Briefing Room 05.16.2026: CIA Covert Ops in Mexico, Aung San Suu Kyi's Fate Unknown, Crackdowns in Costa Rica.

Welcome back to The Briefing Room, the weekly update that we very narrowly voted not to turn into a game show entitled How Bad Can This Get With Me? Sadly, we didn't have the budget for a giant spinning wheel of awful news, but you know, maybe one day.

Today we're going to start off in Latin America where the Central Intelligence Agency is blowing up cartel bosses and carrying out drug raids on Mexican soil without Mexico's knowledge.

Then we'll travel to Myanmar for an ultra-depressing demonstration of authoritarian whitewashing in action before making a trip to Costa Rica to understand a rapidly worsening internal crisis. As always, thank you so much for your support of Fronts.co.

If you're watching this, you are one of our beloved premium subscribers and you can rest easy in the knowledge that your support makes our work possible.

We appreciate you very much, and to express our gratitude, here's all the underreported bad news that we think you should know about. On the 28th of March, 2026, a car bomb detonated just outside of Mexico's Felipe Angeles International Airport.

Killed alongside the driver was the car's sole passenger, high-ranking Sinaloa cartel member Francisco Beltran, better known as El Payen.

When the incident first came to light, reports from local authorities suggested that Beltran had been transporting an explosive device and that it had triggered by mistake before reaching its target. But according to a new bombshell report by CNN, Francisco Beltran's death was far from an accident.

Instead, CNN alleges that the blast was a successful assassination, a covert operation carried out by none other than the American Central Intelligence Agency.

According to Mexican law, the CIA assassination on the nation's soil would be very illegal without the express permission of the Mexican government. The idea that the CIA would be present in Mexico carrying out operations without the federal government's knowledge was already being discussed in some corners before the CNN report came out.

Back in late April, Mexican President Claudia Scheinbaum confirmed that two CIA agents had died in Mexico in a vehicle crash after participating in a raid on a drug lab in the state of Chihuahua.

According to Scheinbaum at the time, neither she nor her government had any knowledge that CIA agents would participate in that drug raid, even as anonymous local sources indicated that this was the third time the CIA had assisted in a drug raid this year.

In that story, Chihuahua state leaders were implicated, having invited the CIA along and allowed them to dress in the uniforms of the Chihuahua State Investigative Agency without ever informing Mexico City. Of course, it's not entirely unusual that the CIA would be active in Mexico to some degree.

It's standard for the CIA and other American intelligence and law enforcement agencies to collaborate with their Mexican counterparts, provide intelligence, and coordinate cross-border operations. The current U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Ronald D.

Johnson, was appointed to the role while he was serving as the CIA's science and technology liaison to U.S. Special Operations Command.

He's been a career CIA operative since he ended his career in the Army as a Green Beret in 1998 and was previously Washington's ambassador to El Salvador during the Army. of Nayib Akeli's domestic crackdown on Salvadoran gangs.

But for foreign agents to participate in Mexican law enforcement raids is outlawed by Mexico's constitution, and for Washington to approve the CIA raids that allegedly went down in Chihuahua, the U.S. would have had to choose to disregard that law.

That, in turn, raised tensions between Mexico and the U.S. across the last several weeks before the new CNN report came out.

At the heart of the simmering diplomatic crisis, a claim that U.S. President Donald Trump has been repeating for years that the U.S., under his leadership, would consider taking unilateral action against cartels on Mexican soil.

While neither U.S. nor Chihuahua officials have filled in the missing details, it's easy enough to deduce what might have happened here. Local law enforcement, frustrated with federal leadership, chose to strike a quiet deal with the CIA to go behind Scheinbaum's back.

The problem, of course, is that this isn't only extremely illegal under Mexican law, but it's a possibility that Scheinbaum had made abundantly clear that she and her government would oppose. With trouble already brewing in the background, CNN's report on the 12th of May was especially explosive.

According to the report, the car bombing that killed Francisco Beltran was a targeted assassination that CIA operatives had carried out by placing an explosive device within Beltran's vehicle prior to his departure.

The report describes the killing as, quote, part of an expanded and previously unreported CIA campaign inside Mexico spearheaded by the agency's elite and secretive ground branch to dismantle the entrenched cartel networks, end quote.

Those operations have targeted cartels that the U.S. has recently designated as foreign terrorist organizations, and on several occasions, CIA operatives have, quote, directly participated in deadly attacks on several, mostly mid-level cartel members, end quote.

The Beltran assassination, however, was especially significant, to the point that before the CNN report was released, Mexico analysts were poring over what they suspected might have been a killing by another cartel, quoting CNN again, brazen even by the standards of typical Mexican cartel violence.

The report suggests that the CIA is working to dismantle cartel networks from bottom to top, with an unusual level of attention paid to lower and mid-level enforcers who facilitate trafficking at the ground level.

As for whether the CIA's involvement was known and approved by the Mexican government, Mexico City and the CIA both denied that the story was legitimate.

As Mexico Secretary of Security Omar Garcia Harfuch stated on X, quote, the government of Mexico categorically rejects any version that seeks to normalize, justify, or suggest the existence of lethal, covert, or unilateral operations by foreign agencies on national territory, end quote.

And as serious as the allegations against the CIA already are, they're not the only report of alleged American covert operations to come out this month.

A recent investigation out of Honduras by the website Hondurasgate and an independent news outlet revealed leaked audio recordings of Honduras' president, Nasr Espora, and other top Honduran officials discussed. an alleged effort to destabilize left-leaning governments across Latin America.

Allegedly, those operations are to include a disinformation campaign targeting Brazil, Colombia, and, yes, Mexico, while operating on U.S. soil.

That effort would have benefited from direct financial support from Argentinian President Javier Malay, with the backing of U.S. President Donald Trump. As key Honduran officials explain in the purportedly leaked audio, the effort is intended to, quote, attack and eradicate the cancer of the left, end quote.

And it's supposedly spearheaded by former Honduran President Juan Orlando Jiménez, who was pardoned by Donald Trump just months ago from a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking.

Before we move on from this story, though, we must emphasize that both the allegations revealed in the CNN report and the allegations described in this second report out of Honduras are just that, allegations that have not been conclusively confirmed.

But if those allegations are true, then they reveal a highly aggressive U.S. effort that influence Latin American nations, especially Mexico, while taking kinetic action on their soil. If and when this story develops further, we, of course, will be back to cover it.

So, from Mexico, we pivot to the nation of Mar Mar, where we're now more than two weeks out from the ruling military regime's declaration that the country's former civilian leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, would be transitioned to house arrest. This is as a show of, quote, benevolence and goodwill.

But despite the ruling Tatmadaw claimed that Suu Kyi would be released from prison, nobody has seen her ever since.

Suu Kyi was placed into military custody in 2021 when the Tatmadaw seized power in a coup d'etat.

Alongside many of her deputies and parliamentarians, Suu Kyi was forced to watch from inside a cell as Mar Mar descended into civil war, an ongoing conflict that has probably claimed well past 100,000 lives despite difficulties in establishing a clear death toll.

Ever since, Suu Kyi has been kept isolated from her country and the rest of the world, unable to communicate with anyone outside.

In 2024, amid reports that her health had deteriorated dramatically, the regime stated that she'd been moved to an undisclosed location to keep her safe during a heatwave. According to anonymous regime officers from within Myanmar, she has been held under house arrest in the capital of Napdor ever since.

Those claims, however, are not generally considered to be credible, and Suu Kyi's legal team and her family have been unable to make contact.

As her family has recently pointed out, she could very well be in extremely poor health if she is even alive in the first place. When the nation's leadership announced her transition to house arrest, they released a photo, undated, in an unknown location, with no way to prove it hadn't been digitally altered.

Even though the Tatmadaw government has refused to provide proof of life or regular updates on Suu Kyi's status, it wasn't much of a surprise that the regime chose to announce that she had been moved.

Over the last several months, Myanmar's military dictator has been essentially pantomiming a transition to something that's supposed to pass for a civilian government.

He's held elections. actions under tightly controlled conditions, polling only voters who live in zones the military controls, and has positioned himself as the head of that civilian government.

His role as chief of the military has been passed on to a loyal deputy, his new legislature has been filled with parliamentarians who will reliably do his bidding, and all told, the whole transition was about as genuine as a Russian ceasefire.

But the transition wasn't for the benefit of Myanmar's civilian population or even the regime itself. Instead, the recent elections and everything that has come afterward are a display for an international audience.

Myanmar is trying to work its way back into the international community, seeking sanctions relief, resumption of trade, diplomatic arrangements, and other changes that would allow it to return to business as usual.

Never mind, of course, that Myanmar is still in the midst of a full-scale civil war, and the regime can't even exert control over half of the nation's territory. But if Myanmar is going to be allowed to return to the international order, its admission will have to be approved by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, better known as ASEAN.

Since 2021, ASEAN has declined to formally suspend Myanmar's membership, but it has blacklisted the regime, disinvited it from summits, and even stripped it of what was supposed to be a turn as the bloc's chairman this year.

But much like, say, the African Union, non-African affairs, the ASEAN bloc's decisions are typically respected and followed by the rest of the world, and if Myanmar could get ASEAN to accept its recent elections as legitimate, it could expect similar treatment from other nations.

To try and accomplish that challenge, Myanmar has been pursuing a strategy that we could generously call… doing the bare minimum.

The country announced an amnesty program for political prisoners, released a small proportion of all the people in politically motivated detention across Myanmar, and then announced that it would wind down the amnesty program to continue at some later time.

Then it sliced a bit of time off the 80-year-old Suu Kyi's prison sentence, along with the sentences of some of her deputies, and when that wasn't enough, it sliced off a little bit more. Because of the regime's benevolence, Suu Kyi will now be released at age 99.

The announcement to transition Suu Kyi to house arrest was simply the latest step that Myanmar had taken to see whether it would be enough to get ASEAN leaders to engage.

But nowhere in the discussion has Myanmar offered that she could be freed or even provided basic proof of life. And despite everything, the regime's plan might just work.

While most ASEAN nations remain deeply skeptical of Myanmar's leadership and its sham elections, Thailand has been the exception, consistently signaling that it was open to allowing Myanmar to re-engage with the bloc.

Not counting Myanmar, ASEAN is comprised of ten member states, and Thailand is among the more influential, with the third-largest GDP of the group and some of the greatest credibility to weigh in on Myanmar because of their long shared border.

It also enjoys close relations with the US and NATO, as well as China, and it's one of ASEAN's foremost cultural ambassadors to the rest of the world. So, where Thailand goes, the rest of the bloc is likely to follow.

As Myanmar keeps making extremely minor concessions, and other ASEAN nations have signaled to ignored movement, most recently the Philippines, which currently leads the bloc. After a summit just a few days ago, ASEAN leaders remained split, but they're headed into virtual talks with Myanmar's government to tentatively explore a regional re-engagement.

Make no mistake, Suu Kyi is still somewhere in state custody.

Maybe she's in house arrest, or maybe she's not. Maybe she's alive, or maybe she's not. But after five years of ruinous civil war, after doing the absolute bare minimum to signal meaningless token changes, Myanmar's military regime seems to be on the verge of getting away with everything.

It'll still have a war to fight, but the people trying to fight that war and resist a military regime that's bent on cementing their dictatorship are about to be on their own, and Suu Kyi is at risk of being forgotten entirely. And finally today, we turn to one of the rare countries on Earth that our Front's team practically never has to talk about.

Costa Rica, where there hasn't been a military since 1949, there hasn't been a war since 1948, and the national reputation is one of sunny beaches, not dystopian ninevilles.

But this week, Costa Rica made its way onto our radar, and that of many other people who've made careers out of watching dark and depressing global developments, because according to the nation's new leader, the crackdowns are coming.

Last Friday, 39-year-old Laura Fernandez was sworn in as Costa Rica's new president, after she won a resounding victory in the nation's presidential and legislative elections this February.

She's the chosen political cesser of now-former-president Rodrigo Chavez, and like other Latin American leaders from Nayib Bukele to Daniel Leboa, Fernandez is part of the right-wing, tough-on-crime wave of young populists that have surged to power across the last decade.

Formerly Chavez's minister of the presidency, Fernandez is a close friend to conservative governments from Washington to Chile to Israel. She's also coming into office at a moment of national crisis. Historically, Costa Rica has been renowned for its stability, its lack of crime, and its safety, both for local residents and international travelers.

But over the last decade, the country has faced a transformation that it did not ask for. According to the country's security minister, under Chavez, Costa Rica was home to just 35 operational organized crime groups a decade ago, but today that number has increased nearly tenfold to 340.

In 2017, Costa Rica saw 603 homicides across the year in what was already a record at that time.

But by 2023, that number had climbed to over 900. Incarceration is at an all-time high, and robberies, contract killings, and corrupt prosecutions are all spiraling out of control. But although the country has its fair share of internal challenges, regional experts broadly agree that the situation is the result of trouble abroad.

Because of the recent rise of figures like Bukele, as well as the more recent anti-trafficking efforts of America's Trump administration, transnational criminal groups are making changes all across Latin America.

In some places where authorities have really turned up the heat, they've decided to close down their operations and go elsewhere, meaning that in areas less effective at combating organized crime, the criminals are looking to move in. to the south ecuador peru and bolivia are each being destabilized by waves of organized crime while chile's newly elected

President jose antonio cast surged to victory after pledging overwhelming crackdowns against groups operating on chilean soil further north in central america costa rica is a perfect place for cartels and gangs to expand their operations turning the country into a waypoint on drug trafficking routes that lead toward the u.s and europe according to cara

Morales a police science professor at costa rica's national university of distance education the country is regarded as an ideal place for syndicates to expand their operations turning it into a quote warehouse and logistical operation zone the reason the cartels can get away with such a thing is simple costa rica doesn't or can't intervene now to its credit

The costa rican government has been trying to wake itself up to the problem last june the country arrested a former security minister who has since been extradited to the united states and that november costa rica issued its first designation of a transnational criminal organization operating on the nation's soil the so-called south caribbean cartel ordinary

Citizens are certainly aware and they responded to the growing crisis in part by electing laura fernandez as their new leader the nation has increased drug prosecutions trained and deployed special police units and now welcomed a president who says she intends to institute crackdowns on the scale of naive kelly in el salvador but as laura fernandez

Understands all too well costa rica's long-time commitment to pacifism has left it badly under equipped to deal with this challenge its constitution outlaws the existence of a standing military and in practical terms the country lacks the personnel or the institutions to really surge into crackdowns at scale after all there hasn't really been much of a need

To create those institutions or to fund and expand them prior to the last few years fernandez's hard work trying to change that accelerating development on a maximum security prison modeled after bukele's prison infrastructure and promising that she'll soon declare a state of emergency to expand her powers but in her electoral victory fernandez failed to

Secure a legislative supermajority something she'd need to really deepen her upcoming crackdowns or modify the nation's constitution costa rican opposition leaders have expressed a good deal of relief that fernandez wasn't handed that sort of mandate fearing an authoritarian takeover and a dismantling of costa rica's prized independence institutions but even

Though the costa rican opposition will stand between fernandez and any dictatorial impulses she may possess it's difficult to deny the gravity of the security situation that costa rica is facing and it's equally difficult to chart a path to normalcy with the tools currently currently at costa rica's disposal thank you for watching