On Tuesday, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador acknowledged that he had been informed that the government’s top human rights official, Alejandro Encinas, was being spied on. However, he sought to downplay the surveillance, saying “we do not spy.”
The New York Times revealed that Encinas was hacked by the world’s most notorious spyware, Pegasus, while he was investigating abuses by the country’s military. Pegasus can infiltrate cellphones without leaving any trace of an intrusion and extract every piece of data from them.
The only entity that has access to Pegasus in Mexico is the military, according to five people familiar with the contracts for the spyware. Encinas leads the government’s truth commission into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students, one of the worst human rights violations in the country’s recent history.
Several rights groups condemned López Obrador’s comments, with the Centro Prodh tweeting, “We regret that the president minimizes the espionage his administration carries out.” A group of independent experts conducting an inquiry into the 43 students’ disappearance called for the attorney general’s office to investigate the cyber attacks on Encinas.
The Israeli Ministry of Defense has ordered several countries to be disconnected from Pegasus, but did not cancel the Mexican army’s license and later extended it. NSO Group, the spyware’s manufacturer, has opened an investigation into the reported abuses of Pegasus in Mexico.
It remains to be seen how this inquiry will affect the fate of the spyware in Mexico, where Pegasus has been used against human rights defenders and journalists for years with almost no accountability.