On April 29, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton and Administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Terrance C. Cole unsealed bombshell charges of drug trafficking against the sitting governor of Mexico’s state of Sinaloa Rubén Rocha Moya, along with nine other significant Mexican political figures and officials. Along with the indictment, the U.S. requested that those indicted be arrested for the purpose of extradition to the U.S. to face charges, Governor Rocha among them, and the “word” is out that more indictments of state governors are in the works.
Ten days before, a scandal broke out in Mexico when two CIA agents died in a car accident in the northern state of Chihuahua while returning with Mexican officials from a raid on clandestine methamphetamine labs. President Claudia Sheinbaum has emphatically rejected President Donald Trump’s repeated overtures pressing that U.S. military and police forces be given permission to operate in Mexico, purportedly to fight drugs; Sheinbaum has responded by asserting Mexico’s sovereignty and ability to combat drugs nationally. It turned out that the governor of Chihuahua, of the opposition PAN party, had secretly allowed the CIA to operate in that state, in direct violation of Mexico’s well-known strict laws against foreign citizens participating in law enforcement, public security, or military activities within Mexico.
Now Sheinbaum finds herself at the center of an orchestrated destabilization designed to either bring her totally to heel, or topple her government: If she refuses to extradite Rocha and continues to deny Americans permission to operate freely inside the country, she will be denounced for being allied to drug interests; if she folds and grants everything Trump is demanding, Mexico’s sovereignty is gone—along with control of its significant oil industry and other valuable raw materials.
The key U.S. official on the ground in Mexico assigned to oversee these opening salvos in what is shaping up as a major destabilization of Mexico designed to end the way the invasion of Venezuela did, is President Trump’s new U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, retired Army Col. Ronald D. Johnson. The first 20 years of Johnson’s career were spent deployed on missions in the U.S. Special Forces (e.g., commanding a detachment in George H.W. Bush’s 1989 overthrow of Panama’s Manuel Noriega). Upon retiring from Special Forces Ops, he moved into the CIA for the next two decades, working closely with the U.S. Southern Command during that period.
The destabilization of the Mexican government has no more to do with “fighting drugs” than did George H.W. Bush’s invasion of Panama, which installed a government run by the Cali cocaine cartel in the country, all in the name of “fighting drugs.” The Mexican independent farmers association known as the National Front To Save the Mexican Countryside named the game that is now underway very precisely in an Open Letter to President Sheinbaum: It is the financier interests of Wall Street and the City of London which run the drug trade as their private army—and then use the devastation they have created as the pretext to take over.
