In a country of drug traffickers, savage battles between cartels, and their victims, the spark that set everything off came from a remote spot in an isolated mountain range. In the early hours of April 19, two CIA officers and two agents from the Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office were killed in a brutal car crash. On a road that winds through the gorges of the Sierra Tarahumara, their vehicle plunged into the depths of a ravine. The tragedy itself quickly receded into the background because of what it revealed: U.S. intelligence officers were with Mexican state agents returning from dismantling a huge drug lab. That revelation quickly set the rest of the pieces in motion.

First, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum moved swiftly against Chihuahua’s opposition government. The federal administration said it had no knowledge of the CIA agents, arguing that the Mexican Constitution bars foreign figures from doing field work.

The Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office stumbled at every step as it could not explain what the U.S. agents were doing there; the resignation of the Chihuahua prosecutor was announced, investigations were opened, and impeachment proceedings against Governor Maru Campos were launched.

Amid the internal conflict in Mexico, messages arrived from the United States: first a criticism of Sheinbaum’s “lack of compassion” over the agents’ deaths, and then the announcement of charges against the governor of Sinaloa and nine other officials for links to drug trafficking.

Both Maru Campos and Sinaloa Governor Rubén Rocha Moya were summoned on Saturday to testify before the Attorney General’s Office. Only a month has passed since the accident, and the repercussions inside and outside Mexico’s borders are still unfolding.

Unanswered questions

The case is full of questions. No government has helped answer them. For her part, the governor of Chihuahua says she did not know at the time about the operation, and barely knows now. She argues that the person who authorized the operation was the director of the State Agency of Investigation (who died in the crash); that the U.S. agents did not take part in the operation but do participate in operations in Chihuahua, though they are not CIA, and that people must wait for the investigations to finish.

Maru Campos only acknowledges that the then-attorney general of Chihuahua, César Jáuregui, called her at 3 a.m. on April 19 when the crash occurred and later told her that there were four CIA agents there, that two were in the vehicle that crashed, and two were in another vehicle.

As a result, there is still no detailed reconstruction of what happened. Citing testimony from the U.S. government, the Los Angeles Times reported that the four CIA officers did go to the drug lab, that it was the third raid they had taken part in since January in Chihuahua, and that they were there wearing state police uniforms. A source close to the Sheinbaum government told this newspaper that the drug lab was no longer operational, so the loss of life was in vain.

The crash has, however, produced one finding on the Mexican side: the CIA is cooperating with state governments and doing work previously carried out by other agencies, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). The same sources say the presence of these intelligence officers is greater now than at other times, and has grown almost by default after Trump designated Mexican cartels as terrorist organizations.

“In terms of the fogginess and the clarity of the information, in one month we have not yet gained much,” says María Teresa Martínez Trujillo, director of the Noria Research Center for Mexico and Central America. “There is no convincing account of who they were, what they were doing here, why it happened, why they were with Mexican agents, why they were where they were, why the accident occurred.”

Martínez, a professor at Tec de Monterrey, points out how public opinion in Mexico has grown used to having only “bits of the story and being left with a lot of unknowns,” while the case evolves toward a “politicization”: “And at the same time it is linked to other tensions in the political-criminal configurations, particularly what is happening in Sinaloa,” she adds.

The fallout

There is one fact that cannot be overlooked in this story. Most Mexican states are controlled by the ruling party Morena, and Chihuahua — one of the exceptions, led by the National Action Party (PAN) and the country’s largest state — will hold gubernatorial elections in 2027. In the days following the accident, Sheinbaum spoke about the case in all her morning press conferences, announced that it would be investigated whether the Mexican Constitution had been violated, stressed that U.S. officers could not operate in the field, and also took aim personally at Maru Campos, noting that she had not even answered her calls.

“The Mexican government tried to use the crash for domestic politics, but unintentionally ended up feeding distrust toward U.S. agencies,” says security analyst Carlos Pérez Ricart. “In the pursuit of winning some internal applause and affecting some internal opponents, they ended up making political use of the deaths of two people. And there is also a human aspect that the agency would not have tolerated. I think the federal government misread the situation and, instead of showing compassion for the deaths, they made political capital out of them.”

For the researcher at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE), the response from the Department of Justice and the CIA came in reaction to “the excessive prominence the Mexican government gave the issue”: “It is natural there would be a response, and we have yet to see all the consequences.”

Just 10 days after the Chihuahua crash, the United States indicted Rubén Rocha Moya and nine other political and security figures in Sinaloa. Two of them have already surrendered across the border. The Donald Trump administration has publicly said on several occasions that these indictments will not stop in Sinaloa.

The spies

The CIA has had agents in Mexico for decades; those who were in Chihuahua — unnamed publicly, unacknowledged on the Mexican side of the border — were not the first and will not be the last. Their deaths have drawn such attention because they are the latest example of a clash between conflicting messages: Donald Trump’s recurring threat of military intervention in Mexico and Sheinbaum’s perpetual defense of Mexico’s sovereignty.

“The president shows a general resistance to the presence of the agents, which does not mean there are not likely very specific cooperation agreements and projects,” says María Teresa Fernández Trujillo. Because the CIA officers should not have been working in Chihuahua, but they were.

“It is perfectly normal for the CIA to do its work with the states. It happens, it happened, and it will happen,” says Pérez Ricart, author of Cien años de espías y drogas: la historia de los agentes antinarcóticos de Estados Unidos en México (A Century of Spies and Drugs: The History of U.S. Drug Enforcement Agents in Mexico). “Sometimes it’s written down, sometimes not, sometimes it’s formal and sometimes informal, but CIA officers operate and will continue to operate in Mexico with or without the local government’s authorization.”

The researcher believes that state governments will now be “more cautious,” given what’s happened to Maru Campos, but he does not think this will transform how the intelligence agency intervenes: “The CIA needs informants, police, investigators, public prosecutors, and that relationship is not controlled — and has never been controlled — by the federal government. Much of the operation is not even endorsed by local governments. So this is not a before-and-after of anything. And especially not now, when the presence of these people is so evident, and interference is so central.”

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Seeing John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, in Havana might be less surprising than seeing Ramón Romero Curbelo, head of the Intelligence Directorate of Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior. His face had appeared on television before, but not in connection with his official position, and it is his position that gives such a face its expression. Images of him can be found at military events on the island, or in official delegations to Nicaragua and Vietnam, though always as part of a larger group. Another powerful military officer, which is no small matter, but not quite what we now know it to be.

In the photo the CIA published on its X account, Romero presides over a table dotted with socialist kitsch: bouquets of red roses, water bottles from small businesses, and white tablecloths from a workers’ cafeteria. Beside him are several Cuban officials, and in front of them, as if facing the entire communist platoon single-handedly, stands Ratcliffe, at attention. It is a bleak scene. What is being served at that table — and what cannot be seen — is the Cuban people. Curbelo’s hand invites his visitors to sit down and tells them they may eat. The stage has been closing in, and the United States is about to devour a menu that Castroism, chopping away here and there, diligently prepared for it, although Curbelo, in reality, does not seem entirely happy, but rather annoyed at having to share what until now they had been snacking on all by themselves.

The fact that the CIA reached the Cuban intelligence stronghold without firing a shot, after having previously killed 32 Cuban soldiers in Venezuela — stupidly sacrificed to defend a petty tyrant whom his own people had already betrayed — suggests that Castroism has no intention of self-destructing. They won’t wrap themselves in a flag and wait for the Marines on the Malecón; instead, they will try to buy more time, scraping together a way out for themselves, while meekly accepting what we might call a “soft invasion” — the formalization of the existence of big capital.

Be that as it may, the CIA seems to have already announced that it’s not willing to waste time with civilian intermediaries or second-rate scapegoats, such as, in these opaque regimes, even the country’s president himself. Perhaps Miguel Díaz-Canel’s own head is on offer at that ceremonial table, but only as decoration. The Americans didn’t go all the way to Havana to feast on so little. They went, according to their own eyewitness accounts, to see the face of Curbelo, the head of Cuban spies, and for the world to see it too.

In Spartan societies like Cuba — where kings are mere instruments of public negotiation used by the anonymous committee of the political police — the exposure of one of those faces signifies a loss of power. None of those faces are designed to become specific. They come from the people, they are among the people, they have eaten lunch at your school, slept in your shelter, gone to your university, walked through your neighborhood, and they rule and oppress with the omniscience of their ordinariness and under the guise of daily work.

Curbelo, a brigadier general, comes from Cienfuegos and is nobody’s son. In the photo, his face is stern, his brow furrowed, his head freshly shaved, and everything that could have made him a peanut vendor at a provincial train station suddenly transforms into something terrifying. Something deadly. I haven’t met, at least not consciously, any Cuban intelligence agents, but I have met several counterintelligence agents, who are in charge of surveillance within the country. They don’t use spies, but rather informants, yet the principle of the aura, of impenetrability, is the same.

Anyone who’s been through interrogations in Cuba knows that initially you’re approached by one or two individuals of considerably lower rank. Clumsy, amateurish, and brutish. Later, if you endure a couple of rounds, others may arrive, with more years of service, a more polished demeanor, and more refined methods. The violence becomes more concentrated, less hysterical, if you will. My first interrogators in Cuba, several years ago now, turned out to be, when the time came, the drivers of the second-in-command: a burly, middle-aged mulatto who called himself Saucedo and was considerably smarter and more ferocious than his subordinates. Even so, however much Saucedo seemed to be in charge, there was always a way to bring him down, and it consisted of thinking about the interrogator you hadn’t yet encountered, the one above him.

A few months ago, to make matters worse, the newspaper elToque revealed that Saucedo was actually Lieutenant Colonel Rafael Pupo Carnet of the Ministry of the Interior. They found out which neighborhood he lived in and even uncovered a video — from someone’s wedding or birthday, I don’t know whose — where he can be seen standing there, doing nothing, looking like he couldn’t care less. Part of the power of these men lies in the fact that the person being interrogated is unable to imagine them outside the interrogation room, that it seems as if they only exist there, like the anthropomorphic manifestation of a repressive machine.

In this neurotic game of opacity and masks, who, that we haven’t yet seen, might be lurking behind the head of Cuban intelligence? There’s no one left. It’s the anticlimactic end to a historic crime. For Curbelo, who believed he had spent his entire life preparing to be a general in the war against the Americans, history had reserved for him a position as a drawing-room captain.

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The confession came almost four months after the planes exploded over the Caribbean Sea: “I told them to try to knock them down over [Cuban] territory, but they would enter Havana and leave.” It was June 1996, and the 11-minute, 32-second statement was recorded and later transferred to an old compact disc. “Of course, with one of those missiles, air-to-air, what comes down is a ball of fire that will fall on the city.” The man speaking didn’t know then that he was revealing the crime that would haunt him for the rest of his life: the downing of two planes belonging to the Brothers to the Rescue non-profit organization. “Well, knock them down into the sea when they reappear; and don’t consult those who have the authority.” The speaker was Raúl Castro. The U.S. Department of Justice now intends to prosecute him for the deaths of the four crew members, more than three decades ago.

On May 20, an unprecedented event could take place in the mecca of Cuban exiles: the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida is set to formally present its indictment against Castro in a ceremony at the Freedom Tower in Miami. This initiative comes amid the Trump administration’s siege against the regime on the island. Since the Republican president announced in January that Cuba was “next,” following the incursion into Venezuela to arrest Nicolás Maduro, Cubans have been watching closely for any sign that might shed light on Trump’s uncertain plans.

It’s hard for people to imagine a figure like Castro, now 94, being transferred to a maximum-security prison in the United States so near the end of his life. He’s no longer the powerful man who can sit down and talk with the United States, as he did during Barack Obama’s presidency in 2016. Now he sends his grandson, Raúl Guillermo Rodríguez Castro, to carry on his legacy. Time, however, hasn’t lessened his debt, nor has old age granted him any special treatment among the exile community. “I don’t know if we’ll ever see Raúl Castro before a U.S. court,” says Arnaldo Iglesias, 88, in his Miami home. “But I would like the full recognition of the truth. I want it established that four men were murdered by a dictatorship during a humanitarian mission.”

Iglesias’ memory has not erased the events of that February 24, 1996, when the two Cessna C-337 planes carrying his Brothers to the Rescue comrades were shot down between 3:21 p.m. and 3:27 p.m. by Cuban Air Force MiG fighter jets. A third plane, carrying Iglesias, managed to escape. “I remember the voices on the radio, the uncertainty, and then the silence. A silence that defies explanation.”

A week earlier, Iglesias had seen his friends all smiles in Nassau, Bahamas, during a Brothers to the Rescue humanitarian mission. The group was conducting search and rescue operations in the Florida Straits, with exiles and the help of the U.S. Coast Guard, to assist those who took to the sea from Cuba, the so-called rafters. Iglesias never saw Armando Alejandre, 45, Carlos Costa, 29, Mario de la Peña, 24, or Pablo Morales, 29, again. He still remembers details about each of them, as if time hasn’t taken them away.

“Carlos Costa had a special calmness. Mario de la Peña was an enthusiastic young man and a consummate environmentalist. Pablo Morales was a rafter rescued by us, helping others to achieve the freedom he already enjoyed, and Armando Alejandre Jr., an exemplary Cuban,” he says. “Thirty years later, I still think about them almost every day.”

The survivors, the families of the victims, and the exile community that has for years mourned the four Brothers to the Rescue crew members have patiently waited for justice to be served against the Castro regime. Nothing, so far, has happened. Five administrations have come and gone in the White House without a response, despite the fact that it has been proven the planes were shot down over international waters, not Cuban airspace, and that the U.S. Congress condemned the events on March 12, 1996. That year, Judge James Lawrence King ruled that the Castro regime had murdered “four human beings in international airspace over the Florida Straits.” Cuba refused to compensate the victims’ families, but the United States did so with $93 million in frozen Cuban government assets.

After Trump’s first term, during which he barely paid any attention to Cuba, perhaps no one in Havana expected him to now dedicate so much time to the island. Events indicate that Washington is determined to fight back: a nearly five-month-long oil embargo has been compounded by threats, negotiations, visits from officials, $100 million in humanitarian aid, and the revelation that Castro could face prosecution in U.S. courts. There is one piece of evidence now available to federal judges that forms the cornerstone of the ongoing case: a voice recording in which Raúl Castro admits that he gave the order to shoot down the planes.

Brothers to the Rescue at the center of politics

That audio fell into the hands of Cuban journalist Wilfredo Cancio in 2006, based in Miami and at the time a reporter covering Cuban affairs for El Nuevo Herald. Castro had assumed the presidency of Cuba a few days earlier, due to Fidel’s illness. Ten years prior, as Cuba’s Minister of Defense and head of the Armed Forces, he had admitted his responsibility for the attack on the planes in a meeting with journalists from the island.

Cancio verified the recording with several specialists and with Alcibiades Hidalgo, who was Castro’s personal secretary. It was his voice. On August 20, 2006, he published an exclusive report that garnered worldwide media attention. “What changes with this recording is that there is now voice evidence of Raúl Castro assuming full responsibility,” the journalist told EL PAÍS, adding that he sees the planned indictment as “an act of historical justice.” When asked if the FBI had contacted him at any point regarding the investigation, he declined to comment.

The case of the downing of the planes has followed the course of events dictated by South Florida politics. “In the 1990s, there were formal charges and accusations that were dropped by the Bill Clinton administration, which was difficult for the families of the four men killed to accept,” Iglesias recounts. Two years after the recording was made public, it was once again put on hold with Barack Obama’s arrival at the White House and the diplomatic rapprochement between the two countries. Castro not only visited the United Nations headquarters in New York but also hosted the Democrat for a two-day stay in the Cuban capital. Former spy Gerardo Hernández, linked to the attack on the planes, was sentenced in the United States to life imprisonment and then sent to Cuba in 2014 as part of a prisoner exchange.

Republicans, for their part, have called for Castro’s head: Rick Scott, former governor of Florida, and the current governor, Ron DeSantis, are demanding that the Justice Department file charges. CBS News broke the news about Castro’s possible prosecution on the same day that the CIA director arrived in Havana last week. “Everything that is being done is a form of pressure on Cuba and a symbolic act of justice, albeit belated, but justice nonetheless. There is pressure in Congress and in the community to prosecute Raúl and Fidel as those responsible for the crime,” Cancio comments. “The fact that accountability is being discussed again today sends an important message: state crimes do not simply disappear with the passage of time.”

In 1996, Fidel himself said that he was the one who gave the order that small planes could no longer fly over Cuban airspace to drop leaflets, as they had done before. “They had a general order not to allow it… They acted with full awareness that they were following orders… I take responsibility for that,” the late leader said. However, the leaked audio shows that the order was actually given by his brother Raúl.

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