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. President Claudia Sheinbaum insists that her government was not informed about the direct involvement of CIA agents. If true, then it 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 like 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, communication or interaction.
None of which happened in this case, according to the Sheinbaum government. Federal authorities, the president says, 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.
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”.
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 for the Mexican Foreign Ministry to authorize the next level of collaboration.”
According to the government, that authorisation never came. 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 the Mexican government maintains its support of Cuba, even as the Trump administration ratchets up its threats of military intervention.
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 four CIA agents ended up operating in her jurisdiction in total contravention of Mexican law. There have also been calls for her to be charged with treason, which, while 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 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 very wary of the CIA increasing its presence in the country, says veteran Mexican journalist and historian Lorenzo Meyer. One of the agency’s main functions, Meyer said 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) as well as the CIA’s leading role in the Iran Contra affair.
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 also hugely questionable. The CIA, after all, has arguably been the biggest single facilitator of the global drugs trade since the Second World War. Wherever it has gone, the trade has tended to flourish (e.g., Afghanistan, Colombia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and most recently Ecuador).
As we have argued since 2023, while the illegal drug trade is 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 emphasised 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 and resource plunder. By early December, the whole drug cartel narrative for the war against Venezuela 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 was 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 refused to return Sheinbaum’s calls. Her PAN party is completely standing by her despite the fact that she appears to have broken Mexican law and violated Mexican sovereignty.
In fact, the leadership of both of the two main opposition parties in Mexico, PAN and PRI, seem to 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. And they will literally violate the national constitution and betray their country to help make that happen.