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The US’s Not-So-Secret War in Mexico

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The Mexican state of Chihuahua is spelled with the letters “CIA”.

The mysterious deaths of two CIA agents in an alleged car accident on a treacherous mountain road in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua last week has triggered a diplomatic crisis between Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum government and the Trump administration. It has also sparked a standoff between Mexico’s federal authorities and the state authorities of Chihuahua, which are governed by the right-wing, Washington-aligned National Action Party (PAN).

As the British Mexico-based journalist Ioan Grillo reports, the CIA agents, who numbered between two and four, were allegedly assisting Chihuahua’s State Investigation Agency, or AEI, in dismantling a network of mega labs for synthetic drugs, which Chihuahua attorney general César Jáuregui described as “one of the biggest seizures in the country”:

Run by a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel, which has long controlled crime in the region, the labs boasted dozens of barrels of powder, liquids, ovens and gas cylinders that could churn out crystal meth. The security forces located the labs with the help of surveillance drones, Jáuregui said.

As the convoy rolled back on the long drive towards Chihuahua city, a vehicle went over the edge of a narrow highland road and crashed into a ravine, killing the four occupants: an AEI officer, the AEI director and two CIA agents. The deaths have sparked questions about how the CIA is involved in operations in Mexico, if it breaks a Mexican national security law, and who knew about it.

There are still far more questions than there are answers regarding the CIA’s participation in this operation, and what it means for US-Mexican cooperation on anti-narcotics.

President Claudia Sheinbaum insists that her government was not informed about the direct involvement of CIA agents. If true, the operation represents a clear violation of Mexico’s constitution and sovereignty. Worse still, it was at least the third time CIA agents had joined Chihuahua authorities in a drug trafficking operation, according to the LA Times.

One of the reasons why former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO) was so despised by the US Drug Enforcement Agency is that he put strict limitations on the ability of US government agencies, including the DEA and CIA, to operate in Mexico. As readers may recall, the DEA retaliated by planting allegations in the Western press that AMLO had once received campaign funding from drug cartels in the very middle of the 2024 presidential elections.

AMLO’s 2020 amendments to Articles 70 and 71 of the National Security Law expressly prohibit foreign agents from operating on Mexican soil without the knowledge of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Security and Citizen Protection. All organs of the three branches of government that have contact with foreign agents must have authorisation of the federal government’s security cabinet, to whom they must inform of any meeting or interaction.

None of which appears to have happened in this case. Federal authorities, says Sheinbaum, were kept in the dark about the operation, as well as presumably any other operations being conducted by the CIA or other US government agencies in Chihuahua.

“There are no join operations on land or in the air involving Mexican and US forces”, said the Mexican president a couple of days ago. Sheinbaum said there is only sharing of information between Mexico’s government and the US, carried out within a “well-established” legal framework.

Michael McCaul, the GOP chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security, has contradicted Sheinbaum’s claims, arguing that there is no way that President Sheinbaum didn’t know about the CIA’s participation in the raid. But then he would say that; the alternative would be to admit that the CIA knowingly broke Mexican law and violated Mexican sovereignty.

However, as long as doubts remain about the government’s version of events, political stability in Mexico will be further weakened. And political destabilisation is one of the CIA’s long-honed specialities.

As an angry editorial in the pro-government La Jornada notes, the unravelling threads of the constantly shifting, contradictory accounts of what happened on Sunday “raise more and more doubts about the magnitude of Washington’s espionage and interference operations in our country and the possible connivance of Chihuahua’s state government” (machine translation):

At first, the state’s attorney general, César Jáuregui Moreno, agreed with the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson, that the deceased were “officers attached” to the diplomatic legation who were returning from an operation in which six alleged drug laboratories were dismantled when the vehicle in which they were traveling fell into a ravine. The general director of the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency, Pedro Román Oseguera Cervantes, and the ministerial police officer Manuel Genaro Méndez Montes also died in the traffic incident.

However, on Monday Jáuregui changed his version to a much more confusing one, according to which the aforementioned operation was carried out on the 16th and 17th without any participation of US agents. Later on, US embassy officials asked Oseguera Cervantes for a lift to Chihuahua City, where they were due to take a flight at 10 in the morning, and lost their lives during that journey.

Needless to say, this second version of events was discarded when the Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the alleged embassy officials did actually work for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and did participate in the raid on the narco lab, as part of the Trump administration’s broader “fight” against drug trafficking in the hemisphere Western.

It has since emerged that members of the Mexican armed forces also participated in the raid, stoking speculation that Mexico’s Secretariat of National Defence (Sedena) knew about the raid but did not inform the federal government. It has also come to light, however, that the CIA agents were disguised as Mexican state police officers, like a scene out of the Dennis Villeneuve movie Sicario. In other words, every effort was made to conceal their true identity.

It has also been revealed by the chief of the Chihuahua police force that the Governor of Chihuahua, Maru Campos Galván, has opened the state’s doors not only to the CIA but also to the FBI, the DEA, US Customs and Border Protection, and Border Patrol, not only to exchange information, but also so that they have a “permanent presence” in Chihuahua:

From La Jornada (machine translated):

An entire floor of the so-called Sentinel Tower, headquarters of the Ministry of Public Security of the state of Chihuahua in Ciudad Juárez, is intended to function as a bunker for agents belonging to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), among others, reported Gilberto Loya Chávez, director of the state police corporation.

According to the official, analysts and technical personnel from DEA, FBI, HSI and CBP will operate on level 18 of the building, in a collaboration scheme that will also include Mexican authorities such as the Secretariats of National Defense, Navy and Federal Security and Citizen Protection, as well as the National Guard.

“At the level of collaboration we have, it is sufficient with the state powers to be able to cooperate with these agencies on a permanent basis, it implies an exchange of information, and for this of course the tower is open for the eventual and, where appropriate, permanent presence of these agencies,” Gilberto Loya said on the eve of the start of operations of the building, this week.

He added that, “in parallel, all the processes are running while we await the Mexican Foreign Ministry to authorize the next level of collaboration.”

The Mexican government claims that authorisation never came. According to Washington, the growing presence of US government agencies has been signed off by Mexico and is all part and parcel of the intensifying process of “cooperation and collaboration” between the two countries.

As the editorial in La Jornada points out, these incidents occur in a “context of permanent threats against Mexico by Donald Trump and his team”, who keep requesting permission from Sheinbaum to launch military strikes against Mexico’s drug cartels. As Trump has pushed for deeper US involvement on Mexico, Sheinbaum has found herself in the unenviable position of having to appease him while also protecting (as much as possible) Mexican sovereignty.

This latest incident also takes place against the backdrop of ongoing renegotiations of the USMCA trade deal, for which Trump is trying to exert all possible leverage for US advantage. It also comes as Mexico tries to maintains its support of Cuba, even as the Trump administration ratchets up its threats against the island, and just after Sheinbaum returned from her meeting with Spain’s Pedro Sánchez and other progressive leaders in Barcelona.

The editorial in La Jornada concludes with the following paragraph:

[I]t is necessary to investigate whether what the U.S. newspaper and other media say is true, establish the criminal responsibilities of Prosecutor Jáuregui and Governor [Maru] Campos, and completely reevaluate cooperation with Washington in security matters.

The Sheinbaum government has already called for Governor Campos to give testimony to Mexico’s senate about how CIA agents ended up operating in her jurisdiction. There have also been calls for her to be charged with treason, which, while seemingly justifiable, will probably not happen given the Sheinbaum government’s innately cautious nature.

As the Mexico-based US journalist Kurt Hackbath notes in his weekly Soberania podcast, the US was, and is, clearly conspiring with opposition governors in Mexico to infiltrate the country with CIA agents in their states under the pretext of narcotics operations. And that, as Hackbath concludes, is an expellable offence for the US ambassador to Mexico.

Again, that’s almost certainly not going to happen. Indeed, Mexico’s Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch appears to be accepting the Chihuahua AG’s version of events for now, which only adds to the confusion, as Grillo notes in the tweet below.

But Mexico’s government needs to be “extremely wary” of the CIA looking to increase its presence in the country, warns veteran Mexican journalist and historian Lorenzo Meyer. One of the agency’s main functions, Meyer says in an interview with Julio Astillero, is to destabilise foreign governments that are not entirely to Washington’s liking, citing the examples of CIA-backed coups in Guatemala (1954) and Chile (1973).

Trump’s Man in Mexico

As readers may recall, Trump’s pick for US ambassador to Mexico, retired Col. Ronald D. Johnson, is no stranger to the CIA. In fact, he is a former CIA career officer as well as an ex Green Beret special forces officer whose missions included combat in El Salvador’s gruesome 12-year civil war (1980-92). During his “second career” at the agency, Johnson had a habit of popping up in troubled hotspots like Panama (during the US invasion) and Yugoslavia.

Johnson has already had one tour of duty as a senior diplomat, serving as ambassador to El Salvador during Trump’s first term, where he forged close ties with the country’s strong-arm president, Nayib Bukele. He was also formerly the senior representative for the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA at US Southern Command — in other words, a man who presumably knows a thing or two about military interventions and destabilisation campaigns.

On news of the appointment, Hackbarth said that while the former ambassador, Ken Salazar, was a “metiche” (meddlesome), Johnson is a hired thug. In the clip below, Hackbarth reads out a brief and rather graphic account (from Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop) of some of the dark deeds the Salvadorian military and paramilitaries got up to during the 1980s under the supervision of US military consultants like Johnson:

The Trump administration, rather than showing contrition for being caught in flagrante breaking Mexican law and violating Mexican sovereignty, has gone straight on the offensive. In an interview with Fox News, Karoline Leavitt accused Sheinbaum of showing no sympathy for the two CIA officers that were killed while illegally operating in Mexican territory:

“Considering all that the United States of America is doing currently under this president to stop the scourge of drug trafficking through Mexico, to the United States… We have seen some cooperation from President Sheinbaum. I think the president always wants to see more cooperation.”

Firstly, the claim that Sheinbaum did not express regret for the deaths of the two CIA agents is demonstrably false:

Secondly, the claim that US forces are targeting Mexico, as well as Latin America as a whole, in order to combat the illegal trade in narcotics is questionable at best. On the one hand, cooperation between Washington and Mexico has lead to the capture and/or extradition of dozens of cartel capos, including Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, alias Mencho, who was killed in an anti-narcotics operation in February.

On the other hand, the CIA’s role is not to combat the drugs trade; it is to destabilise governments, organise coups and remove hindrances to US empire and hegemony. In fact, the agency has arguably been the biggest single facilitator of the global drugs trade since WW2, helping the trade flourish, either actively or by turning a blind eye, in Asia (through the Kuomintang and Air America), Europe (the Corsican mafia), and Central America (Noriega).

In Mexico, CIA agents were allegedly involved in the Guadalajara cartel’s kidnapping, torture and killing of the DEA agent Kiki Camarena, according to the best-selling book by Jesús Esquivel, The CIA, Camarena and Caro Quintero. And let’s not forget the agency’s role in Afghanistan…

As we have argued since 2023, while the drug cartels are a huge, and growing, problem for both the US and the Americas as a whole, the US’ rapidly escalating war against the drug cartels across the entire Latin American region is, at bottom, a pretext for another campaign of regional plunder and geostrategic domination, which is now playing out.

To justify its escalating hostilities against Venezuela, the Trump administration hyped up President Nicolás Maduro’s alleged involvement in drug trafficking through the CIA-fabricated Cartel de los Soles. Yet once the CIA had done its work and Maduro had been abducted, to be replaced by his vice-president, Delcy Rodríguez, almost all talk about drug trafficking stopped — despite claims that Delcy and her brother, Jorge, are the real heads of the imagined cartel.

Now, all the talk is of controlling and exploiting Venezuela’s resources — its oil and gas, gold and silver, bauxite and rare earth minerals — and the need to free them up for Western and allied conglomerates. China, Russia, Iran, Cuba and North Korea have all been cut out of the equation. Venezuelan revenues are now deposited in US-run accounts, just as happened with post-invasion Iraq, while laws ensuring state oversight and control of resources are being eased.

The drugs were never the real objective, as we argued from the very moment the drums of war began beating; they were the cover story for invasion, resource plunder and the elimination of Chinese and Russian influence in Venezuela. By early December, the whole drug cartel narrative was unravelling so fast that even the US mainstream media were poking holes in it. Then came Trump’s full pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who is the epitome of a narco politico.

Returning to Mexico, it’s worth noting that few countries on the planet have suffered more US interference and interventions. Indeed, as we’ve noted before, Mexico City is even home to a Museum of Interventions, according to which the United States has violated Mexican sovereignty 13 times since Mexico’s foundation in 1810. One of those invasions lead to the theft of over half of Mexico’s territory.

Since the opening of the new US embassy complex in late 2024, Mexico City is also home to the largest U.S. Department of State facility in the world outside Washington, DC. And that inevitably translates into a very large CIA presence. The CIA is already deeply embedded in Mexico — indeed, according to recently declassified documents, as many as four former presidents were once on the agency’s payroll.

The CIA’s extensive presence in Mexico significantly limits Sheinbaum’s freedom of action, as Yves has pointed out previously. Given the power asymmetries inherent in the Mexico-US relationship, the Mexican president is unlikely — and probably ill advised — to take strong action against Washington itself, such as by expelling Ambassador Johnson.

But perhaps she can make an example of Governor Mora, pour encourager les autres. Mora has apparently gone AWOL and is refusing to return Sheinbaum’s calls. The leaders of Mora’s political party, meanwhile, are not only standing by her despite her apparent violation of Mexican law and sovereignty; they’re holding her up as a hero who is willing to do whatever it takes to bring down the drug cartels. And that can be a seductive argument.

With the CIA building alliances with state government apparatuses, Mexico’s Sheinbaum government faces arguably its biggest threat to date. The leadership of the two main opposition parties in Mexico, PAN and PRI, both of which have a long, storied history of selling out to Washington, clearly support the idea of US military intervention — whatever it takes to get the somewhat left-of-centre MORENA party out of power and bring back the status quo ante.

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13 comments

  1. ciroc

    If the CIA agents had really died in a car accident, it would have been easy to cover it up. The fact that they made it public suggests that wasn’t the case. They probably wanted to hide the embarrassing way in which they died, such as having their car blown up by cartel members with a rocket launcher.

  2. Candide

    Fooling the people with misunderstandings/disunderstandings of reality
    fits well with billionaire purchase of entire news organizations, and demonizing refugees
    with scaremongering. Thanks are due for Nick and NC for administering an antidote to the poisonous game imposed across our hemisphere!

  3. AG

    Thanks!!
    I wish Taylor Sheridan would read this…

    I know constraints of creating popular film narratives.
    But as of late in topics such as this their simplicity and one-dimensional views are striking.

    Regardless of some of SICARIOs aesthtic merits (i.e. also director Villeneuve and the score by the late Jóhann Jóhannsson) the all around projection of what geopolitics is lives up to how empire sees itself.

    Even a MIAMI VICE movie was way more advanced in trying to shed light onto the complexities and evil nature of our own elites.

    It is no coincidence that SICARIO 2 while more conventional in it´s filmic approach and clumsier story construction was ideologically way ahead of its predecessor is a product of the mind of Stefano Sollima.

    Sollima is an Italian and thus not Hollywood, who unlike Sheridan knows violence first hand as a former war reporter/documentary DOP.

    On this note, may I recommend the SKY mini-series about drug trafficking between Mexico/US/Italy ZEROZEROZERO, based on the book of the same name.

    And those who can stomach it, the borderline Ridley Scott take, THE COUNSELOR, also based on a book.

    p.s. With his LIONESS series Sheridan has revealed even more limitations as geopolitical analysis is concerned.
    I welcome the honesty concerning relationships in that show.

    But politically after 25 years of War on Terror and all the other shit that has gone down since Korea and Vietnam I cannot wrap my head around the fact that Hollywood today sounds as imperialistic as ever – created by people who call themselves in all seriousness “left” – one way or the other. (Sheridan won´t, but he does display a certain groundedness towards his audience. Or at least tries to emulate it.)

    1. Nick Corbishley Post author

      “On this note, may I recommend the SKY mini-series about drug trafficking between Mexico/US/Italy ZEROZEROZERO, based on the book of the same name.”

      Thanks for that, AG. It’s a great book but I didn’t realise it had been made into a series. Will have to try to track it down somehow.

      1. AG

        ZeroZeroZero
        fwiw:
        https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8332438/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_in_0_q_zerozerozero
        I watched it on DVD from my public library.
        Amazon Prime might have it. Depending on territory.
        trailer
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aMhpKM-30o
        However the series is much bolder and more proficient than Sky´s overly conventional trailer.
        Especially Janus Metz´s episodes.

        Interviews with the Italian producers made it pretty clear that ZEROZEROZERO was an immense challenge for a European funded production.

        The production value was massive by comparison. And the willingness to go “cinematic”.
        And I assume revenue from selling the rights eventually did not justify further projects of such nature. Covid crisis did the rest.

        p.s. Metz did a great job with his sophisticated and reduced tennis drama “Borg” about Borg v. McEnroe.

        1. Nick Corbishley Post author

          The fact that the same people who created the series were also behind the movie Gomorrah certainly bodes well, as does the inclusion of Gabriel Byrne in the cast. If it captures at least some of the attention to detail of the book, particularly regarding the economics of the cocaine trade, it will be worth a watch. I remember when El País interviewed Roberto Saviano on the publication of his book, which I covered in an article for WOLF STREET, and Saviano put it in the starkest of terms:

          Cocaine is a merchandise that is sold everywhere in the world, all the time. I used the expression [in the book] “governs the world” because the data are astonishing: More than 400 billion dollars of revenue per year… If I invested 1,000 dollars in an Apple share, in one year I would make back around $1,200, $1,500. If I invested the same amount in cocaine, I could make back $182,000. That’s the power of cocaine.

          He also said this about the role of “fast ports” in the drugs trade, which these days always makes me think of Ecuador, now the world’s largest conduit for the cocaine trade whose economy also happens to be dollarised (kaching!):

          One thing that works in the narcos’ favour is that a port that handles containers slowly is as good as dead. A port that receives and processes many containers as quickly as possible is alive and kicking. To give a hypothetical example, if a port were to decide to check all of the containers it handled, no company would ever want to use it. The faster the port, the better. And it’s this paradox that helps to make the drug trade possible.

          Lastly, this one on how the drug cartels saved Europe’s banking system during the Global Financial Crisis:

          These days, the big drug cartels do not use tax havens, or at least they use them less than before. Instead, they use European [and obviously American] banks. In the new book, I mention Antonio María Costa, the former Under-Secretary of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, who said at the beginning of the crisis that the European banking system had lowered its security barriers. In other words, they had opened the floodgates to drug money. Costa has publicly stated that the European financial systems were as good as saved by the global drug trade, yet no EU government has responded to his accusation.

    2. lyman alpha blob

      Thanks AG. I hadn’t heard of Sicario before this post but I’m big fan of Villeneuve’s aesthetic in his scifi movies and I just recently watched Jóhannsson’s movie Last and First Men. That latter one is interesting for the visuals and music, but admittedly a little light on plot (mostly none). Anyway, I’ll check it out along with the others you recommended.

      And thanks Nick for another great rundown of the situation – really excellent work.

      2. AG

        Didn´t know Jóhannsson had directed.
        There are other tentpole/big budget composers who moved into other areas of filmmakering too, like Michael Giacchino (some smaller directing assignments) or John Ottman (film editing).

      3. AG

        ahem, Jóhannsson fits as he died of an overdose, if one belives Wiki…🙄
        Well, in entertainment that kind of abuse is normal.

    3. AG

      re: drug movie recommendations

      AMERICAN MADE (2017) the more indie-style Tom Cruise vehicle about Barry Seal.

      Written by Garry Spinelli quoted on Wiki:

      “I was looking for little hidden pieces of history. Small stories that affected larger global events and I came across the Mena story. And I always wanted to do a gangster film. Goodfellas is one of my favorite movies and I was always on the hunt to try to find my version of that. And once I started researching CIA’s involvement in Mena, the same name kept popping up, was this Barry Seal character. As soon as I found Barry, I knew I had a movie.”
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Made_(film)

      Ridley Scott´s overlooked but maybe one of his best works ever, AMERICAN GANGSTER (2007), biopic and Denzel Washington vehicle about Frank Lucas.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Gangster_(film)

      NETFLIX´s bestselling series OZARK (4 seasons.) A seldom case where each season does add something.

      Since I first learned about the (probable) ties between the Clintons and drug trade in his governor years
      here on NC, I have asked myself if the creators of OZARK were inspired by those episodes. Of course in today´s America it would be suicide to admit such a line of thought publicly as a moviemaker.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_(TV_series)

      KILL THE MESSENGER (2014), the Gary Webb biopic which I already mentioned last year:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_the_Messenger_(2014_film)

      To pick a non-American, French slow-moving but very well crafted THE CONNECTION/ LA FRENCH (2014), by Cedric Jimenez, inspired by The French Connection. About the “relationship” between a drug king and a French cop who is fighting him. It eventually creates empathy for both sides.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Connection_(2014_film)

  4. AG

    p.s. Tariq Ali had written about Kosovo post 1999 and Camp Bondsteel 20 years ago as a means to destabilize EU + RU by way of redirecting heroin routes from Afghanistan away from Turkey to the European continent/Balkans.

    I haven´t followed up that geopolitical game since. To see in how far it fulfilled its political and economic means in ways not unsimiliar Mexico´s case.

    I guess NC covered that too in the past…

  5. Andrew

    This is just one more confirmation for me that the world (and the US perhaps more than most places) is just nuts and immoral. Like any country should have an organization like the CIA or embassies that have any special privilege. The lack of transparency in governments is a scourge and just encourages bad actors.

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