“The time has come to show the United States that it is under threat from a country of 130 million inhabitants that is finally waking up.”
Russia is trying to poison bilateral relations between the Mexico and the US by taking advantage of Mexico’s ruling party Morena’s innate anti-Americanism. That is the conclusion of an article published last week by Washington-based American journalist Dolia Estévez. The apparent basis for this claim is an alleged document published by the “Social Design Agency”, part of a Kremlin-funded global disinformation campaign called Doppelgänger.
That document somehow found its way into the hands of the FBI, and the US Department of Justice declassified it last week. In its decision to reveal elements of the document to Estévez, a reporter with ties to the Woodrow Wilson Centre for International Scholars, a US government think tank, the DOJ sought to “alert public opinion and the Mexican government about Russia’s sinister plans to drag Mexico into a spurious conflict with the United States”.
“Existential Resentment”
The Russian document advocates intensifying Russian meddling in Mexico by stirring up anti-American sentiment in the country. The authors propose exploiting Mexicans’ “existential resentment” over the loss of over half of their territory to the US in the mid-19th century as well as creating a “perception of threat” on a border overwhelmed by violence and migration — all apparently with one main goal in mind: to help Donald Trump, “our partner”, get back in the White House:
Written in Russian and translated into English, the six-page text.. brings the 1848 war to life with a map depicting California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, part of Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas as not belonging to either the United States or Mexico. Instead, there is an imaginary gap between the two, with the slogan “Mexico does not forgive” along the dividing line. Although territorial annexation is still present in the collective imagination of some, it is crazy to assume that it will lead to another war with the United States, which the writing evokes with a painting of the Battle of Buena Vista in 1847, which Mexico lost…
From the document’s title, A Mexican Pass for Candidate “A”: A Project for Proxies in the November 2024 Campaign – to the last sentence – “The time has come to show the United States that it is under threat from a country of 130 million inhabitants that is finally waking up” – the project makes [Russia’s] intentions clear: to use Mexico as a tool to erode the credibility of the US electoral system and help Trump win the elections.
“Candidate A (Trump), who was building a border wall, who every day of his presidency talked about the immigration problem coming from the South and to whom the baton must be passed to shift the political narrative [NC: presumably a reference to the war in Ukraine], urgently needs an intensifying confrontation with Mexico.” The success of the U.S. economy, which electorally favours “candidate B” (Democrat), leaves Trump the option of “creating the perception of a threat” from violent cartels and hordes of angry migrants at the border.
Morena, the party of former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the current head of state Claudia Sheinbaum, is, in the words of the alleged document cited by Estévez, “an easily manipulated centre-left formation with anti-American tendencies, that is favourable to de-dollarisation and a reorientation of Mexico’s economic priorities.” As for Morena’s electoral base, it consists principally of Mexico’s disadvantaged classes, which largely share this anti-American sentiment — again, according to the document cited by Estévez.
But is the document real? Who knows? It could be. But all we have to go on is the word of the FBI, whose judgment was, to put it mildly, sorely lacking in its “investigation” of Russiagate, as the Durham Report concluded last year:
“[T]he FBI discounted or willfully ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive relationship between Trump and Russia… An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes. Unfortunately, it did not.”
Even by the standards of those who brought us Russiagate, this latest story is riddled with holes, not least of which is the alleged document’s use of the word “success” to describe the US economy right now. Then there is the idea that the government of Mexico, whose economy is joined at the hip to the US, is somehow favourable to de-dollarisation. It also seems that Kamala Harris, like Biden before her, is perfectly capable of sabotaging her own presidential campaign without any need of outside help, and one would imagine that Moscow knows this.
Also, both the former Trump and current Biden governments have done a sterling job of stoking anti-US sentiment in Mexico on their own, through a combination of insults (mainly on the part of Trump), lawsuits (mainly Biden) and threats (from both sides but particularly Trump and the Republicans who have been talking about intervening militarily in Mexico to cap the capos for at least five years). And lest we forget, these accusations, whether true or not, are coming from the country that has meddled the most in Mexico for the past 180 years.
That all being said, Russia does have a motive for fanning the flames of anti-US sentiment in Mexico. Exacerbating tensions between the US and its direct southern neighbour and largest trade partner is a good way of keeping the US on its toes in its own neighbourhood, and somewhat distracted from other parts of the world. The same goes for Moscow’s deepening of ties with Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.
But if that is what Moscow is indeed doing, it pales into insignificance with what the US has done over the past 10 years with Russia’s direct neighbour, Ukraine, which includes (but is by no means limited to) orchestrating the Euro Maiden coup, empowering Ukraine’s Azov Nazis and arming Kiev to the teeth so that it could wage war on the Eastern oblasts. When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine finally began, Washington, together with London, did everything they could to wreck any chances of a swift negotiated peace.
Estévez closes her article with this far from convincing exhortation to her readers:
What I relate here should be enough to convince the short-sighted, skeptical or ignorant that Russian interference in Mexico is not an invention of the CIA, nor the product of the “Russophobia” of a handful of journalists on both sides of the Atlantic, but a real and proactive strategy of great importance in which Morena, knowingly or not, is a formidably useful tool.
“Back to the Cold War”
US accusations of Russian meddling in Mexico are likely to continue, if not intensify, in the coming months…
Read the full article on Naked Capitalism
Nick Corbishley 