The CIA crash that opened a fraught month in Mexico–US relations

In a country of drug traffickers, savage battles between cartels, and their victims, the spark that set everything off came from a remote spot in an isolated mountain range. In the early hours of April 19, two CIA officers and two agents from the Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office were killed in a brutal car crash. On a road that winds through the gorges of the Sierra Tarahumara, their vehicle plunged into the depths of a ravine. The tragedy itself quickly receded into the background because of what it revealed: U.S. intelligence officers were with Mexican state agents returning from dismantling a huge drug lab. That revelation quickly set the rest of the pieces in motion.

First, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum moved swiftly against Chihuahua’s opposition government. The federal administration said it had no knowledge of the CIA agents, arguing that the Mexican Constitution bars foreign figures from doing field work.

The Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office stumbled at every step as it could not explain what the U.S. agents were doing there; the resignation of the Chihuahua prosecutor was announced, investigations were opened, and impeachment proceedings against Governor Maru Campos were launched.

Amid the internal conflict in Mexico, messages arrived from the United States: first a criticism of Sheinbaum’s “lack of compassion” over the agents’ deaths, and then the announcement of charges against the governor of Sinaloa and nine other officials for links to drug trafficking.

Both Maru Campos and Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha Moya were summoned on Saturday to testify before the Attorney General’s Office. Only a month has passed since the accident, and the repercussions inside and outside Mexico’s borders are still unfolding.

Unanswered questions

The case is full of questions. No government has helped answer them. For her part, the governor of Chihuahua says she did not know at the time about the operation, and barely knows now. She argues that the person who authorized the operation was the director of the State Agency of Investigation (who died in the crash); that the U.S. agents did not take part in the operation but do participate in operations in Chihuahua, though they are not CIA, and that people must wait for the investigations to finish.

Maru Campos only acknowledges that the then-attorney general of Chihuahua, César Jáuregui, called her at 3 a.m. on April 19 when the crash occurred and later told her that there were four CIA agents there, that two were in the vehicle that crashed, and two were in another vehicle.

As a result, there is still no detailed reconstruction of what happened. Citing testimony from the U.S. government, the Los Angeles Times reported that the four CIA officers did go to the drug lab, that it was the third raid they had taken part in since January in Chihuahua, and that they were there wearing state police uniforms. A source close to the Sheinbaum government told this newspaper that the drug lab was no longer operational, so the loss of life was in vain.

The crash has, however, produced one finding on the Mexican side: the CIA is cooperating with state governments and doing work previously carried out by other agencies, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The same sources say the presence of these intelligence officers is greater now than at other times, and has grown almost by default after Trump designated Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations.

“In terms of the fogginess and the clarity of the information, in one month we have not yet gained much,” says María Teresa Martínez Trujillo, director of the Noria Research Center for Mexico and Central America. “There is no convincing account of who they were, what they were doing here, why it happened, why they were with Mexican agents, why they were where they were, why the accident occurred.”

Martínez, a professor at Tec de Monterrey, points out how public opinion in Mexico has grown used to having only “bits of the story and being left with a lot of unknowns,” while the case evolves toward a “politicization”: “And at the same time it is linked to other tensions in the political-criminal configurations, particularly what is happening in Sinaloa,” she adds.

The fallout

There is one fact that cannot be overlooked in this story. Most Mexican states are controlled by the ruling party Morena, and Chihuahua — one of the exceptions, led by the National Action Party (PAN) and the country’s largest state — will hold gubernatorial elections in 2027. In the days following the accident, Sheinbaum spoke about the case in all her morning press conferences, announced that it would be investigated whether the Mexican Constitution had been violated, stressed that U.S. officers could not operate in the field, and also took aim personally at Maru Campos, noting that she had not even answered her calls.

“The Mexican government tried to use the crash for domestic politics, but unintentionally ended up feeding distrust toward U.S. agencies,” says security analyst Carlos Pérez Ricart. “In the pursuit of winning some internal applause and affecting some internal opponents, they ended up making political use of the deaths of two people. And there is also a human aspect that the agency would not have tolerated. I think the federal government misread the situation and, instead of showing compassion for the deaths, they made political capital out of them.”

For the researcher at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE), the response from the Department of Justice and the CIA came in reaction to “the excessive prominence the Mexican government gave the issue”: “It is natural there would be a response, and we have yet to see all the consequences.”

Just 10 days after the Chihuahua crash, the United States indicted Rubén Rocha Moya and nine other political and security figures in Sinaloa. Two of them have already surrendered across the border. The Donald Trump administration has publicly said on several occasions that these indictments will not stop in Sinaloa.

The spies

The CIA has had agents in Mexico for decades; those who were in Chihuahua — unnamed publicly, unacknowledged on the Mexican side of the border — were not the first and will not be the last. Their deaths have drawn such attention because they are the latest example of a clash between conflicting messages: Donald Trump’s recurring threat of military intervention in Mexico and Sheinbaum’s perpetual defense of Mexico’s sovereignty.

“The president shows a general resistance to the presence of the agents, which does not mean there are not likely very specific cooperation agreements and projects,” says María Teresa Fernández Trujillo. Because the CIA officers should not have been working in Chihuahua, but they were.

“It is perfectly normal for the CIA to do its work with the states. It happens, it happened, and it will happen,” says Pérez Ricart, author of Cien años de espías y drogas: la historia de los agentes antinarcóticos de Estados Unidos en México (A Century of Spies and Drugs: The History of U.S. Drug Enforcement Agents in Mexico). “Sometimes it’s written down, sometimes not, sometimes it’s formal and sometimes informal, but CIA officers operate and will continue to operate in Mexico with or without the local government’s authorization.”

The researcher believes that state governments will now be “more cautious,” given what’s happened to Maru Campos, but he does not think this will transform how the intelligence agency intervenes: “The CIA needs informants, police, investigators, public prosecutors, and that relationship is not controlled — and has never been controlled — by the federal government. Much of the operation is not even endorsed by local governments. So this is not a before-and-after of anything. And especially not now, when the presence of these people is so evident, and interference is so central.”

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