US ambassador to Mexico, Ronald Johnson. Photo: State Department.
No one with the slightest respect for diplomacy would ever name Ronald Johnson ambassador to anyplace but Hell. Hiring him to be top diplomat is like hiring Jeffrey Epstein to be the recreation director at a girls high school. His appointment as ambassador to Mexico indicates a hard-line policy of force over diplomacy towards Claudia Sheinbaum and the Fourth Transformation.
Johnson is a retired Colonel, a “former” CIA agent, a super-hawk, an expert in undercover psychological operations and asymmetric irregular warfare, and a seasoned ex-Green Beret with extensive tours of duty in three imperial slaughterhouses – El Salvador, Afghanistan, and Iraq. His current role is to impose Trump’s national security agenda on Mexico, reducing it to a U.S. protectorate, which is what the U.S. means by “partnership.” He has vast experience in dissimulation and deception, espionage and counterespionage, otherwise known as systematic lying, as well as military intervention, which is the U.S. “solution” to drug-trafficking.
He graduated as a Green Beret with a master’s in strategic intelligence, and specializes in undercover operations and unconventional warfare. In the 1990s, he was dispatched to the Balkans as a senior military officer in charge of a team made up of personnel from the CIA, the NSA, and Special Missions Unit to arrest people accused of “war crimes,” which conveniently excluded U.S. and NATO officials committing large scale atrocities in the region at the time.
Johnson was appointed to get Mexico back in line with Washington’s to-hell-with-the-people agenda. Days after he arrived in the Mexican capital he was guest-of-honor at a far-right dinner hosted by Eduardo Verástegui, a wealthy far-right actor aligned with Bolsonaro, Milei, and Trump. He was also at another gala welcome with members of the American Society, an “independent” business group of which Johnson is the honorary leader, and which dedicates itself to blaming Mexico for drug-trafficking while ignoring massive U.S. involvement in the same trade, as though drug-kingpins weren’t well stocked with U.S. military grade weapons and nourished by its recreational drug culture, money laundering, distribution gangs, and CIA drug-running going back many decades.
Since his appointment, Johnson has been turning the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City into a C.I.A. operations center. Obviously uninterested in strengthening trade, investment for development, or even intelligence for legitimate security purposes, his priority is to prevent Mexico’s Morena party from remaining in power. For Donald Trump, allowing Washington’s “back yard” to be governed by a reformist government outside established imperial guidelines is an invitation to popular rebellion that must be crushed lest it ignite a regional conflagration. Morena’s slogan alone is deeply offensive: “for the good of all, poor people first,” which flies directly in the face of capitalist dogma putting rich investors first, last, and always, with trickle-down pieties for the poor and vanishing middle class.
Obviously, Johnson’s background and abilities go directly against the staples of diplomacy, which are courtesy, non-judgmental dialogue, and negotiation, all of them indispensable to sane international relations but useless for capitalist plundering. Thus, Johnson has to follow an imperial policy of pressure and destabilizing force, in order to deepen Mexican dependence on the U.S. and undermine the once defensive containment policy of the Mexican Foreign Ministry and the Ministry of National Defense, an effort primarily focused on reducing immigration through the use of productive investment at the most common migration origin points.
Johnson has a deep understanding of Latin America and the Caribbean (but not Mexico), because of a career spent in the area of responsibility of the Pentagon’s Southern Command, until 1999 at the network of U.S. bases in the Panama Canal Zone. In the 1980s, he served as military advisor to the Salvadorean army during its war of virtual extermination against the FMLN.
The Salvadorean military officials carrying that policy out had been indoctrinated at the U.S. School of the Americas (also known as the school of coups) in fanatical anti-Communism, then went out and tortured and massacred civilians to the tune of 70,000 killed from the late seventies to the early nineties, most of them peasants and indigenous peoples.
Johnson retired as a colonel in 1998 and joined the CIA, where he participated in world-wide combat operations including counterinsurgency, state terrorism, espionage, “scientific” torture, and unconventional warfare, among other responsibilities. He led air, land, and sea deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, and was in charge of CIA paratrooper operations.
From 2019 to 2021 Johnson was ambassador to El Salvador, during which time Nayib Bukele laid the foundations for repressive dictatorship, featuring arbitrary mass incarceration, concentration of executive power, imprisonment of journalists, closing down of human rights groups, and digital spying on journalists and the public.
Johnson works closely with Marco Rubio, who accused ex-president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrabor (AMLO) of handing Mexico over to drug cartels, a routine smear applied to unsubmissive Mexican governments. During his term in office (2018-2024) AMLO had the nerve to impose the National Security Law on the U.S., which has limited the covert activities of foreign agents like those of the DEA, FBI, NSA, DIA, and CIA, who since December 2020 have been required to inform the Mexican government about their operations inside Mexico, an intolerable affront to American imperial marauders who consider the entire world a U.S. trophy.
This past April 19 Johnson announced the deaths of two U.S. agents in a car accident in Chihuahua, alerting the world to CIA involvement in dismantling a drug lab in Sierra Tarahumara, which put Chihuahuan governor Maru Campos of the National Action Party (PAN) under fire from the Mexican federal government and the Morena party for authorizing foreign agents to operate without permission on Mexican territory. Morena initially threatened to impeach Campos, but later declined to pursue the option.
On April 29 Johnson posted in his social media the U.S. filing of criminal charges against Sinaloa governor Ruben Rocha and nine others by the U.S. federal prosecutor’s office in the Southern District of New York. In ensuing days President Claudia Sheinbaum rebuked the United States for abruptly making the Rocha case public, and questioned the legitimacy of implicating Rocha and other Morena officials without demonstrating clear evidence of their supposed guilt.
The Ruben Rocha extradition request may have been a Hail Mary to rescue Maru Campos from the political consequences of her collaboration with the CIA. If Morena can be put on the political defensive with drug trafficking charges it might not be able to pull off an aggressive full court press against U.S. intervention. Or so Washington may be thinking. Whatever the strategy, the complete lack of reciprocity in extradition requests between the two “partners” demonstrates that it is a political one, not a neutral law-enforcement initiative undertaken in a spirit of fraternal cooperation.
Since Morena came to power in 2018 Mexico has made 269 extradition requests of the U.S., but none have been granted. Thirty-six were rejected outright and 233 are still pending. Some of the requests have to do with the 43 disappeared students at Ayotzinapa in 2014, but the gravity of this crime has not induced U.S. cooperation. Another request involves Thomas Aron, who tortured kidnapped students at Ayotzinapa, and is now comfortably living in Israel where the Holy State widens its genocidal operations and refuses to extradite him.
Ignoring all of this, the U.S. demands instant extradition of Morena officials based on accusation alone. Even if a given accusation is shown to have merit, the U.S. is fully capable of offering a pardon in exchange for a corrupt deal, as it did with Juan Orlando Hernandez in Honduras. It’s not exactly news that pardons and everything else are permanently for sale in the current White House. But the issue goes beyond government relations, as the Mexican people recognize the stakes and have begun to take action.
To protest Maru Campos’s collaboration with the CIA, Morena supporters carried out a protest march on May 16. The march took place in the scorching Chihuahuan heat with local PAN supporters (Governor Campos’s party) doing everything they could to discourage turnout: blocking and tearing-up roads, closing bridges, putting up toll booths, shutting down public transport, and dispatching party thugs to intimidate marchers and attack journalists. Still, 20,000 protesters turned out, replete with Mexican flags and anti-CIA signs to make it known that the Mexican people will not consent to clandestine U.S. operations inside Mexico. For them, Campos’s collaboration effectively ceded authority to the United States, a treasonous act that effectively terminated her right to continue as governor in their view.
Campos brazenly defended her collaboration as a “successful operation,” and clumsily strove to turn it into a presidential bid. Why should I have to answer to the Mexican Senate, she wanted to know, when Senators are being accused of ties to organized crime? Her abject servility and yearning for impunity couldn’t have been more starkly demonstrated.
In her June 2 address to the nation commemorating two years since being elected to power, President Sheinbaum called out U.S. intervention in her strongest terms to date, saying that it was legitimate to question U.S. intentions when it makes extradition requests without offering evidence, and stating that the U.S. may be planning to meddle in Mexican elections. A day later Ambassador Johnson publicly responded with the usual fake neutrality, stating that “the struggle against the cartels should unite us, not divide us,” adding that we should never allow politics to divide us. “Every time we try to convert this shared security challenge into a political discussion, it’s a missed opportunity to strengthen our cooperation and protect the people we serve,” he claimed.
As though it were possible to serve the rich and the poor at the same time.
That the U.S. seeks to destroy Mexican sovereignty couldn’t be more obvious. Early in his second term, President Trump declared the cartels foreign terrorist organizations, and the U.S is now using that designation to target Mexican officials whose political ideology it loathes but cannot debate. It intends to inflict defeat without having to debate, but it can only do this if Mexico cooperates in its own degradation and refuses to publicly state that the Emperor has no clothes, which appears unlikely.
The announced crusade to rescue Mexico from corruption, after all, comes from a government whose president makes millions of dollars off of illegal stock transactions using insider information, then plugs the companies involved during his public speeches, this while the U.S. supports genocidal Israel to the hilt, kidnaps a foreign head of state (Maduro), and launches an unprovoked war of aggression with Iran, pushing the world economy to the brink of another Great Depression.
It should be recalled that General Santa Ana’s slow response to the Texas border crisis 180 years ago resulted in the dismemberment of Mexico and the loss of half its territory. Now the gringo imperialists are coming for the other half. If U.S. intervention is not promptly shut-down, low-grade secession movements could emerge in the border states.
Washington’s goal is to get Mexico to abort its solidarity with Cuba, let the U.S. extract rare earth elements and lithium, and prevent a collapse of the discredited PRI/PAN in real time in hopes of reviving Mexican subservience to the civilized master race in Washington. Call it the second coming of Manifest Destiny.
But this time, the Mexican people are awake, and aware of what happened last time. They’re not likely to surrender the other half of their territory to a fading U.S. empire with a mentally unstable president who is the envy of no sane person in the world.
Sources.
Ernesto Nuñez, “US Ambassador Ronald Johnson, an uncomfortable voice amid Mexico’s defense of sovereignty,” El Pais International, June 3, 2026
“Lost City,” Miguel Angel Velazquez, La Jornada, (Spanish) May 26, 2026
“CIA Out of Chihuahua,” Soberanía: The Mexican Politics podcast, Episode 107, You Tube, May 20, 2026
“The CIA in Chihuahua and the U.S. Counterattack: They didn’t come to train, they came to destabilize,” Soberanía: The Mexican Politics podcast, You Tube, May 1, 2026
C. Fazio, “Trump and Johnson: Bad Omen,” La Jornada (Spanish), December 23, 2024
C. Fazio, “The Johnson Factor,” La Jornada (Spanish), December 22, 2025
“From Cooperation to Intervention,” La Jornada (Spanish), June 1, 2026
The post The Second Coming of Manifest Destiny appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Michael K. Smith.
Michael K. Smith | Radio Free (2026-06-18T06:02:09+00:00) The Second Coming of Manifest Destiny. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2026/06/18/the-second-coming-of-manifest-destiny/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.