CIA Secretly Runs Narco-Hunting Units In Mexico

Report: CIA Secretly Runs Narco-Hunting Units in Mexico 15 hours ago (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images) A Reuters investigation has found that the CIA has been running covert operations in Mexico for years to track down the country's most-wanted drug traffickers. The secret: The U.S. spy agency works closely with special narco-hunting units inside the Mexican military. In January 2023, the Mexican government deployed helicopter gunships and hundreds of soldiers into rural Sinaloa to capture Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of the imprisoned cartel kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. In the hunt for the young capo, the mission's architects worked hand-in-glove with a powerful American backer: the Central Intelligence Agency. Ahead of the raid, America's premier spy agency leveraged its vast eavesdropping apparatus to surveil the communications of Guzmán's associates to locate him in his mother's hometown in the western Sierra Madre mountains, according to four former U.S. intelligence and law enforcement sources. CIA analysts assembled a detailed dossier, known as a "targeting package," on El Chapo's flashy son. The CIA was helped by intel from a member of Ovidio's circle who had secretly flipped, three of the sources added. Finally, to carry out the arrest itself, the Mexican Army deployed an elite unit that was trained, equipped, and vetted by the CIA, a dozen current and former U.S. and Mexican officials said. With the permission of the Mexican government, the CIA gives training and equipment to these outfits, as well as financial backing for activities like travel. The U.S. spy agency also screens their members with U.S.-administered polygraph tests, which is why the groups are often called "CIA vetted units." Today, there are at least two such CIA vetted military units operating in Mexico. In addition to the Mexican Army group that nabbed Ovidio, there's a special Mexican Navy intelligence outfit, according to eight current and former Mexican and U.S. officials. In the past, the CIA also had vetted units within Mexico's now-defunct federal police, a state-level police force, and the federal attorney general's office, according to two former senior U.S. and Mexican officials. These CIA vetted units, the details of which Reuters is reporting for the first time, fall under the agency's covert operations. Such activities are generally classified, and their budgets and staffing are kept secret. To detail the CIA's activities in Mexico, Reuters spoke to more than 60 current and former U.S. and Mexican security sources, including former CIA officers, diplomats from both countries, U.S. anti-narcotics agents, and Mexican military leaders who worked closely with the U.S. spy agency. The majority spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the intelligence agency's activities. The CIA has a long history of operations in Latin America, particularly during the Cold War, when the agency worked with military juntas and dictators to counter leftist governments and guerrillas. The agency also helped topple South America's cocaine trafficking empires at the end of the 20th century. But the U.S. spy agency's secret fight against Mexico's cartel leaders has gone largely unreported. The CIA vetted Mexican army and navy units have played key roles in planning or executing the majority of captures of high-profile narcos in recent years. The army outfit is comprised of hundreds of CIA-trained special forces and is seen as the military force in Mexico most capable of nabbing heavily armed drug lords holed up in fortified mountain hideouts, security sources say. That has turned the CIA into the gatekeeper of American anti-narcotics operations in Mexico, according to current and former U.S. security sources. "The CIA is the facilitator and the coordinator on some of the most important anti-narcotics issues in Mexico," said a recently departed senior official in the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City. "Those units are extremely important." For decades the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has been the face of U.S. anti-narcotics efforts in Mexico. The DEA and other U.S. law enforcement agencies, such as Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), lead the U.S. effort to investigate suspected drug traffickers and gather evidence that is admissible in U.S. courtrooms. These agencies also work with Mexican counterparts to execute complex capture operations. But inside the U.S. embassy, the CIA spearheads the high-level coordination between the myriad U.S. agencies working on anti-narcotics, the American security sources said. To some, the embassy's seating arrangement symbolizes the power dynamic: CIA analysts – and those of other U.S. intel agencies – sit on the same floor as the ambassador. DEA, HSI and other law enforcement agents have their desks on the floor below. In response to detailed questions from Reuters, the White House said in a statement: "The United States and Mexico are working as sovereign partners to successfully stop the illegal flow of deadly narcotics across the border and eliminate the cartel networks responsible." "Thanks to the leadership and partnership" of U.S. President Donald Trump and Mexico's President Claudia Sheinbaum, "the threat posed by transnational terrorist organizations armed with illicit narcotics diminishes by the day and efforts will not cease until American communities are safe from the scourge of drugs and cartels," the statement said. CIA spokesperson Liz Lyons said in a statement that Mexico's cartels have become a significant focus for the agency. "From day one, Director (John) Ratcliffe made securing our southern border and countering drug cartels in Mexico and regionally a top Agency priority to support President Trump's directive to end narco-trafficking," she said. The Mexican government did not respond to detailed questions for this report. The new insights into the CIA vetted units and the U.S. spy agency's extensive anti-narcotics activities come as the Trump administration is weighing a dramatic escalation of the U.S. drug war in Mexico, one that could strain the bilateral relationship. The CIA and U.S. law enforcement have long operated south of the border solely at the discretion of Mexico's government, which greenlights all capture operations and uses Mexican forces to execute them. But Trump has said publicly that Washington may take unilateral military action in Mexico if the Mexican government failed to dismantle drug cartels. His administration has designated several Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, which former national security officials say lays the groundwork for military action inside the country. Case in point: Last week, the U.S. military killed 11 people in a strike on a vessel in the southern Caribbean that allegedly departed Venezuela carrying illegal narcotics. Without publicly offering evidence, U.S. officials said that those killed were members of a Venezuelan cartel that the Trump administration has also designated as a foreign terrorist group. As for Mexico, U.S. military and intelligence officials have in recent months discussed options for carrying out deadly strikes against drug cartels inside the country, according to two U.S. officials involved in the talks. What role the CIA could play in such a campaign is unclear. The CIA and U.S. special operations forces often work side-by-side on complex operations, particularly since the U.S. war on terror began a generation ago, former CIA and elite military officers said. Inside its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the CIA is moving resources and personnel to amp up counter-cartel efforts, including through the creation of a new Americas and Counternarcotics Mission Center, its leadership has said. Top counterterrorism officials have been reassigned to work on Mexican cartels, according to three intelligence sources. The agency has increased its drone surveillance flights south of the border, other former intelligence officials say. CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis has said the agency is applying lessons learned from the global war on terror to the Mexican cartels. "We have built a finely tuned machine at the CIA over the past 20 years since 9/11 to find, fix, and finish terrorist targets, and now we are going to be taking that machine and turning to the cartels," he said in a May episode of the podcast of Tudor Dixon, a U.S. conservative commentator. The phrase "find, fix, finish" is used in national security circles to refer to the process of locating a target and then capturing or killing that person. The CIA declined to elaborate on Ellis' comments. The Trump administration's increasingly aggressive approach to fighting the region's drug traffickers has created a high-stakes balancing act for President Sheinbaum of Mexico's ruling leftist Morena party. With Mexico facing economic pressure from Washington over tariffs and the prospect of U.S. military intervention, Sheinbaum has increased her government's efforts to combat organized crime. She has presided over a nearly year-long offensive against the Sinaloa Cartel. And she has approved two, unprecedented mass expulsions of more than 50 suspected drug traffickers to the U.S. These measures have won her praise from top U.S. officials. But Sheinbaum has stated repeatedly that unilateral U.S. action in Mexico is a red line. "We will not accept any violation of our territory," she said in a news conference last week. "We do not accept subordination, but simply collaboration between nations on equal terms." Some CIA veterans of the U.S. war on terror are likewise wary of the prospect of Washington taking a more militaristic approach to fighting drug trafficking in Mexico, a U.S. ally, neighbor and top trading partner. Ralph Goff, a former CIA operations officer with extensive experience in covert and paramilitary operations, cited the potential of civilian casualties, cartel retaliation and diplomatic fallout. "Sicario is a good movie, but bad U.S. policy," he said, referring to a 2015 thriller about a CIA-led paramilitary operation inside Mexico. "Drugs are a consumption problem, not a production problem. We can't just kill our way out of this." The U.S. track record in Mexico thus far has cast doubt on whether a more muscular role will yield the desired results. The CIA's vetted military units have become Mexico's most successful forces for hunting down suspected traffickers. But the capture of drug kingpins has fractured cartels and sparked bloody power struggles. Some 30,000 Mexicans are murdered each year, according to Mexico's national statistics agency. Many of those killings stem from cartel-related violence. Meanwhile, narco-hunting did little to stop the flood of fentanyl on American streets and Mexico's ascension as the world's top producer of the synthetic opioid. Over the last five years, some 50,000 to 75,000 Americans have died annually from synthetic opioid overdoses, almost exclusively from Mexican-made illicit fentanyl. To be sure, the CIA is just one of several anti-narcotics actors. The Mexican government sets its own national security strategy, decides on the top targets, and approves capture operations. U.S. law enforcement – including the DEA – has for decades followed the so-called kingpin strategy of tracking and taking down cartel leaders. But by acting in secret, the CIA has largely escaped scrutiny for its role in the troubled drug war. In the mid-1990s, Roberto Aguilera Olivera was the leader of a virtually unknown Mexican Army unit called "Special Intelligence Issues." Its main adversary was the Zapatistas, a leftist indigenous group that staged an uprising in 1994. Then the CIA arrived, looking for a local partner to help it hunt down drug traffickers. The Mexican Army repurposed the group as the Anti-Narcotics Intelligence Center in 1995. The CIA gave the team hack-proof computers and a portable eavesdropping machine, said Aguilera, who helped set up the unit before being posted to London as Mexico's military attaché. The CIA flew the unit's officers to the U.S. for training in espionage and surveillance. CIA specialists designed prosthetic mustaches, wigs and fake scars for the Mexican soldiers to use as undercover disguises. Jack Devine headed the CIA's then-recently created counternarcotics center in Langley in the early 1990s. He helped build out the CIA's network of vetted anti-narcotics units in key Latin American countries. "The decision was made to create units where we're really going to give them state-of-the-art technical equipment and we're going to give them state-of-the-art intelligence collection capabilities," Devine said. In Mexico, the Anti-Narcotics Intelligence Center quickly emerged as Mexico's premier narco-hunting outfit. Aguilera returned to Mexico and led the unit from 2000 to 2006. Now retired, he recounted how its soldiers, traveling in disguise on the CIA's dime, fanned out across Mexico to surveil, film and wiretap drug lords and their confidants. In 2000, the outfit was renamed the Drug Trafficking Information Analysis Group (or GAIN, for its acronym in Spanish). "The CIA helped massively," Aguilera said. Mexico's Army did not respond to a list of detailed questions about the history of GAIN and its relationship with the CIA.