Twenty years ago, the largest US embassy in the world was in occupied Iraq. Today, it is in Mexico. And the first person to take charge of the new facilities will be a former CIA agent and Green Beret.
The US’ outgoing Ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, just “opened” the United States’ new embassy building in Mexico — a full two years behind schedule. Obviously, the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic will have hindered progress. Indeed, the new embassy is still not quite open to the public yet — hence the use of inverted commas in the first sentence– and is expected to remain that way until late 2025.
Work began on the project in 2018, during Donald Trump’s first term. It was also the year that the revamped NAFTA trade deal, or USMCA, was signed.
Built on the site of a former Colgate-Palmolive factory that required extensive toxic clean-up (nice little metaphor), the new facilities cost $1.2 billion to build, measure 49,000 square meters and, once fully operational, will house 1,400 employees. It will be the US’ largest embassy in the world, according to Salazar, seeing off competition from the likes of Canada (#5), Afghanistan (#4), Pakistan (#3), Lebanon (#2) and Iraq (#1), which has been significantly downsized from an initial staff of 16,000 to just 349 today.
Note that two of those countries have been militarily occupied by the US (Iraq and Afghanistan, which was eventually abandoned by US forces in 2021). Lebanon is currently under attack by Israel for the umpteenth time while Pakistan has a been key strategic ally of Washington’s for decades, especially from the time the US began supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989). And then there’s Canada, whose government is probably livid that Mexico has once again leapfrogged its way to the top.
The new US embassy campus in Mexico provides a “secure, modern, and environmentally sustainable platform” for US conniving diplomacy, according to Davis Brody Bond (h/t upstarter), one of the architectural firms chosen to design the project:
The Embassy is sunken several stories into the ground, and designed around a large covered open air courtyard, responding to the scale of the neighborhood and climate of the region. Several additional smaller courtyards permeate the dense office block, providing sunlight, air, and natural scenery deep within embassy operations. The exterior façade is protected by a large, bronze brise-soleil that minimizes heat gain without diminishing views out of Mexico City.
The new facility incorporates rigorous sustainability and energy-saving goals, aiming to reduce environmental impact, optimize building performance, and enhance the self-sufficiency of the campus…
It is a relief to know that the US’ Mexico-based spooks will soon be doing their plotting in a “campus” that is sustainable and energy-efficient. During the ceremony to mark the embassy’s near-inauguration, Salazar described the scale and ambition of the new facility as testament to “the singular relationship between the two nations, not only as the main trading partners, but as a family. It also reflects the importance of our bilateral integration to make North America more prosperous and competitive.”
That word “integration” is, I believe, key. There is no way that Washington would undertake such a grandiose project if it didn’t have larger plans for Mexico, and the broader Latin American region. My guess is that those plans will include further intensifying the integration of the three NAFTA 2.0 members, before possibly extending the USMCA trade deal beyond the immediate confines of North America. That’s assuming Trump doesn’t first destroy it.
Just a couple of days ago, President Claudia Sheinbaum reiterated the position of her predecessor and mentor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO), that the USMCA should not be limited to the three current member countries, but should be extended further south to other parts of Latin America. According to Sheinbaum, this expansion would transform the continent into an “economic power”, surpassing even other regions of the world.
Strained Relations
However, diplomatic relations between the US and Mexico are at a low point, even as their bilateral trade reaches record levels. Roughly three months ago, Mexico’s then-outgoing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (aka AMLO), took the largely symbolic step of putting his government’s relations with the US and Canadian embassies on ice after their ambassadors publicly criticised his proposed judicial reforms, which AMLO argued are a purely domestic affair. In the end, the concerted efforts to derail the reforms fizzled to nothing.
There have also been clashes over Mexico’s security agenda. When Ken Salazar lambasted AMLO’s security policies just days after the president left office, AMLO’s successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, responded by criticising Salazar’s inconsistent messaging on security matters. Indeed, one of Sheinbaum’s first acts in government was to put a leash on Salazar by insisting that all contact between the ambassador and the Mexican government must go through Mexico’s Foreign Ministry.
“A series of, let’s say, general guidelines have been established because the ambassador often calls one government minister after another. So, now have we told him: ‘If you want to discuss issues pertaining to the Ministry of Energy because US businessmen are interested in investing [in Mexico] and they want to know the minister’s availability, [you must go] through the Foreign Ministry.”
If relations between the two countries are strained today, they appear set to sour a whole lot more in the months to come. Just in the past few weeks, Trump has threatened to close the US-Mexican border, to carry out mass deportations, including of undocumented Mexicans, punish trade with tariffs on Mexican goods of 25% and make cooperation between the two countries contingent on the containment of drug trafficking and the migration crisis.
At the same time, members of the Trump administration have been debating to what extent, not whether, the US should “invade” Mexico. This is par for the course these days. Throughout the election campaign, droves of Republican lawmakers and right-wing pundits, including arch neo-con and regime change-specialist Lindsay Graham, the governor of Florida, Ron de Santis, media pundit Tucker Carlson and former attorney general, Bill Barr, called for direct, overt US military intervention against Mexico’s drug cartels, ostensibly to stem the flow of fentanyl.
Worse still, the Sheinbaum government will soon have to deal with Donald Trump’s picks for US Secretary of State, Marc Rubio, a hardcore neo-con with dripping disdain for progressive governments in Latin America, and US ambassador to Mexico, retired Col. Ronald D. Johnson, a former CIA officer and ex-army special forces officer whose missions included combat in El Salvador’s 12-year civil war (1980-92).
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 apparently got on like a house on fire 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 regime change operations.
As Oaxaca-based US journalist Kurt Hackbarth said on his (excellent) weekly podcast, Soberania, while Salazar is 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 US special forces got up to in Central America during the 1980s:
Hackbarth even suggests that Mexico should reject Johnson’s appointment as ambassador — something, he said, the Sheinbaum government is well within its rights to do, but probably won’t:
This is very clearly an ambassador chosen to implement and cover for US covert operations in Mexico, which Trump has promised. It’s unlikely that the US would do something as stupid as to march across the border like they did against Pancho Villa in the punitive expeditions 100 years ago. But to step up covert operations based on the model they used of kidnapping (the Sinaloa cartel capo) Mayo Zambada, absolutely. And remember, the United States’ strategy in Syria, very sadly, has worked. So, I think they are all the more revved up to try these manoeuvres elsewhere.
US Ambassador: A Crucial Role in Mexico
For Mexico, the role of US ambassador is even more important than it is for most other countries — partly due to the sheer number of times it has been invaded by its northern neighbour over the past 200 or so years (at least 10, according to the Council on Hemispheric Affairs).
Mexico City even hosts a National Museum of Interventions, which I visited a couple of months ago. Housed in the former Monastery of San Diego Churubusco, which was used as a makeshift fort during the US army’s invasion of Mexico City in 1847, the museum offers a fascinating trip down a dark collective memory lane. Among the exhibits are photos of US soldiers storming into the city of Veracruz in 1914 as well as maps of the Mexico that existed before the US invaded and seized possession of over half its territory between 1846-8.
The Museum of Interventions, in the Mexico City barrio of Coyoacán
The US ambassador is also a vital figurehead in Mexico due to the scale of influence the US wields within Mexico’s political, business and military circles. For example, during June 2022, Salazar visited Mexico’s National Palace 18 times in two weeks, to chaperone AMLO in meetings with US businessmen, sparking caustic rumours that Salazar had his own office in the building.
Johnson’s appointment coincides with an intensification of hostilities between rival gangs in Sinaloa following the DEA’s arrest/kidnapping of cartel kingpin as well as calls from Republican politicians in the US and members of Mexico’s National Action Party to designate Mexico’s drug cartels as “narco-terroristas”. Marco Rubio, for one, has fully embraced Trump’s proposal to label Mexico’s cartels as terrorist groups to justify US military incursions into Mexico.
These hyped-up concerns about narco-terrorism generally are merely intended as pretexts to justify occupation, regime change or lawfare…
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Nick Corbishley 