“We can’t rule out [espionage] because we don’t know what they did.”
With those words, Mexico’s Defense Minister Ricardo Trevilla Trejo responded to a reporter’s question about whether United States military aircraft had engaged in “espionage” missions near and south of the U.S.-Mexico border to surveil and collect intelligence on Mexican drug cartels.
“They didn’t violate national air space,” added the top military brass at President Claudia Sheinbaum’s Tuesday morning press conference.
The questioning of the defense minister came a day after CNN reported that the U.S. military “significantly increased its surveillance of Mexican drug cartels over the past two weeks, with sophisticated spy planes flying at least 18 missions over the southwestern U.S. and in international airspace around the Baja peninsula.”
The news organization said that its reporting was based on “open-source data and three U.S. officials familiar with the missions.”
Trevilla said that Mexican authorities had “located” two of the missions CNN referred to, including a Feb. 3 flight detected “83 km to the southwest of Cabo San Lucas, Baja California Sur, outside Mexican airspace over international waters,” according to the Defense Ministry.
Sheinbaum said last week that it was “not something strange that there is a plane that flies in international airspace,” even when the aircraft is a United States military one in close proximity to Mexican territory a significant distance south of the U.S.-Mexico border.
However, the frequency with which the U.S. military has recently used spy planes to surveil areas close to Mexican territory is far from normal, according to CNN.
‘A dramatic escalation in activity’
CNN reported that the U.S. military spy plane missions — many of which flew close to the U.S.-Mexico border — were conducted over a period of 10 days in late January and early February.
Citing current and former U.S. military officials, the news outlet said that the flights represent “a dramatic escalation in activity” near Mexican territory.
The Pentagon has sent at least 18 surveillance flights of sophisticated spy planes to the Mexican border to collect intelligence on Mexican cartels, according to open source data and three U.S. officials. https://t.co/OoGFPzon43 pic.twitter.com/Bv7VFg6p3w
— Christiaan Triebert (@trbrtc) February 11, 2025
They come at a time when United States President Donald Trump is using the military to secure the border as he seeks to stem the flow of narcotics, especially fentanyl, into the U.S. from Mexico.
Citing a former military official “with deep experience in homeland defense,” CNN reported that the Pentagon “has historically flown only about one surveillance mission a month around the U.S.-Mexico border.”
“Typically, officials instead focus these planes on collecting intelligence on other priorities, such as Russian activity in Ukraine or hunting Russian or Chinese submarines. The activity highlights how the military has already begun shifting finite U.S. national security capabilities away from overseas threats to focus on the southern border, where Trump has declared a national emergency,” CNN said.
The types of spy planes used to carry out the recent U.S. military missions, including Boeing P-8 Poseidons, a Lockheed U-2 and a Boeing RC-135, are “capable of collecting intelligence deep within Mexico” while flying over U.S. airspace along the border, according to CNN’s sources.
Trevilla said there are agreements between the armed forces of Mexico and the United States to share such information.
“In any case, they would give it to us,” the defense minister said.
“I just had … telephone communication with the [United States] Northern Command … during which we established that we’re going to continue adhering to the bilateral mechanisms that exist between the armed forces of both countries,” Trevilla said.
The U.S. government appears determined to do all it can to combat Mexican cartels, which engage in a wide range of criminal activities including drug trafficking and people smuggling across the Mexico-U.S. border. On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order that laid the groundwork to declare cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, while the U.S. government announced last week that it intended “to pursue total elimination of Cartels and Transnational Criminal Organizations.”
In the Oval Office on Jan. 20, Trump said that the use of the U.S. military against Mexican cartels in Mexico “could happen,” while he declared last year that military strikes on cartel targets in Mexico were “absolutely” an option.
CNN reported that the “ramp-up” in spy plane flights near Mexican territory “underscores Trump’s determination to wield the military as the lead agency tackling counternarcotics and border security — two issues that have historically been led by domestic law enforcement agencies.”
“… Some current and former U.S. officials expressed quiet concerns to CNN that the intelligence flights could be part of an effort to find targets for the U.S. military to strike itself,” the media outlet added.
Citing a United States Department of Justice source, the El Universal newspaper said that the flights were “related to information provided by Ismael ‘El Mayo’ Zambada and Ovidio and Joaquín Guzmán, aka Los Chapitos,” all alleged Sinaloa Cartel leaders who are in U.S. custody on drug trafficking charges.
Report: Mexico expects a further escalation of US ‘actions’ at the border
El Universal reported on Wednesday that it had access to a “high-level federal government analysis” that predicts an “escalation” of actions from the United States on the 3,145-kilometer long border it shares with Mexico.
“After the increase in United States spy flights in international waters to surveil Mexican drug cartels, the federal government anticipates an escalation of intelligence and military actions from the northern neighbor on the border with Mexico,” El Universal said.
The government analysis, the newspaper said, states that “the intensification of these United States border operations will serve to pressure the Mexican government to accept security concessions.”
El Universal didn’t say what those “security concessions” might be.
Sheinbaum says that the Mexican government is willing to collaborate with the United States on security issues but she is opposed to the use of the U.S. military to combat Mexican cartels on Mexican soil.
“We all want to combat drug cartels, that is clear. So what do we have to do? We have to coordinate efforts and collaborate — them in their territory and us in our territory,” she said last month.
An unsolicited military intervention in Mexico by the United States would no doubt infuriate the Mexican government and place an enormous strain on the bilateral relation. But, as Trump put it, “stranger things have happened.”
According to national security academic Víctor Hernández, “the United States government is preparing a low-scale military intervention in Mexico, with special forces and drone attacks.”
“Any military operation of this nature requires reconnaissance flights, like those we are seeing,” he told El Universal.
Carlos Pérez Ricart, an academic who specializes in security issues and author of the book “One Hundred Years of Spies and Drugs: The History of US Anti-Narcotics Agents in Mexico,” told the newspaper El País in December that he “would not be surprised to wake up one day to an American missile hitting a methamphetamine laboratory in Badiraguato,” Sinaloa, the home town of imprisoned drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
“It could happen [but] there is nothing to suggest that a more aggressive, direct, and invasive policy will lead to a decrease in fentanyl trafficking to the United States,” he said.
With reports from CNN and El Universal
