The Johnson Factor

ByCarlos Fazio

This editorial by Carlos Fazio originally appeared in the December 22, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Mexico Solidarity Media, or the Mexico Solidarity Project.

While a potential merger of the Pentagon’s Northern and Southern Commands is being discussed—which, as a projection of hemispheric power, would become the Americas Command—in the military, security, and intelligence fields, the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 had already yielded significant benefits in Mexico, even before its official announcement. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged last Friday in Washington, collaboration between the United States and Mexico “is the highest in its history.” However, he did not provide details.

Some precedents for the strategic military alliance speak for themselves. As La Jornada revealed on February 4, 2002 (C. Fazio, “Pentagon Plans to Create a Military Force Together with Mexico and Canada”), our country was de facto integrated into the United States’ security perimeter under the control of the Northern Command. In turn, within the framework of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP, or the militarized NAFTA, 2005), the Mérida Initiative (2007) would lead to an accelerated denationalization of the internal security system. The priorities of the Bush Jr. administration were: the war on drugs (in Mexican territory); the war on terror (also in Mexico); border security (on Mexico’s northern and southern borders); control over public security and the various police forces in Mexico; penetration of local armed forces (SEDENA and SEMAR); and the creation of covert military bases disguised as bilateral intelligence offices or fusion centers. The construction of institutions and rules similar to those of the United States (harmonization of laws as part of Mexico’s silent and subordinate integration). Thus, without any limits on continuity, the United States would be a co-designer of Mexico’s “national security” strategy, which, beyond semantic games and other simulations, meant a surrender of sovereignty.

From the beginning of his second term last January, using the fentanyl issue and the designation of Mexican criminal groups as “foreign terrorist organizations” as his main talking points, Trump applied aspects of the so-called “OODA cycle” to the government of the Fourth Transformation: observe, orient, decide, act. The key aspect of this combat strategy is the cycle: it is not a single exercise, but a series of interconnected actions, each one feeding into the next. An action is taken, and the enemy’s reaction is observed. The reaction is analyzed, and a decision is made about the best course of action before proceeding. The enemy reacts, and the cycle repeats. Until the enemy is killed.

Grooming his first executive asset was quite easy for Death Squad Diplomat Ron Johnson, now US Ambassador to Mexico.

Publicly, President Claudia Sheinbaum has responded to Trump’s pressure with her “cool head” strategy, consistently using the Mexican Constitution as a fragile weapon. However, on the military front, at the highest levels, the recurring official language between the Pentagon, the Mexican Army (SEDENA), and the Mexican Navy (SEMAR) remained that of “hemispheric security and shared prosperity,” “long-term collaboration and mutual understanding,” and “interoperability in complex situations.” This was the prevailing narrative last June when the Secretaries of National Defense, Ricardo Trevilla, and of the Navy, Raymundo P. Morales, visited the Colorado Springs military base, headquarters of Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). It was the same narrative used on November 19th during the visit to Mexico by the head of Northern Command, General Gregory M. Guillot.

Guillot’s meeting with Trevilla and Morales came after Trump’s umpteenth outburst that “cartels rule” Mexico, and in the context of the Pentagon’s Operation Southern Spear, which escalated air and naval activity in the Caribbean off the Venezuelan coast, followed by acts of piracy and international terrorism, while reports circulated of a P-3B Orion reconnaissance aircraft monitoring communications and detecting movements in the mountainous region of Sinaloa.

In early November, various media outlets reported that the United States would use drones, if approved, to dismantle drug labs and assassinate leaders of Mexican criminal organizations. According to NBC, units belonging to the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command would be deployed. Therefore, under the authority of the “intelligence community” and regulated by “Title 50 status,” which refers to covert operations outside the traditional military context, Mexico would become a stage for clandestine actions against criminal groups now considered “terrorist” by Washington.

Therefore, a key factor in the meeting between Guillot, Trevilla, and Morales was the unusual presence of Ambassador Ronald Johnson, a retired colonel whose background as a commander of army special forces and a member of the CIA’s operational section (CovertOperations) demonstrates that, from the beginning of the current administration, Mexico was considered a strategic target of what is now the Trump Corollary. As always, the official narrative alluded to military cooperation to confront organized crime, irregular migration, terrorism, and disinformation operations and cyberattacks, allegedly originating in Russia and China. But it omitted, of course, the CIA’s covert operations, its executor on the ground, and its native assets , so the armed forces’ counterintelligence must remain vigilant beyond President Sheinbaum’s nationalist rhetoric.

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