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Mexico’s President
Andrés Manuel López Obrador
ran for office in 2018 as an honest politician out to clean up corruption. Now the largest computer hack in Mexican history and new revelations suggesting that the government uses spyware to surveil citizens are rewriting that narrative.
In September Mexicans learned that a group calling itself Guacamaya hacked Sedena, Mexico’s ministry of national defense. The hackers claim to have pinched some six terabytes of data. In layman’s terms, this could amount to nearly five million pages of text—although it’s probably less because it includes photos and videos.
Even the most ambitious members of the fourth estate haven’t been able to digest the full contents of the leaks in the weeks since an organization acting as an intermediary for Guacamaya began providing access to the stolen files. But journalists are eagerly nibbling on a veritable feast of data and reporting on what they’ve found. I have not downloaded it but have been reading the Mexican press.
One conclusion that’s hard to avoid from the tidbits shared so far is that the army has a lot of information about alleged connections between the political class—including the ruling party—and organized crime.
Mexico has five regional intelligence-gathering centers that combine the work of agents from the defense ministry, the Navy, the National Intelligence Center, the National Guard, the attorney general and the office of security and citizen protection, or SSPC. These agents gather information and file reports that are combined and sent to the National Intelligence Fusion Center, which is the country’s nerve center for security intelligence.
An Oct. 5 story on the hacked data by the Mexican newspaper Proceso said that during his time as governor of Tabasco,
Adán Augusto López Hernández
put three men in positions of authority at the local SSPC and in the Tabasco State Police who were named by the southeast intel center “as members of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.” According to Proceso, the southeast intelligence center “even referred to one of them as the ‘alleged leader’ ” of another criminal group in Tabasco: “Hernán Bermúdez Requeña, who remains at the head” of the SSPC in the state. According to Aristegui Noticias, another Mexican news outlet, there are a total of five intelligence reports in the leaks—one in 2019, three in 2021 and one in August—linking Mr. Bermúdez to crime groups.
This might be chalked up to local links between the narcos and politicians except that Tabasco is the president’s home state and former Gov.
López Hernández
is now the president’s minister of government—the de facto deputy president.
Proceso reported Mr. Bermúdez’s claim that the criminal group he is alleged to lead doesn’t exist. He stressed that he “cannot answer for the 7,000 police under his command” and “he questioned the veracity of the hacked Sedena documents,” the paper wrote. Proceso said that Mr. López Hernández didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The U.S. war on drugs inevitably corrupts institutions. Mexico’s large and wealthy neighbor with an appetite for consuming illegal substances was bound to enrich the Latin underworld, which was bound to use its profits to bribe officials and weaponize its operations.
Yet organized crime is now tearing Mexico apart, and allegations that Mr. López Obrador’s own cabinet members are part of it can’t be shrugged off. For the sake of the nation and of people like Mr. Bermúdez, who maintains his innocence, an investigation seems in order. Short of compromising operations, Mexicans also deserve to know what action has been taken using the reports.
AMLO, as the president is known, has said there won’t be any investigation. Sedena has remained silent. This is generating the sense of a coverup and fears that Mexican authorities, out of greed or terror, have given in to the cartels.
There is also fresh evidence from the hack that the military demands a greater role in the economy. Writing for the online news outlet Latinus on Oct. 3, Isabella González explained that the leaked emails reveal a plan for two new military companies to serve tourists on the Yucatán Peninsula, which would become “the seventh and eighth companies established by the Army since [AMLO] took office.”
If this weren’t enough to unnerve Mexicans, the Mexican NGO Network for the Defense of Digital Rights, working with other transparency groups including the Toronto-based Citizen Lab, alleged earlier this month that since 2019 the government has used Pegasus spyware to hack into devices of at least one human-rights activist and two journalists. Pegasus is designed to track terrorists and criminals, but former President
Enrique Peña Nieto
was accused in 2017 of using it to spy on his political adversaries. AMLO has promised those days are over. But then AMLO has made lots of promises, many of which seem to have slipped away.
Write to O’Grady@wsj.com.
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