The premise was something out of a B-grade thriller. At 2 a.m. on Sunday, April 19, a car plunged into a ravine in Chihuahua, the sprawling Mexico state that borders Texas and New Mexico, killing four. According to the initial information, two of the deceased belonged to the State Investigation Agency (AEI in Spanish), while the other two were something else entirely.
In a tweet later that day, US Ambassador Ronald Johnson asserted that they were “US Embassy Personnel” without specifying further, while press reports identified them as “training officers,” an enigmatic label that only served to deepen the mystery. The five-vehicle convoy the car had been a part of was ostensibly returning from locating a remote drug lab in the Sierra Tarahumara Mountains, despite the fact that both the constitution and the terms of Mexico’s National Security Law of 2020 prohibit foreign agents from participating in any such operation on Mexican soil. What exactly then was going on?
At her morning press conference the following Monday, President Claudia Sheinbaum was unambiguous: the federal government had been unaware of the operation, whatever it was. Beginning with condolences for the deceased agents (despite later claims by right-wing media and Donald Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt that she had omitted them), Sheinbaum confirmed that her government was seeking clarifications from both the embassy and the state government headed by the opposition National Action Party (PAN) politician Maru Campos.
Following a day of fevered speculation, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday, April 21, that the US personnel in question were, in fact, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents — a detail that Johnson, a former CIA agent himself, had conveniently left out. Two other CIA agents, it later emerged, were also part of the convoy and subsequently exited the country. Over the course of the week, Chihuahua’s Attorney General César Jáuregui desperately attempted to spin the revelations, with unwittingly hilarious results as the truth came to light. First, he said that the officers had been far away. Then, he conceded they had been on site but only for training purposes. Finally, he claimed that they had been performing drone training in a neighboring pueblo and conveniently asked to hitch a ride back to the airport.
All for naught: Jáuregui resigned on Monday April 27, the first casualty of a spreading political firestorm that, in real time, appeared to be confirming many Mexicans’ worst fears about US meddling dressed up as “anti-drug” coordination. And not just anywhere, but in an opposition-controlled border state.
On the face of it, the idea that the CIA would trundle down to Chihuahua to locate one (abandoned) meth lab is absurd on its face, especially in light of the over 2,300 labs dismantled by the Sheinbaum government so far. To begin with, drug interdiction is supposed to be a Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) task — although in light of its scandal-ridden record of late, one can understand why it would be losing out in the perennial turf war among the three-letter agencies. Seizing its opportunity, the CIA is effectively cribbing the DEA’s brief in order to insert itself into Mexico and advance with its actual mission. What that is, as yet, is not completely clear: serve as an advance force for an eventual US invasion? Track down strategic mineral sites? Organize destabilization cells? Balkanize the border region?
Given the agency’s murderous record of coup-plotting up and down the continent, together with the Trump administration’s national security goals, none of the options are good.
The Empire Strikes Back
The affair, and Sheinbaum’s sovereignty-affirming response, provoked the ire of a Trump administration determined to exact payback. On April 23, a mere four days after the accident in Chihuahua, Johnson was dispatched to the State of Sinaloa to inaugurate a methanol plant. With high irony as the official representative of an administration drowning in misconduct, the ambassador began by praising the project only to turn to decrying the evils of government corruption. “That’s why [the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement] requires our governments to criminalize bribery and corruption and enforce codes of conduct for public officials,” he said before concluding, ominously, with the following: “We may soon see significant action on this front. Stay tuned.”
It soon became clear what Johnson had been so unsubtly alluding to: not a week later, the Southern District of New York under Trump ally Jay Clayton unsealed drug-related indictments against ten officials from the Pacific Coast state of Sinaloa, including, notably, two elected officials from Sheinbaum’s own party: Governor Rubén Rocha Moya and Senator Enrique Inzunza. The DEA-backed charges centered, in Rocha’s case, around alleged participation by the Sinaloa Cartel in his 2021 gubernatorial campaign, which he was to have paid back by allowing them to “operate with impunity” in the state. Two of the ten — former state security minister Gerardo Mérida and former finance secretary Enrique Díaz Vega — soon appeared in US custody, with Mérida pleading not guilty.
Whether or not he is guilty of the specific charges made by the United States, Rocha — who has taken temporary leave from the governorship to address the charges — is no choirboy. But curiously, those very charges, which took the form of provisional arrest requests, have not been accompanied to date by any substantive evidence. This is something that, in her morning press conferences, President Sheinbaum has repeatedly pointed out:
There has to be evidence based on Mexican law, because otherwise it would mean that decisions are being made from abroad — especially when it comes to people elected by their own people — and it would be determined from abroad whether someone remains in office or not. So this is also a matter of sovereignty.
Of the 269 extradition requests Mexico has made of the United States since 2018, Sheinbaum has also pointed out, the US government has granted precisely zero. Not a single one.
Trump’s Total War on the Latin American Left
Sheinbaum’s insistence on “evidence based in Mexican law” is no accident. In the United States, prosecutors frequently build cases around cooperating witnesses cajoled into testifying in exchange for benefits, reduced sentences, or free tickets to witness protection programs. Attorneys general get their splashy headlines; justice may or may not be done. While such arrangements can produce valuable information, as dramatized by any number of self-glorifying shows and movies, they also create incentives for perjury that Mexican courts tend to view more skeptically.
Thus, Washington’s long-standing reluctance to extradite: the justice system has a strong institutional interest in keeping people within its own prosecutorial pipeline. This also helps to explain why it has refused to provide the evidence in the Rocha case that Sheinbaum has repeatedly requested. By rushing the indictments to distract from the Chihuahua CIA affair, it may not have had its full case together. It may simply not have the evidence at all, as in the 2020 case of former Defense Minister General Salvador Cienfuegos. Or it is basing its allegations on expected testimony from the Chapitos, the sons of former Sinaloa Cartel head Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzman extradited in 2023 and 2024, together, perhaps, with Mérida, Díaz Vega, and whoever else the United States decides to arrest or kidnap.
Whatever the case, and whatever its own flaws, Mexico’s legal system generally demands that allegations be supported by evidence that satisfies its legal standards. Ultimately, that is the standard against which any US extradition request will be judged.
Neither Chihuahua nor Sinaloa can be separated from the all-out Trumpian offensive against Latin America. In Argentina’s legislative elections, Trump dangled and then threatened to withdraw a bailout package to coerce voters into supporting the party of Javier Milei. In Honduras, he went as far as pardoning the former president — a convicted drug felon — Juan Orlando Hernández two days before the country’s presidential elections; indeed, the recent Hondurasgate recordings have revealed a plot to attack the region’s progressive governments through a coordinated disinformation campaign using Hernández’s operations and Milei’s money. In Brazil, the administration has just declared two organized-crime groups (Primeiro Comando da Capital and Comando Vermelho) as foreign terrorist organizations at the behest of right-wing presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro, in a clear bid to justify further interventionism ahead of October elections. In Colombia, it has wielded Ecuadorian president Daniel Noboa as a next-door proxy to destabilize the presidential campaign there, with Noboa bombing along the border between the two countries under the bogus pretext of attacking a drug camp. Recently, Trump endorsed far-right presidential candidate Abelardo de la Espriella, who shot to first in the initial round of elections, calling his opponent, Iván Cepeda, a “radical left Marxist.”
Venezuela continues to struggle with the bitter aftermath of the January 3 kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro. In Bolivia, the United States is openly propping up besieged president Rodrigo Paz while attempting to hunt down former president Evo Morales; according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the thousands protesting Paz’s neoliberal counter-reforms are “criminals and drug traffickers.” In Guatemala,it is pressing hard for joint military operations on national soil. And, of course, it is strangling Cuba with a murderous oil blockade while threatening to take it over “almost immediately” after finishing with Iran.
There is no need to sugarcoat things: through its “enlist and expand” strategy, the United States is attempting to stamp out every remaining progressive government in Latin America, replacing them not just with any old right-wing regime but the farthest-right lackeys, stooges, criminals, and sellouts. And it is not hiding the fact.
As for Governors Rocha and Campos, both were summoned by Mexico’s Federal Attorney General’s Office (FGR) to give their testimony. Rocha appeared on May 26 without much fanfare. Campos, however, chose the media-circus route, appearing the following day not to provide testimony but to lodge a complaint, surrounded by conservative figures and alleging she is the victim of “political persecution.” It is clear that Campos and the PAN are trying to parlay her ill-gained notoriety into a future presidential bid; absent a standard-bearer and wallowing at 11 percent in the polls ahead of next year’s midterms, one can understand the party’s desperation, even to the point of trying to convert a clear-cut case of treason into some perverse kind of folk heroism.
A vast majority of Mexican voters see things very differently.