Did CIA Hit A Sinaloa Narco With A Car Bomb?
A CNN story makes an explosive claim; it has holes and was denied in U.S. and Mexico but the tactic is plausible
In late March, a pick up truck leaving the AIFA airport on the outskirts of Mexico City exploded on the highway, rolled across multiple lanes of traffic and crashed, leaving the two occupants dead. The driver and passenger were both from Sinaloa, the latter being identified as Francisco Beltrán, alias ‘El Payín,’ alleged to be a powerful member of the Sinaloa Cartel and lieutenant of a kingpin called El Meño.
While the Mexican press originally reported that a car bomb caused the explosion, prosecutors from Mexico State, where the deaths took place, gave limited information and threw out suggestions that it could have been a mechanical failure. The story was left with loose ends.
This Tuesday, however, CNN reported the explosive charge that the CIA was involved in the attack in a covert war against narco targets south of the border. “The Beltran operation was part of an expanded, and previously unreported, CIA campaign inside Mexico — spearheaded by the agency’s elite and secretive Ground Branch — to dismantle the entrenched cartel networks,” it says.
If true, the deaths could be the first victims of long-threatened U.S. strikes on cartel targets here. It would be an illegal operation (under Mexican law at least) that puts the lives of Mexican civilians in danger. And it would ratchet up pressure on the already fragile Trump-Sheinbaum security partnership.
But was it really a CIA hit? Several former federal agents told CrashOut it sounded plausible, especially considering how President Donald Trump has ramped up the war on drugs, with missile strikes on cocaine boats. Yet Mexico’s security secretary and the CIA quickly denied it, with a CIA X account calling it, “false and salacious reporting that serves as nothing more than a PR campaign for the cartels and puts American lives at risk.”
The CNN story has several holes that raise questions. The first is…
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