2023-12-06 05:01:00
Mexican businessmen such as magnate Carlos Slim and Germán Larrea, two of the richest men in the country, and a dozen journalists were spied on during Enrique Peña Nieto’s government using Pegasus software, according to a protected witness in the trial against the operator. of this tool.
According to information from the Mexican news portal Aristegui Noticias, this was revealed during the trial against Juan Carlos García Rivera, an employee of the company KBH Applied Technologies Group, a network of shell companies that was used to market the program owned by the company in Mexico. Israeli company NSO Group. According to the witness identified as “Zeus”, the head of the company, the Israeli Uri Emmanuel Ansbacher, received instructions via telephone from then-president Peña Nieto to spy on specific people.
Pegasus is a tool that allows hackers to access not only the content of a smartphone, but also the environment where it is located, making it easier to access conversations. In July 2021, an international media investigation revealed that several countries tapped 50,000 phones with this program, of which 15,000 cases were in Mexico during the Peña Nieto government, the highest number.
The plot according to “Zeus”
The witness stated that in September 2015 he received a USB through Ansbacher’s driver, since he had to send some files contained in it. However, when one of them allegedly accidentally opened it, he found an Excel file with 1,500 records of names of journalists and politicians, which were targets of espionage. Among the names, he specified, were those of Larrea, executive director of Grupo México, Slim, president of Grupo Carso and the richest man in Mexico, and journalists such as Carmen Aristegui, Carlos Loret de Mola and Jenaro Villamil, current president of the Public System. of Radio Broadcasting of the Mexican State (SPR). That database included phone numbers, incoming and outgoing calls, locations, photographs and recordings.
According to the statements of “Zeus”, García Rivera also received orders from the former Secretary of the Interior, Miguel Osorio Chong, and the former head of the defunct National Research and Security Center (CISEN), Eugenio Imaz Gispert, at the same time that they They gave instructions to the owner of KBH to define the objectives of the communications intervention.
García Rivera served as Technology Director at the company Proyectos y Diseños VME, one of the companies that sold the spyware, its use licenses and its updates to the CISEN; to the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA) and the former Attorney General’s Office (PGR), today the Attorney General’s Office (FGR). These sales are supported and verified with invoices.
Background
The cases of espionage in Mexico in recent years are not new. In fact, the Guacamaya Leaks group published documents that it hacked from SEDENA in October 2022. They revealed that the Army had spied on journalists and activists. One of the targets would have been the Undersecretary of Human Rights of Mexico, Alejandro Encinas, according to an investigation by the American newspaper New York Times published in May of this year. That medium highlighted that the Mexican Army is the only entity in the country with access to Pegasus, and assured that this institution spied on more phones than any other client of that company in the world.
The most recent breach of Encinas’ phone occurred last year, while he was leading a truth commission charged with investigating the 2014 kidnapping and disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa students, a case that remains unsolved. Encinas attributed responsibility to the Army in these disappearances, which could have generated interest in spying on his communications. Furthermore, the New York Times highlighted that Encinas is one of the few officials who publicly denounced the growing power of the Armed Forces and its influence in politics and in million-dollar public works contracts, such as the construction of extensive railway networks, the distribution of medicines and the management of ports and customs.
On the other hand, a group of organizations reported in 2021 that the PGR – Peña Nieto’s Prosecutor’s Office – harassed and persecuted some of its members who sought to clarify the facts surrounding a massacre that occurred in San Fernando, a municipality in the north. Mexican state of Tamaulipas in which remains of 196 people were found in 2011. The women allegedly spied on were Mercedes Doretti, who coordinates the work in Mexico of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF); Ana Lorena Delgadillo, director of the Foundation for Justice and the Democratic Rule of Law (FJEDD); and Marcela Turati, journalist and co-founder of Quinto Elemento Lab.
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