MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Wednesday denied a NCS report that the CIA was finishing up lethal operations in Mexican territory, accusing the U.S.-based information group of trying to “hurt the government and the people of Mexico.”
NCS reported Tuesday that the CIA facilitated a focused assassination of a member of the Sinaloa cartel on a freeway outdoors Mexico City, fueling a firestorm in Mexico. The New York Times later reported that Mexican forces carried out the assault and the CIA supplied planning and assist.
Sheinbaum known as the NCS report a “lie.” Asked concerning the New York Times report throughout her morning press briefing, she known as it “a fiction the size of the universe.”
Liz Lyons, a spokesperson for the CIA, additionally lambasted the NCS report, posting on X that “this is false and salacious reporting that serves as nothing more than a PR campaign for the cartels and puts American lives at risk.”
A NCS spokesperson stated the CIA had been offered with particulars of the report previous to publication and had declined to remark. While the community didn’t immediately deal with Sheinbaum’s statements, it stated it stands by its reporting.
“After publication, CIA spokesperson Liz Lyons released a statement to NCS saying, ‘This is false and salacious reporting that serves as nothing more than a PR campaign for the cartels and puts American lives at risk,’ without specifying what aspect of the reporting is false,” the NCS spokesperson stated.
The New York Times additionally stood by its reporting, with Charlie Stadtlander, government director of media relations and communications, saying in an emailed assertion that the publication “remains confident in the accuracy of what we reported.”
While Sheinbaum’s mentor and predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, usually attacked journalists in his morning information briefings, going so far as to dox crucial reporters, Sheinbaum has taken a extra measured tone within the face of criticism.
But the president has been tormented by scandals involving the United States in latest weeks as she comes below strain to keep up a powerful relationship with Washington within the face of renegotiating a free-trade settlement and threats by U.S. President Donald Trump to take motion on cartels.
Sheinbaum has underscored Mexico’s sovereignty, a story that more and more has been questioned.
Last month, two CIA agents were killed in a car crash together with native Mexican investigators on their return from an anti-narcotics operation within the northern state of Chihuahua. Sheinbaum stated she had no information of the operation, and Mexican and U.S. authorities contradicted themselves for days.
Every week later, a New York court docket charged Sinaloa’s governor — a high-ranking member of Sheinbaum’s get together and ally of López Obrador — with drug trafficking and weapons offenses, accused of aiding within the large importation of illicit narcotics into the U.S.
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Jocelyn Noveck contributed to this report from New York.