The diplomatic theater has a new act
President Claudia Sheinbaum made it clear this Monday that there will be no lawsuit with the United States over the accident that killed two CIA agents in Chihuahua. But be careful: it is not a simple “nothing happens.” It’s a calculated move.
“We hope that it is an exceptional case… that a situation like this will not be repeated again,” said the president in her morning conference.
Here’s the drama: those agents did not have permission to operate in Mexican territory. One entered as a tourist, the other with a diplomatic passport. The federal Security Secretariat was blunt: they did not know that gringo spies were moving through their land.
The mystery of the operation
The two Americans died along with two officials from the local prosecutor’s office during a dismantling of a synthetic drugs laboratory. The CIA hasn’t said a word. Sheinbaum demands answers: he wants the Attorney General’s Office and the Senate to clarify how the hell this operation was put together.
The opposition governor María Eugenia Campos and state prosecutor César Jáuregui were already summoned to the Senate for this Tuesday. The clock is ticking.
Sovereignty in the center of the ring
And here’s the kicker: U.S. Ambassador Ronald Johnson blurted out last week that “the private sector needs certainty, security and a corruption-free environment.” Sheinbaum responded with class but without mincing words: the United States “is not a country that has to tell us how to behave.”
It’s not new. Since 2012, when an embassy van was shot up and two CIA agents were wounded, the relationship has been a tug-of-war. López Obrador put the brakes on it with a law that forces foreign agents to report their movements. That law is still in effect.
My father always said: “Politics is not about getting excited, it’s about understanding who wins.” Here whoever maintains narrative control wins. Sheinbaum knows it: he gives in publicly to win strategically.
