Russian soldiers march in the Independence Day military parade in Mexico City in 2023. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
THE WATCH STAFF
As Moscow rapidly expanded a spy nest at its embassy in Mexico City, Russian migrants surged across the Mexico border into the United States and Russian media outlets blanketed the Mexican people with Moscow’s malign propaganda. After the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022, the Kremlin set its sights on Mexico to gain closer access to U.S. intelligence and influence.
The Kremlin added 37 diplomatic workers — an increase of about 75% — to its existing Mexican embassy staff of 49 after the invasion of Ukraine, though Russia is not even among Mexico’s top 25 trade partners. A larger staff allows Moscow to widen its anti-U.S. intelligence operations, promote its disinformation and propaganda throughout Latin America, and portray itself as an ally.
Russia refused to back down after Dolia Estévez, a Washington, D.C.-based Mexican journalist, exposed the spy buildup in May 2023 in a column on the Mexican political media website Eje Central. The Russian embassy itself, in a break with protocol, tweeted criticism of Estévez, mocking her and accusing her of “Russophobia and spy-mania.” An embassy tweet suggested that she got her facts wrong and that her figures came from “Langley,” apparently alluding to the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Estévez said she got the information from the Mexican Foreign Ministry’s Directory of Foreign Missions. “The tactics of Russian intelligence have not significantly changed since the time of Lenin,” Estévez told The Watch in an email. “They have always tried to ‘kill’ (so to speak) the messenger that is delivering the news rather than address the news. What is new though is to see a foreign embassy in Mexico openly attacking local journalists.”
Since then, Estévez said, “the number of Russian ‘diplomats’ dropped to the current level of 66 (down from 86).” In comparison, she said, the United States, Mexico’s top trade partner, has 46 diplomats assigned to Mexico City.
The U.S. government has known about Russia’s growing spy activities since before Estévez revealed the embassy staff expansion. On March 24, 2022, Gen. Glen D. VanHerck, then commander of U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), warned the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee during a hearing that Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency, commonly known by its Soviet-era acronym GRU, has more intelligence officials deployed in Mexico than anywhere else in the world.
“I would like to point out that most of the GRU members in the world are in Mexico at the moment. That’s Russian intelligence personnel. And they keep a very close eye on their chances of influencing the opportunities and access that the United States has,” VanHerck told the committee.
Former CIA Director William Burns has said his agency is also closely watching the growing Russian presence in Mexico. “Part of this is a function of the fact that so many Russian intelligence officers have been kicked out of Europe (since the start of the war with Ukraine). … So, they’re looking for places to go and looking for places in which they can operate. But we’re very sharply focused on that,” Burns said in London in September 2024, according to NBC News. A 2023 report that Estévez wrote for the investigative website Spytalk found that more than 600 suspected spies were expelled from Russian embassies across Europe after the war started.
Russians on the move
Amid Russia’s spy buildup at the embassy, a wave of Russian migrants sought to cross into the United States from Mexico. In December 2022 alone, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 7,912 encounters with Russian citizens at the Mexico-U.S. border, 10 times the number of encounters for all of 2021. In the 12 months after the war with Ukraine started, Customs and Border Protection reported 41,150 encounters with Russians at the border, 52 times as many as in all of 2021.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants have sought refuge from the war in Ukraine or from Western sanctions placed on Russia after the invasion. But analysts have said that migration events also can be opportunities for spies. Mexico’s “proximity makes it an important target for Russia’s collection of intelligence (and) its ability to insert agents into the United States through immigration flows,” Dr. R. Evan Ellis, a research professor of Latin American Studies at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, told The Watch.
“The Russians have a very robust illegals program,” Duyane Norman, who spent nearly 30 years in the CIA, told Estévez in 2023. “Their patience and their ability to wait and position people for years is — I’m not going to say it’s unrivaled — but it is impressive. They’re patient enough it’s going to be hard to discover them. Their illegals program has existed for a very long time.”
A February 2024 commentary for the Brookings Institution, a think tank based in Washington, D.C., noted that Russian smuggling networks have proliferated at the Mexico-U.S. border. The authors said Russian intelligence services could “encourage the establishment of greater cooperation between Russian and Mexican criminal groups or attempt to develop direct ties to Mexicans by offering them safe haven in Russia away from the reach of U.S. law enforcement.”
A propaganda machine
At the same time, Russia’s propaganda machine has bombarded Latin America with state-controlled coverage. A study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford in England found that Russia Today (RT) and the Sputnik news agency greatly expanded their presence there since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war. RT en Español is the Spanish version of Russia Today, which is funded by the Russian government. Sputnik Mundo is the Spanish-language platform of Sputnik News, a Russian news agency based in Moscow.
RT en Español is currently blocked on television and online in Canada, the European Union, the United States and other nations, but it’s going strong in Latin America. RT en Español is more successful than any of RT’s other services, including versions in English, Arabic, German and French. It’s been busy spreading false narratives about the United States, the war in Ukraine and Russia’s vision for the world.
RT and Sputnik also reach audiences through media and messaging channels, while the Kremlin uses troll and bot farms and local influencers to spread the same pro-Russia views. Russia’s messaging strategies include chain-link retweeting across many Russian government accounts; misquoting credible sources from The New York Times, The Washington Post and other media outlets, or taking quotes out of context to fit pro-Russia narratives; flooding social media and news sites with constant updates; topic hopping, capitalizing on immediacy and relevancy to maintain attention; and the use of bots — computer programs designed to automatically perform repetitive tasks on the internet, often mimicking human actions.
In October 2023, RT announced it would start broadcasts on the Mexico City Metro, the capital’s primary transit system. The move vastly broadens RT’s audience: The subway system carries about a billion individual riders per year.
Russia’s strategy in Mexico also has focused on weaponizing historical and socioeconomic grievances with the United States. For example, Russia has tweeted a call for remembrance of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty ended the Mexican-American War but required Mexico to give up 55% of its territory, including the present-day states of Arizona, California, most of Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and some of Wyoming. Mexico also ceded claims on Texas and recognized the Rio Grande as the border.
Russia also spotlights reports of Americans exploiting and mistreating Mexican migrants. And in April 2024, Russia’s ambassador in Mexico tweeted a false report saying the U.S. was recruiting members of drug cartels from Colombia and Mexico to fight in Ukraine. “The first batch of ‘a couple hundred of these thugs’ is scheduled to be launched into the combat zone in the summer of this year, the press office of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) said,” the tweet erroneously claimed.
Mexican government’s ‘neutrality posture’
When former Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, often known as AMLO, came to power in December 2018, he continued a policy of improving relations with Russia. In 2021, after the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Mexico received 24 million doses of Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine through an agreement with the Russian Direct Investment Fund.
Less than a month after Russia invaded Ukraine, legislators from AMLO’s political party created a congressional Mexico-Russia Friendship Committee in March 2022. Since then, the Mexican government has refused to impose sanctions on Russia, rejected sending weapons to Ukraine and, although it voted to condemn the Russian invasion in the U.N. General Assembly, Mexico abstained from voting to suspend Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council. López Obrador’s successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum, took office on October 1, 2024.
“A greater willingness to work with Russia is part of Mexico’s neutrality posture,” said Ellis, of the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.
In September 2023, as Mexico celebrated the anniversary of its independence, the country held its annual military parade in Mexico City. But this time, Russian soldiers also marched at the event. Opinions were mixed in Mexico, and the Ukrainian Embassy protested.
But Mexico’s president defended the Russians’ participation. López Obrador said that all countries with which Mexico has diplomatic ties were invited. “The Chinese were also in the parade, and there wasn’t so much outcry,” he said, noting a Russian contingent had participated in the past.
A ‘robust and expanding’ relationship
The U.S. government and military, meanwhile, emphasize that Mexico is an equal partner; the United States values its relationship with Mexico, and it does not want to impose its will on Mexico.
In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in March 2024, Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, commander of USNORTHCOM and NORAD, cited the enduring relationship between the two countries’ militaries: “It is already apparent the military-to-military relationship between the United States and Mexico is robust and expanding as both nations address the challenges posed by common threats to our citizens and shared interests. The bonds between USNORTHCOM and our Mexican military partners are broad, resilient, and focused on expanding our combined capability to defend and secure North America from myriad state and non-state threats. Countering competitor influence in the region remains a key priority for USNORTHCOM and our Mexican military partners, and as a direct result, the U.S. and Mexican militaries are more operationally compatible than at any point in our shared history.”