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 there are doubts about the government’s version of events, political stability in Mexico is 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 the Mexico-based security analyst, Ioan 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…
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Nick Corbishley 