fake news. I watched it live. I heard a lot of cheering for the U.S. About the same as for Canada. The amount of cheering a country got seemed to depend on the number of athletes it had, and its chances of winning. The exception was Ukraine, which got an overwhelmingly positive reception.
The West does love their Nazis. The reason governments keep spreading propaganda is because it clearly works. Got an entire parliament to give an actual Nazi a standing O not long ago.
You watched it live but not in person.
NBC cut out the booing. Be aware, I do not use the term Fake News without research.
NBC appears to cut crowd’s booing of JD Vance from Winter Olympics broadcast
Italian commenters here-a-bouts have confirmed this.
>measures like reducing U.S. drug demand and tightening gun laws that feed southbound weapons flows are more likely to undercut cartel power than cross-border raids.
These old saws have always been silly. Along with the way bankers got generations of NPCs to chant “closing the border is impossible” which led to a suicidal corollary: borders are immoral. And the way Noam Chomsky, long-time associate of convicted pimp and suspected Mossad-asset Jeffrey Epstein, convinced people that it was Israel which was really a puppet of the US and not the other way around.
Would the argument that Mexico should reduce the demands for guns and greenbacks be taken seriously?
Would this logic about demand have been applicable to China in relation to opium?
The guns argument is the dumber of the two considering the global nature of the arms trade and the fact that the Mexican army and many state police forces operate as an arm of the cartels.
Reality has revealed the blame America first/Democracy Now vision of the world to be a parody act.
@ hauntologism at 9:18 am
Re “Noam Chomsky … convinced people that it was Israel which was really a puppet of the US and not the other way around”.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson who ran the US State Department for 4 years in the early 2000s also says the US is the puppet master and Israel the puppet.
I predict overreach and blowback. And a lot of misery in the interregnum. When the US empire collapses (all empires die, and the US is increasingly looking like it’s past its sell-by date), new statelets and systems will emerge.
“…There is also the serious danger of reigniting full-scale conflict with the cartels…”
Yes, the CIA is deeply embedded in Mexico. Isn’t the CIA running guns, drugs and have assets within the cartels? How much influence do they have over the cartels? I would think that the cartels are an effective way to pressure and manipulate the Mexican government and a convenient excuse to send US military into Mexico to further manipulate the situation. We can ask folks like Larry Johnson about this aspect.
It is surprising that the US lets Mexico buy Chinese EVs. Also, aren’t these cartels the biggest buyers of the weapons that NAT0 sends to the Ukraine? It seems that the US government allowed the drugs to come into the country to keep their population weak and controllable.
Audit the banks laundering the drug money and freeze it.
This article (and others like it) are odd to me. They seem to describe an alternate reality where the United States government is interested in and able to adopt an “aggressive stand” against drugs and something called “cartels,” fictions invented in reactionary think-tanks in the middle of the 20th century. Although it may be useful in some ways to understand the alternate reality that the US government wants us to believe, the article fails as an explanatory text. I am no more the wiser as to why the US government is pursuing this made-up “aggressive stand” after reading the article. Clearly the US government wants something from the Mexican government… but what is it? There are clues in many of the wonderful comments, but ultimately all we can do is guess. My own guess is that there are various elements close to or within the Trump administration looking for concessions on trade (with the T-MEC renewal coming up), markets (with Mexico banning GMO corn and ending new oil concessions in the last decade), and foreign policy (Cuba, which to its credit the article did mention). Threatening military action over drugs and “cartels” is just the mafia intimidation tactic we’re all used to.
You are misleading readers, as in Making Shit Up. You provide no evidence to back your denigration of this article. And you make false claims, as in insinuate there are no gang in Mexico. Not only are they present but they have been regularly reported as such a major presence as to constitute a threat to the authority of the central government.
A search engine shows it is not an “alternative reality” that Trump is threatening military intervention in Mexico based on claims about drug activity and cartels in Mexico.
Yes, there is the question of what Trump wants to achivee, but you demand that a post author mind read Trump? Are you nuts? Look at how many pretexts he has offered for his threats v. Iran. And we have also repeatedly cited Wesley Clark saying the US had no objectives in attacking Iraq, so this is a long-standing US predisposition, to knock over or mess with countries just because we can.
I’d love to see what Ioan Grillo is writing at the moment. Grillo is an Englishman who lived through the first wave of hard drugs in west England and decided to start a journalism career back in 1990s. Taught himself spanish and move there. Took cojones. Since then he’s written multiple books on cartels. Incredibly brave dude. Very pessimistic of any successful control of the drug biz. Too much money. In the US we’ve got the banksters. In Mexico they’ve got the gangsters. Hard to tell them apart, especially as more gets exposed about elite financiers in the Epstein files. 2026 is going to be interesting in the Chinese sense of the word.
P