A car carrying US diplomatic plates came under sustained fire from federal police (PF) officers in the south-central state of Morelos on 24 August. Two US officials travelling in the vehicle were injured, and a Mexican navy captain was largely unscathed. At this point the facts of the incident give way to speculation. The identity of the US officials, for instance, is unclear, as is precisely what they were doing in Mexico, and why they came under attack. Without clearing up these issues, President Felipe Calderόn apologised in public to US ambassador Anthony Wayne four days later.
The car apparently refused to stop for federal police officers, who were neither in uniform nor in marked cars, waving it down. They responded by opening fire and as the car made its escape it was pursued by several other vehicles. A Mexican judge ordered the preventative arrest for 40 days of 12 federal police officers involved in the incident, at the request of the attorney general’s office (PGR).
Extra-official sources from the PGR this week put out that the two US officials injured in the attack on the car in Morelos were in fact agents of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who were visiting a military training centre, El Capulín, on the border between Morelos and the Estado de México. This followed a claim by Mexico’s news magazine Proceso, citing an anonymous source, that the men were actually members of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) assisting the navy in tracking down Héctor Beltrán Leyva, the leader of the eponymous drug trafficking organisation (DTO) - and that a fourth man, an informer, was also in the car. The US authorities declined to reveal the identities of the officials beyond saying they worked in law enforcement.
The navy issued an odd statement about the incident in which it pointed out that the navy captain in the car was not driving but was on the back seat making calls from his mobile phone seeking help. It might have felt compelled to dissociate itself completely from any involvement. The navy has a productive working relationship with US security personnel, while its working relations with the PF are increasingly strained.
Opening a forum on public security at the national anthropology museum in the presence of Ambassador Wayne on 28 August, President Calderón said the violent incident was unacceptable and that the PGR would conduct a thorough investigation to get to the bottom of it. “Be it from negligence, lack of training, lack of trust, complicity, these acts cannot be permitted and they are being investigated absolutely rigorously,” he said, while thanking Wayne for the help the US is providing through the Mérida initiative to combat organised crime.
The mayor of the Distrito Federal (DF), Marcelo Ebrard, decried the fact that the whole incident was shrouded in mystery. He expressed greater interest in clarifying what the US officials were doing in Mexico, however, than clearing up the motive for the violence. “Is there some agreement signed between Mexico and the US that allows the CIA to carry out operations in Mexico? This is very sensitive,” he said, adding that it was not envisaged in the Mérida initiative and fell outside the margin of the constitution and Mexican law. Ebrard said it was incumbent on the senate, which will start a new session on 1 September, to investigate and to inform Mexicans “what agreement there is with the US, how far it stretches and with which agencies.”
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