This article caught my eye:
Cartel car bomb: the CIA is fighting Trump’s colonial shadow war in Mexico
by Joe Glenton
The CIA used a car bomb to kill a mid-level cartel leader in Mexico’s capital, insiders claim. The US foreign intelligence agency is pursuing clandestine operations as part of president Donald Trump’s war on so-called ‘narco-terrorists’. In reality, the operations are about extending US control over the Americas.
Cartel boss Francisco Beltran was killed by an explosion on 28 March:
Video and pictures of the attack on March 28 show a quick burst of flames with the car continuing to roll forward, drifting off the highway.
The CIA has called accusations it was involved “false and salacious reporting”, which
serves as nothing more than a PR campaign for the cartels and puts American lives at risk.
Yet two CIA officers were killed in Mexico in April 2026. They were returning from a raid on a drugs lab in Chihuahua.
CNN said of the recent car bombing:
Mexican authorities have maintained extreme secrecy around the explosion, but multiple sources tell CNN that the attack was a targeted assassination, facilitated by CIA operations officers. An explosive device had been hidden inside the vehicle, the State of Mexico’s Attorney General told CNN.
Sowing chaos in Mexico
The US outlet quoted several figures familiar with the operation. They contradicted the official CIA response.
One said:
The lethality of their operations has been seriously ramped up. It’s a significant expansion of the kind of thing the CIA has been willing to do inside Mexico.
A former CIA officer said the US was trying to sow chaos through unattributable actions:
They definitely wanted this incident to create the question in everyone’s mind of, ‘Who did this?’
While Mexican journalist Jose Cardenas commented:
We have been living in anarchic war for many months in Sinaloa. But attacks like this, if confirmed, in an area near the country’s capital, well, I have never heard of anything similar.
In February, the killing of a senior cartel boss Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes led to widespread fighting across several Mexican states. Mexican security forces reportedly pulled the trigger, but CIA intelligence supported the operation. Here is the Canary report on that mission.
Conflating drug trafficking and terrorism
The US has increasingly tried to frame drug trafficking in the same category as terrorism. The new US counter-terrorism strategy reaffirms this:
Last year, I rightfully designated the deadly cartels as terrorist organizations, and began using the strength and power of the U.S. military to stop and destroy their operations.
This approach was also used to justify the 3 January attack on Venezuela. That action saw president Nicolas Maduro kidnapped and taken to New York for trial. The same narrative is still being used to justify illegal drones strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. To date, 193 people have been killed at sea since September 2025.
As the Canary reported on 6 January:
The US justice department classified the Cartel De Los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) alongside ISIS and Al-Qaeda in November. 43 days later, the US has effectively admitted the organisation does not exist – at least not as a cartel in any conventional sense.
The fact is, Cartel De Los Soles was always shorthand for high-level government corruption in Venezuela. It’s use goes back to the 1990s. The ‘suns’ refer to a rank insignia worn by grifting senior military officials. Which means the US classified a slang term in the same category as actual terror groups.
In reality, the Trump administration is aggressively pursuing hemispheric control. One writer has described this as building a ‘homeland empire’.
Trump’s homeland empire
Trump’s plan is driven by US decline, but also the increasing synergy between law enforcement, military and intelligence aims. This process is powered by the fascistic impulses of the US war on terror.
Historian Nikhil Pal Singh warned in a recent piece for Equator:
familiar analytical frameworks which rely on the distinction between foreign and domestic realms, normality and legality, policing and war, cannot provide the ‘world picture’ we need to grasp what’s happening here.
Instead, Trump:
conflates immigrants, drugs and free trade as sources of weakness coming from outside, “poisoning the blood of our country”.
Ultimately, Singh argued, Trump has combined:
the archaic geopolitics of a settler empire to the modern legal frameworks devised by his liberal predecessors.
US operations in South America are continuing under the name ‘Operation Total Extermination’. Canada, Cuba and Greenland have all been threatened with intervention or annexation. If not for the disastrous Iran war, Trump might already have acted. US rhetoric about continental politics has centred on drugs. But scratch the surface and you’ll find the same old colonial ambitions.
Featured image via N+
https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2026/05/13/cartel-car-bomb/
Venezuela, 51st State?
Trump’s talk of 51st US state met with near-silence in Venezuela
By REGINA GARCIA CANO and JUAN PABLO ARRAEZUpdated 2:16 PM BST, May 14, 2026
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Twice this week, U.S. President Donald Trump has expressed interest in turning Venezuela into his country’s 51st state. The latest came via a Truth Social post Tuesday with a map showing the South American country filled with the U.S. flag.
Previous statements doubting Venezuela’s sovereignty over the past 25 years have been met with immediate derision from senior government officials, including the president. The ruling party even organized demonstrations in the capital, Caracas, as recently as Jan. 3, hours after then-President Nicolás Maduro was captured by the U.S., that included chants of “Gringo go home.” This time around, however, the government has mostly kept quiet, save for a brief statement to reporters Monday from acting President Delcy Rodríguez.
The approach demonstrates the balance Rodríguez must strike between external and internal politics following the January U.S. military attack in Caracas. The Trump administration has since implemented a phased plan to try to turn around the crisis-wrecked country and has forced Rodríguez’s political movement, Chavismo, to abandon the anti-U.S. sentiment that long accompanied its teachings.
“This is probably the most public and sharp manifestation of the government’s transactional, self-survival approach above everything else right now, above even that sort of basic tenet of Chavismo,” said Christopher Sabatini, senior fellow for Latin America at the London-based Chatham House think tank. “It’s better that they hold their tongue, not offend the U.S. right now. Why overreact to a ridiculous claim by Donald Trump?”
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