By Natasha Bertrand, Zachary Cohen, Evan Perez, Mauricio Torres, CNN
(CNN) — Earlier this spring, a mysterious explosion blew up a car carrying an alleged cartel operative in broad daylight on one of Mexico’s busiest highways just outside of its capital city.
Francisco Beltran was killed instantly along with his driver, their bodies found slumped over in their seats after the concentrated blast. Video and pictures of the attack on March 28 show a quick burst of flames with the car continuing to roll forward, drifting off the highway.
Known as “El Payin,” Beltran was accused of being a mid-level member of the Sinaloa Cartel, one of Mexico’s most notorious drug trafficking syndicates, Mexican security analysts and sources familiar with his activities said.
Mexican authorities have maintained extreme secrecy around the explosion, but multiple sources tell CNN that the attack was a targeted assassination, facilitated by CIA operations officers. An explosive device had been hidden inside the vehicle, the State of Mexico’s Attorney General told CNN.
The Beltran operation was 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, those sources as well as two additional people familiar with the campaign told CNN. President Donald Trump has designated several of those groups foreign terrorist organizations and deemed them to be at war with the United States.
Since last year, CIA operatives inside Mexico have directly participated in deadly attacks on several, mostly mid-level cartel members, the sources said. “The lethality of their operations has been seriously ramped up,” said one of the people briefed on the operations. “It’s a significant expansion of the kind of thing the CIA has been willing to do inside Mexico.”
The level of CIA involvement with operations has varied, according to the sources, from more passive intelligence sharing and providing general support to direct participation in assassination operations.
The CIA declined to comment for this story. Several Mexican government agencies did not respond to requests for comment.
The attack on Beltran was brazen even by the standards of typical Mexican cartel violence, and Mexican analysts debated in the days afterward whether it could signal a worrying, sophisticated new dimension of cartel-on-cartel warfare.
“We have been living in anarchic war for many months in Sinaloa,” Mexican journalist Jose Cardenas said on his television show broadcast by Grupo Informa in the days after the attack. “But attacks like this, if confirmed, in an area near the country’s capital, well, I have never heard of anything similar.”
A former CIA paramilitary officer told CNN that knowing how the agency operates, ‘They definitely wanted this incident to create the question in everyone’s mind of, ‘Who did this?’”
The CIA’s involvement in recent operations targeting high-profile cartel figures, like Nemesio “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, has been well-documented, though much of that activity has publicly been described as intelligence sharing.
But the agency’s covert activity inside Mexico goes far beyond those few cases that attracted international attention and involves much more direct participation, sources told CNN.
The strategy, the sources said, is to dismantle entire cartel networks, which involves not only removing those at the very top but also identifying vulnerabilities throughout the organization and systematically targeting lower-tier players who serve as key cogs in the trafficking enterprise.
Those operations often attract little attention outside