Wyatt Derp 🥑

🇲🇽🚓👮‍♀️The NYT’s new investigation into how the CIA quietly operated in the state of Chihuahua is worth reading closely, because it says a lot about how Mexico’s fight against organized crime actually works. The story, briefly: according to the Times, the CIA partnered with Guillermo Zuany Portillo, a Chihuahua prosecutor and former police commander, who paired CIA officers with state police units on counter-cartel operations. For more than six months, officers allegedly trained state forces, rode along on missions, and provided direction during raids. Then in April, a truck carrying two CIA officers went off a cliff, killing all four people inside. That blew the cover and set off a national scandal. Here are three takeaways-- 1. The public red line and the behind-closed-doors reality are not the same thing. President Sheinbaum has said almost daily that U.S. forces operating on Mexican soil would be a grave violation of sovereignty. But the Times reports that privately she has deepened security cooperation, including with the CIA, partly to defuse Trump’s threats of unilateral military action. Both things can be true at once. The sovereignty rhetoric is real politics, and so is the quiet accommodation. 2. Partisan divides are a genuine fault line. The CIA allegedly found a partner at the state level, bypassing the federal government’s authorization. Now Sheinbaum, from Morena, is in a public fight with Chihuahua’s PAN governor, Maru Campos. The governor says she knew nothing, and a former state attorney general has been charged with treason. Whatever the legal merits, the case is also a story about who controls security policy in a country where states, parties, and the federal government compete for authority and for blame. 3. "Good guys" are in short supply in Mexico. Access to cartel targets often comes from compromised partners. The Times reports that the U.S. had revoked Zuany’s visa over suspected cartel ties, that he was under FBI investigation, and that his visa was reinstated after he began helping the CIA. State prosecutors and witnesses describe him as powerful and suspected of corruption. This is the recurring dilemma in U.S.-Mexico security work: the people best positioned to deliver operations are frequently the ones closest to the networks being targeted. Several operations reportedly ended with targets slipping away, which raised suspicions of tip-offs. The on-the-ground reality in Mexico undermines the simple "war on cartels" rhetoric coming from Trump & other U.S. politicians.

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