Deaths of two CIA agents in Mexico raise alarms about US interference

The deaths of two U.S. officials in a road accident early Sunday morning in a remote area of ​​the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains in the state of Chihuahua would have been nothing more than a tragic accident in a region full of steep canyons, where two Mexican agents also lost their lives. The magnitude of the matter changed when it was revealed that the Americans were agents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). And it has escalated significantly in the last 48 hours, when President Claudia Sheinbaum stated that the four were “working together” on a mission of which the federal government was unaware. In addition to the state of Chihuahua, Sheinbaum has demanded explanations from the United States through a letter sent to its embassy.

The accident has become a crack through which the public has glimpsed one of the most opaque aspects of Mexico’s complex relationship with the U.S.: security, how much cooperation there is with Washington and how much subordination, in a debate in which the threat of U.S. interference is a constant, especially since Donald Trump returned to the presidency.

The rhetoric of intervention on Mexican soil has intensified since January, when Trump, after removing Nicolás Maduro from his bed in Caracas and transferring him to a New York prison, said that “the drug cartels control Mexico” and offered the country a military presence to combat them. Sheinbaum has always drawn a red line on this point regarding cooperation with Washington and has developed a narrative of defending sovereignty. This Wednesday she stated: “In our conversations, Trump has suggested providing us with greater support, including the presence of members of the United States military, to which we have replied, ‘It’s not necessary, President Trump.’ Our collaboration is very good, and any other action would violate our laws. We are very strict regarding our national sovereignty.”

What these two U.S. officials were doing in Mexico remains a mystery to Sheinbaum’s government, as she herself has admitted. For this reason, she has demanded explanations from the authorities in Chihuahua, a border state where security cooperation with Washington is close and which is one of the few governed by the opposition National Action Party (PAN). Sheinbaum wants to know what happened to determine “if the Constitution was violated,” since Chihuahua alone would not have the authority to authorize the entry of foreign agents or to carry out joint operations without the federal government’s knowledge. The president emphasized Wednesday that “there cannot be U.S. agents operating in the field,” as this matter affects “national security and sovereignty,” and therefore “is not a minor issue.”

Hours later, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt addressed the issue not to offer explanations, but to say that Trump “always seeks more cooperation” and to ask Sheinbaum for “some sympathy for the two American lives lost considering what the U.S. is doing under this president to stop drug trafficking through Mexico.”

In recent months, Trump has been spreading U.S. military presence throughout Latin America under the guise of fighting drug trafficking and claiming the region is his sphere of influence, or, in his words, his “backyard” — an allusion to the Monroe Doctrine, which the U.S. president has revived. While Ecuador and Argentina have welcomed joint operations and a military presence, Mexico is trying to resist the pressure through fluid collaboration in many areas, but with the clear limitation that any action taken in Mexico requires the cooperation of the Mexican government.

“For more than 100 years, there have been CIA, DEA, and other agency agents in Mexico. It’s a constant, not a variable, in the bilateral relationship,” explains Carlos Pérez Ricart, a research professor at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE). “They operate, move around, and make contacts without the Mexican government’s knowledge. They may have the cooperation of state governments, but it’s irrelevant whether the federal government knew about it or not, since it lacks the ability to prevent or track it.”

Pérez Ricart speaks of the “inevitability” of the presence of U.S. agents, something that occupies a complicated place within the concept of sovereignty in the face of a neighbor that has “few limits in foreign policy” and “specific objectives related to crime in Mexico, which it pursues, by legal or illegal means. This has always been the case,” the analyst says. For him, the bilateral relationship is “based on asymmetry, blackmail, and pressure,” and permeated by drug trafficking. Within this framework, the narrative of sovereignty maintained by the Sheinbaum administration shows cracks, exposing the lack of internal communication on security matters with Chihuahua, when such coordination “is one of the pillars of the security strategy presented by [Secretary of Security] Omar García Harfuch,” regardless of the political affiliation of whoever governs there, points out Teresa Martínez Trujillo, a research professor at the Tecnológico de Monterrey university.

On the other hand, acknowledging, as Sheinbaum has done, that she doesn’t know what’s happening in a state that’s also in a key location on the border, implies a blind spot and that pressure from the United States seeps in through it. “It’s shortsightedness, in the sense that she has no information about either the United States or Chihuahua, and therefore a lack of control over what’s happening there,” explains Martínez — a politically unfavorable image for the Mexican president.

The opacity and suspicion surrounding everything related to the CIA and its activities in Latin America is another key factor in this story, Martínez indicates. “If the car hadn’t gone off the road, we wouldn’t have known anything, and even then, there’s still a lot of missing information,” she states. And this obscurity fuels suspicion along with logical questions. For example, what were two CIA agents and two Mexicans assigned to the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency doing together? Morena, Sheinbaum’s party, has requested that the governor of Chihuahua, María Eugenia Campos, and the state attorney general appear before the Senate to clarify this point.

Chihuahua Attorney General César Jáuregui has repeatedly changed his story about the nature of the cooperation the four deceased agents were involved in as the days have passed. On Sunday, he asserted that they were “returning from an operation to destroy clandestine drug labs.” On Monday, he claimed that the Americans were in a town six hours away from the dismantled lab, training Mexican agents in the use of drones, and that they were not working on the same mission at the lab; the Mexicans had simply picked them up after completing their separate tasks. Sheinbaum contradicted the attorney general, stating that they have evidence that the American and Mexican agents were working together, which, as she has indicated in recent days, opens the door to a potential violation of the Constitution. However, the matter remains far from resolved and is growing in scope. Now, the governor of Chihuahua has requested a meeting with Sheinbaum to discuss the issue, celebrating “the dismantling of the largest lab known to date,” while the role of the Americans remains unclear.

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