The World Briefly

May 26, 2023

I Spy

Mexico

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Pegasus spyware was deployed against members of the Mexican president’s inner circle who are investigating alleged abuses by the military, the Washington Post reported this week.

Sources and digital rights advocates said Alejandro Encinas, Mexico’s undersecretary for human rights and a close friend to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, had his phone bugged by the surveillance program. Citizen Lab, a digital research center at Canada’s University of Toronto, confirmed the presence of the malware on Encinas’s phone via a forensic audit last year.

Encinas informed the president about the bug but López Obrador downplayed the cyber attack and dismissed suggestions that the army was behind the hack.

Observers said the developments are shocking because Encinas and López Obrador are close allies, adding that the president had tasked him with investigating the 2014 disappearance of 43 young men studying at a teachers’ college in Ayotzinapa.

The undersecretary released a report last year accusing authorities, officials, and drug traffickers of the disappearance and alleged cover-up.

Encinas’s office is also probing the disappearances of hundreds of people in the 1960s and 1970s during the military’s “Dirty War” against a left-wing insurgency.

Mexico’s military is historically known to employ surveillance technology – including the Israeli-made Pegasus software – to spy on opposition politicians, journalists, human rights activists, and criminal groups.

Following the 2021 Pegasus Project investigation that unveiled the use of the spyware by governments worldwide, López Obrador had pledged to end political spying and urged authorities to stop using the program.

But a number of Mexican digital rights groups have recently published documents suggesting that the armed forces continue to use Pegasus. The malware was found in the phones of activists and journalists looking into alleged army abuses.

The matter is further complicated by the president’s constant reliance on the military for a host of high-priority tasks, from combating drug traffickers to building new infrastructure.

This story originally appeared in the May 26, 2023 newsletter, Swinging Politics.