Odd Denial

Rather than going into the background of this, I'll steal it from Richard:

Yesterday, William Booth of the Washington Post reported:

For the first time, U.S. officials plan to embed American intelligence agents in Mexican law enforcement units to help pursue drug cartel leaders and their hit men operating in the most violent city in Mexico, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.

Later in the day, Arturo Saukhan, the Mexican Ambassador to Washington, and U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, denied that that any United States agents are working in Mexican territory and that there are no plans to seek a change to Mexican law to allow such operations.

Of course, there ARE U.S. agents working in Mexico (we have a Drug Enforcement Agency office here in Mazatán. and –when the news cycle is slow — you can count on an expose of the U.S. agents at the Mexico City airport (looking for U.S. citizens transferring from Cuban flights to U.S. ones, no doubt) — but they aren’t “embedded” and, it sounds as if this is either wishful thinking on the U.S. government’s part, or Booth is talking about trainers of some sort… which isn’t controversial, given that Mexican police and military units have received training from Israeli, French and Spanish police in the past.

I had the same reaction to Sarukhán's denial. American agents have long been known to operate on Mexican soil. The examples of it are legion: Enrique Camarena, the two DEA agents who were nearly abducted by Osiel Cárdenas, et cetera. Not only are such examples many, they are not controversial, or at least, they haven't been. There was a controversy a few years ago about whether DEA agents (I believe, although maybe it was another branch of the US government) could be armed, but not whether they could be here. And even that controversy was more about hair-splitting over the explicit right versus the accepted custom.