The CIA has always mucked around in other countries’ elections. This is from Monthly Review, a self-described Marxist magazine based in New York, so you be the judge of its credibility. But anyway, this is about Mexico around the late 1970s or so.

The documents, most of which are related to a CIA probe into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, contains a memo from a meeting of CIA agents held on November 29, 1976. In said meeting, U.S. intelligence official Bill Sturbitts said to his colleagues that “Mexico will soon have a new president, a man who has had control of Liaison for a number of years…”

López Portillo was not the only former president of Mexico to have been on the payroll of the CIA. Three other presidents who preceded him, namely, Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964), Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970), and Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) were also revealed to be CIA assets in earlier declassification of official U.S. documents. All these former presidents committed acts of grave human rights violations and crimes against humanity against the people of their own country, but that did not stop the United States, the self-proclaimed champion of “human rights,” from cultivating close relations with them.

Cultivating national leaders was not the only interventionist act that the CIA did in Mexico. Declassified documents over the years have revealed a range of illegal activities of U.S. intelligence in Mexico, including spying on Soviet and Chinese embassies in Mexico City; financing extreme right groups; supporting and coordinating the Mexican armed forces; and infiltrating and subverting left-wing students’ organizations and social movements all over Mexico, in COINTELPRO style, often with fatal consequences for the Mexican people.

Monthly Review

That was quite awhile ago, but fast forward to Russia claiming that the 2014 election in Ukraine was a “coup” orchestrated by the United States. It is certainly not implausible to ask if politicians in Ukraine were CIA “assets” at the time (I am not making claims or claiming to have evidence about specific people), if the CIA was spying on say the Russian and Chinese embassies, financing Ukrainian-nationalist anti-Russian groups without asking too many questions about their politics, training and supporting the armed forces (completely in the open on this one). These are dirty tricks, and Russia is certainly not above engaging in any of these dirty tricks itself. I am not claiming any of these dirty tricks would justify Russia invading its sovereign neighbor, but I can put myself in Russian shoes and consider why they might feel a bit paranoid.