The Chihuahua file crossed from presidential statement to legislative calendar Thursday. The Senate foreign-relations committee scheduled a hearing on the CIA-coordination inquiry, following the letter Claudia Sheinbaum sent Ambassador Salazar on Tuesday and her on-camera declaration that no foreign agent may operate in the field on Mexican soil [1]. A hearing date on a committee calendar is not a vote, but it is the moment the probe stops living inside one office and starts generating a record.

The arc compresses faster than the paper predicted yesterday. The paper's lead Monday read the Chihuahua episode as the fourth democracy-erosion mechanism in play — an allegation. By Wednesday Sheinbaum had moved to counterparty action with the ambassador's letter and the no-field-agents declaration [2]. Thursday's hearing completes the sequence: allegation → probe → pressure → institutional record, in 72 hours.

The witness list matters more than the scheduling. La Jornada reports the committee intends to call the Interior Secretary and the federal attorney general's liaison for international matters [3]. Neither the US ambassador nor any intelligence counterpart is on the Mexican subpoena list; the hearing is addressed to the Mexican side of the coordination failure. What the PRI opposition wants — the US witnesses — is not on offer. This is a domestic accountability hearing pointed at a bilateral file. The precedent runs in one direction only, and Sheinbaum has chosen it.

-- LUCIA VEGA, São Paulo