A new document leak from hacker group Guacamaya shows financial ties between Mexican military leadership and drug cartels. It also shows a friendly exchange of weaponry, assets and intel between criminals and powerful Mexican officials. The email leaks show a disturbing culture of surveillance and corruption in the Mexican government.
The leak “reveals something that we really suspected was happening,” says journalist Luis Chaparro.
“This massive participation of the Mexican military with drug cartels, but we just didn’t really know to what extent they were actively participating with drug cartels,” Chaparro continues.
The data leaked by hackers “show that they were not only selling grenades to drug cartels, but also providing them with tactical equipment and maybe, like the most dangerous part of this link between Mexican military and the cartels was the surveillance they were having on journalists and information they were passing along, and but also on Mexican government officials. There was a conversation leaked where a Mexican military member flags a call he oversaw where this cartel member is asking a Mexican official inside the military to track down a target inside one of the Mexican political parties to have a ‘hit on him.’”
Luis Chaparro says Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s response is to downplay the implications of the leak, saying the information in the over 4 million emails is “nothing new.” Chaparro says the revelations of the Mexican President’s health problems are “the least of the problems revealed inside these documents.”
Two things are most surprising to Chaparro from the revelations in the leaked documents. One, is that “the Mexican military is vulnerable to a group of hackers that literally just used the backdoor to enter the whole server of emails and gather information within very few days.” Chapparro says this is very dangerous to, what he calls the most important institution in Mexico, the Ministry of Defense. Second, he is surprised by the extent of surveillance the Mexican military has on journalists, activists and different dissident groups like feminists and the Zappatista movement.
Chapparro speaks on the 2014 Ayotzinapa mass kidnapping and murder of 43 students in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico. New revelations from the hacker leak show “the participation of Mexican officials in how they tried to hide their involvement in the killing of these 43 students in Ayotzinapa.” Chapparro continues, “the Mexican military was really surveilling the Mexican press when it came to investigating the killings of 43 students in Ayotzinapa.”
Chapparro says Mexico is “one of the worst places to actually be a journalist and that is not only because of the threat of cartels, but also to the involvement of the Mexican government, working with the cartels, passing along information to criminal organizations, but also surveilling and intimidating journalists themselves.”
Photo by Tobias Tullius from Unsplash