On March 28, a pickup truck exploded on a highway north of Mexico City, killing two alleged cartel members. One of the victims was identified as Francisco Beltrán, alias ‘El Payín,’ a reported lieutenant of Sinaloa Cartel kingpin ‘El Meño’. The story went largely ignored in the U.S. But recent reports from The New York Times and CNN suggest that the killings may be part of an illegal campaign by the CIA’s Ground Branch inside of Mexico. The allegations come just weeks after the deaths of two CIA officers in Chihuahua, Mexico as well as a U.S. indictment of Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha Moya on drug trafficking charges. Dissatisfied that Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has repeatedly ruled out a U.S. military intervention against the country’s drug cartels, the Trump administration appears increasingly open to testing the limits of longstanding cooperation on security between Washington and Mexico City. While it’s difficult to separate fact from fiction in the allegations, the sad truth is that they seem quite plausible. In 2025, the Trump administration designated groups such as the Sinaloa Cartel and Cartel Jalisco New Generation (CJNG) as foreign terrorist organizations, granting agencies like the CIA legal justification for covert action against Mexican cartels. Much of the language used by both CNN and the Times is deliberately ambiguous, relying on unnamed sources in the agency. CNN claims that the March car bomb “was a targeted assassination, facilitated by CIA operations officers,” while the Times reports that the agency provided intelligence and support “but was not on the ground when Mexican authorities killed [the cartel operative].” CNN’s reporting left room for interpretation that the agency was playing competing traffickers against one another or relying on vigilante paramilitary groups. This would come as no surprise given the CIA’s long and sordid history of collaborating with questionable non-state actors in the Americas, including members of the Guadalajara Cartel, which facilitated arms trafficking to the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980s. In contrast, the implication from the Times is that Mexican forces orchestrated an extrajudicial assassination with the help of — and likely at the behest of — Washington’s foremost intelligence agency. All the more shocking is that sources for both publications claim that the March killing is just one of many; CIA spokeswoman Liz Lyon and Mexican Security Minister Omar Garcia Harfuch have respectively denied any and all allegations. At minimum, it seems clear that the agency has boots on the ground in Mexico. Last month, two CIA officers died in a car crash on the way back from a counternarcotics operation in the state of Chihuahua. In Mexico, foreign agents are forbidden from operating within the country without the express permission of the national government. Sheinbaum has plausibly contended that the deceased officers were illegally invited into Chihuahua by the state’s opposition government. At the same, it’s conceivable that Mexico City has condoned more than it has let on.
The CNN report adds a layer of credibility in addition to a relative silver lining to its allegations. It reads: “The [CIA]’s strategy, the sources said, is to dismantle entire cartel networks, which involves not only removing those at the very top but also identifying vulnerabilities throughout the organization and systematically targeting lower-tier players who serve as key cogs in the trafficking enterprise.” In fact, this is the same strategy that has been pursued by Sheinbaum and her security minister, Harfuch.
Since the onset of the Mexican drug war in 2006, policymakers in the U.S. and Mexico have prioritized the so-called “kingpin strategy,” with Washington conditioning aid under the Merida Initiative on the apprehension of high-value targets. In technical terms, the strategy was a success. Since the late 2000s, successive Mexican administrations have boasted some impressive results, such as the captures of ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, Ovidio Guzmán, ‘El Mayo’ Zambada in addition to the disarticulation of the infamous Zetas Cartel. Yet in strategic terms, the strategy was a catastrophic failure . Infighting within and between cartels saw Mexico’s homicide rate triple from 7 to 24 per 100,000 by 2010, with disappearances increasing tenfold by 2023.
Sheinbaum and Harfuch have pursued a more thoughtful approach of debilitating cartels’ structural and logistical capabilities in concert with the neutralization of kingpins — to great effect. Government figures have found that homicides have fallen around 40% since Sheinbaum assumed office in 2024, with independent estimates finding a decline of at least 15% . Taken at face value, CNN’s sources suggest that the CIA has learned from past mistakes to some extent and has incorporated input from its Mexican partners. At the same time, the sheer brazenness of tactics such as car bombing suspected narcos on metropolitan highways offers ample cause for alarm. Following the 1985 killing of Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena, Mexican cartels have had little incentive to target U.S. citizens, let alone intel agents. Violent crime against U.S. citizens in Mexico typically faces a disproportionate response from authorities relative to native Mexicans, often involving joint investigations with the FBI. To give an idea, in 2023, members of the Gulf Cartel mistakenly kidnapped two African-American tourists and killed two others in Tamaulipas, Mexico, likely believing them to be Haitian migrants. The cartel subsequently apologized for the incident and delivered both the victims and the perpetrators to authorities.
If, however, the CIA allegations prove to be correct, it’s quite possible that cartels’ incentive against targeting U.S. citizens — and U.S. officials — could change for the worse. Tellingly, it seems that agency sources for both the Times and CNN are deeply concerned with the Trump administration’s current course in Mexico.