The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and the CIA have each forcefully rejected a CNN report alleging that the U.S. intelligence agency facilitated the assassination of a Sinaloa cartel member on a highway outside Mexico City.
CNN reported Tuesday that the CIA helped plan and support the targeted killing, while The New York Times later said Mexican forces carried out the attack with CIA planning and assistance. Speaking at her morning press briefing, Sheinbaum called the CNN report a “lie” and dismissed the Times’ account as “a fiction the size of the universe.”
Liz Lyons, a spokesperson for the CIA, issued an equally sharp denial on social media, calling the reporting “false and salacious” and “nothing more than a PR campaign for the cartels” that endangers American lives. A CNN spokesperson responded that the CIA had been given the story’s details before publication and declined to comment, and that after the article appeared, Lyons’ statement did not identify any specific inaccuracies. “CNN stands by its reporting,” the spokesperson said.
The New York Times also stood by its work, with executive director of media relations Charlie Stadtlander saying in an emailed statement that the publication “remains confident in the accuracy of what we reported.”
The denials arrive at a moment of heightened sensitivity for Sheinbaum, who is navigating pressure to maintain a strong relationship with Washington while renegotiating the trilateral free-trade agreement and facing Trump’s repeated threats to take action against drug cartels. Last month, two CIA agents and two local Mexican investigators were killed in a car crash in the northern state of Chihuahua while returning from an anti-narcotics operation. Sheinbaum said she had no knowledge of the operation, and Mexican and U.S. authorities offered contradictory accounts for days.
A week after the crash, a New York court indicted the governor of Sinaloa — a high-ranking member of Sheinbaum’s ruling Morena party and an ally of former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador — on drug trafficking and weapons charges, accusing him of aiding the massive importation of illicit narcotics into the United States.
Sheinbaum, who took office in October 2024, has generally adopted a more measured tone toward the press than her predecessor. López Obrador frequently attacked journalists in his morning briefings, at times doxing reporters who challenged him. But the cascade of U.S.-linked scandals has put her government’s sovereignty-first narrative under scrutiny, and Wednesday’s heated denials underscored the competing pressures she faces both from Washington and from domestic audiences wary of American intervention.