On March 28th, a car exploded as it drove along the highway leading from Felipe Ángeles International Airport on the northern outskirts of Mexico City. Inside the charred vehicle, slumped over their seats, were Francisco ‘El Payín’ Beltrán, a capo in the Sinaloa Cartel, and his driver.
This was no mechanical failure.
An explosive report in CNN last month suggested the car bombing was a targeted assassination by none other than the Central Intelligence Agency, operating as an extrajudicial death squad.
“The cartels, especially Jalisco and Sinaloa, have always used car bombs, but on cars that are stationary,” Mike Vigil, the DEA’s former chief of international operations, told TalkingDrugs.
“But when you take a look at an explosive device in a moving car, that’s a whole different story. It’s much more complex than putting explosives in a car and blowing it up… I’ve never seen any cartel in Mexico be able to do that with a moving vehicle… I can’t say definitively that it was CIA, but it could be somebody that was trained by them in explosives.”
Both the Mexican government and Langley have denied the report. But it’s not the first time this year the ‘spooks’ have made news south-of-the-border.
In April, two “US embassy personnel” died when their car drove off the side of a cliff in Chihuahua, northern Mexico. It quickly transpired that the pair were no ordinary diplomats and, in fact, were accompanying local investigators on a raid on a drug lab, two of whom perished in the car crash as well.
“Within each embassy, in just about every country, they have two sets of CIA agents,” explained Vigil.
“There are the ones that are declared, the ones that actually come out and say, ‘we’re CIA,’ and they primarily work with the foreign military units. A lot of times they vet them, and they do backgrounds, they do urinalysis, check for drugs…they also do polygraphs. And then you also have the non-declared CIA agents. Those are the ones that are completely covert. They operate in the embassy, sometimes in the consulates, under the guise of being political officers or within the commercial sector.”
It became apparent that the two dead CIA agents were operating without the federal government’s knowledge – which is illegal under Mexican law. The Chihuahuan authorities were deeply embarrassed, and the state’s attorney general resigned over the scandal. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum brought up the incident again in a recent speech, criticising America’s involvement and avowing, “Mexico is nobody’s piñata!”
What is the CIA up to in Mexico?
Donald Trump’s White House now considers international drug rings such as the Sinaloa Cartel as terrorist organisations, alongside such esteemed company as Boko Haram and al-Qaeda, and are to be treated accordingly.
“Treat counter-drug cartel work as a form of counter-terrorism and use those authorities and unique resources appropriately, including by moving resources from other regions if necessary,” read a planning document titled “2025 Agency Action Plan” reviewed by CNN.
As a result, Reaper drones have been buzzing in the skies over Mexico, identifying cartel safehouses, meth labs, and other sites. Trump has also appointed an ex-CIA officer, Ronald Johnson, as ambassador to Mexico, where he shares a floor with his former colleagues. The DEA, meanwhile, are relegated downstairs.
“Donald Trump believes because he designated a lot of the cartels in Latin America as terrorist organisations that the CIA is better-equipped because one of their priorities is counterterrorism. But he doesn’t understand that they really are not trained for it,” said Vigil.
“They really don’t have a very good ability to discern good sources from dubious sources. The authors that write those spy novels make them up to be like James Bond, which is the exact opposite.”
The CIA’s clandestine activities put Sheinbaum in a bind. The Mexican president has demonstrated she is open to collaboration with her northern neighbour – extraditing narco heavyweights and stepping-up raids on fentanyl labs – but it has to be done on Mexico’s terms. Sneaking around Chihuahua is unacceptable.
Sheinbaum has categorically ruled out any military intervention from the US, which has a painful history of imposing its will on Mexico. The majority of firearms used in Mexican gangland killings originate from American gun stores, and Sheinbaum has insisted Trump do something to half the flow of firepower first. Perhaps Langley’s alleged involvement in the hit on El Payín was deliberately leaked to pressure Sheinbaum. The deadly takedown of crime lord El Mencho in February, for instance – carried out using CIA intel – followed months of threats from Trump to deploy boots on the ground in Mexico.
“Even when Sheinbaum has said very consistently that there will be no US military troops on Mexican soil, she has also found some alternatives to have bilateral security cooperation in some other ways, like intelligence-sharing,” Cristina Reyes, general manager of Mexico United Against Crime (MUCD), told Talking Drugs.
“When they killed El Mencho, who was the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, they clearly expressed that they had US intelligence support. But of course, [Sheinbaum] needs to be in control of the aid that the Mexican government receives from the US, and that cooperation between the Chihuahua government and the CIA was forbidden… [Mexico] has to be very strategic in how we show that we are cooperating with the US government, but without risking national sovereignty.”
Playing both sides
Although not its primary function, the CIA’s involvement in counternarcotics goes back decades. Since the 1990s, the Agency has trained and vetted elite units within Mexico’s military and law enforcement, most notably GAIN (Drug Trafficking Information Analysis Group) within the Mexican Army, which was provided with state-of-the-art computers and surveillance equipment.
It was GAIN that tracked down Sinaloa kingpin El Chapo’s son (and heir to the family business) Ovidio Guzmán in 2019 and again in 2023, both times provoking a massive gun battle with cartel henchmen before the scion was finally captured.
According to a Reuters report, while Sheinbaum’s predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador (colloquially known as AMLO) had a frosty relationship with the DEA, which he saw as meddling in Mexico’s sovereignty, he carried on working with the CIA in secret. AMLO has not replied to the report.
Historically, however, the CIA has had other priorities, and their collaboration with reactionary drug lords across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Afghanistan have been well-documented.
When Cuban-American drug trafficker Alberto Sicilia Falcon was arrested in 1975, he claimed under torture that he was working for the CIA funnelling guns to Central America; at that time, a hotspot of Cold War insurgencies.
Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo was an ex-cop turned El Padrino (“the Godfather”) of the Guadalajara Cartel in the 1980s; working under the protection of Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate or DFS, which did very little national security and was essentially a state-run racketeering organisation. Gallardo reportedly flew planeloads of cocaine from Colombia via his Honduran partner Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, while the CIA used Ballesteros’ airline, SETCO, to ship guns and ammo to the Contras, anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua.
Larry Victor Harrison aka George Marshall Davis aka ‘White Tower’ was a CIA agent stationed in Guadalajara to help the DFS track leftist insurgents and grew close to one of Gallardo’s capos. Harrison has suggested in interviews that the infamous murder of DEA agent Enrique ‘Kiki’ Camarena took place because he’d stumbled across the CIA operation.
Vigil doesn’t believe the CIA had anything to do with Kiki’s death – and indeed, a lot of details don’t add up – but noted that since the Cold War, the Agency “had alliances with drug trafficking organisations. And they didn’t care about the fact that they were conducting criminal activities as long as they gave them information.”
“And that’s been the case in Mexico as well.”
Mexico is but one front in the war against drugs cartels and organised crime raging across the Americas, where the CIA is playing an active role. In January, a small team of agents on the ground tracked Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s movements through Caracas before he was kidnapped by Delta Force commandos and airlifted to a federal courthouse in Manhattan to stand trial for alleged narco-terrorism.
The Agency has also provided intel to identify suspected drug-running boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, which have been blown up by missile strikes. As of time of writing, more than 200 lives have been lost in these deadly boat strikes since last year.
Aside from the usual issues surrounding the war on drugs, sending in the CIA is particularly problematic. The DEA, for all their faults (and there are many), are a law enforcement agency. That means they’re accountable to the rule of law. They arrest suspects and present their evidence in a courtroom.
The CIA has no such responsibility and can hide behind classified documents and national security, making oversight and accountability nearly impossible.
