By Agencies
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Mexico’s president lashed out this week at what he called U.S. “spying” and “interference” in Mexico, days after U.S. prosecutors announced charges against 28 members of the Sinaloa cartel for smuggling massive amounts of fentanyl into the United States.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador suggested that the case had been built on information gathered by U.S. agents in Mexico, and said “foreign agents cannot be in Mexico.”
He called the Sinaloa investigation “abusive, arrogant interference that should not be accepted under any circumstances.”
A former top U.S. drug enforcement agent called the president’s comments unjustified.
Mike Vigil, former head of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), said López Obrador was mistakenly assuming that U.S. agents needed to be in Mexico to collect intelligence for the case.
In fact, much of the case appears to have come from trafficking suspects caught in the U.S.
“He wants to completely destroy the working relationship that has taken decades to build. This is going to translate into more drugs reaching the United States and more violence and corruption in Mexico,” Vigil said.
López Obrador continued a day later to describe fentanyl, the deadly synthetic opioid that causes about 70,000 overdose deaths annually in the United States, as a U.S. problem, claiming it isn’t made in Mexico.
He has suggested American families hug their children more, or keep their adult children at home longer, to stop the fentanyl crisis.
The Mexican president also made it clear that fighting fentanyl trafficking takes a back seat to combating Mexico’s domestic security problems, and that Mexico is helping only out of good will.
“What we have to do first is guarantee public safety in our country… that is the first thing,” López Obrador said, “and in second place, help and cooperate with the U.S. government.”
Vigil pointed out that it was the very same cartels trafficking fentanyl and methamphetamines that cause most of the violence in Mexico.
Avoiding confrontations with cartels is unlikely to bring peace, Vigil said, noting “it is going to have exactly the opposite effect.”
The U.S. charges announced Friday revealed the brutal and shocking methods the cartel, based in the northern state of Sinaloa, used to move massive amounts of increasingly cheap fentanyl into the United States.
López Obrador at one point threatened to kick DEA agents out of Mexico unless the general was returned, which he was.
Cienfuegos was quickly freed once he returned.
Since then, the Mexican government has imposed restrictive rules on how agents can operate in Mexico, and slowed down visa approvals for a time.
EL SALVADOR
The Inter American Commission on Human Rights has called on El Salvador to restore all the rights suspended under an “emergency” anti-gang decree, which the government said Wednesday it wants to extend for yet another month.
The commission, an arm of the Organization of American States( OAE), expressed concern about special powers to tap phones and detain people for extended periods.
It also expressed concern about thousands of reported rights abuses, many related to arbitrary arrest.
Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele asked the country’s Congress Wednesday to again extend the emergency decree to continue the crackdown on gangs, which is widely popular among Salvadorans.
Polls suggest over eight of every 10 Salvadorans support the measures.
“This security measure has helped transform the country. Homicides have dropped significantly… Without doubt, we are on the right track,” Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro said in a request for the extension.
For decades, street gangs like Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 essentially ruled poor neighborhoods in El Salvador, killing and extorting money from people of all walks of life.
Villatoro said the measures would remain in place until “the last gang member” is arrested.
Congress has voted to renew the emergency powers a dozen times, bringing the crackdown into its second year.
The anti-gang emergency measures were originally supposed to last only a month, following a surge in gang violence in which 62 people were killed in a single day.
In the year since, a total of about 67,000 people have been arrested, and 4,304 have been released, it was originally imposed on March 27, 2022.
Rights groups say there have been 111 deaths in custody and 5,802 suspected cases of rights violations.
MEXICO 2
Press freedom groups said Tuesday the Mexican government apparently continued to use Pegasus spyware to infect telephones of human rights activists as recently as late 2022, despite a pledge by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to stop such spying.
The activists targeted by the spyware work for the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez human rights center. The center has been spied on in the past, and has worked to expose abuses by the government, including the Mexican Army.
The Pegasus infection was confirmed through a forensic investigation by the University of Toronto group Citizen Lab, the groups said Tuesday.
“So far in the administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, at least three human rights activists and two journalists have been illegally spied on with Pegasus, presumably by the Army, which, according to press information, is the only (government) agency that currently has Pegasus,” according to a report by the press freedom group Article 19, The Network for the Defense of Digital Rights and Mexican media organizations.
The New York Times first reported the new hacks.
The Israeli-made spyware Pegasus spyware is available only to countries’ government agencies; it silently infiltrates phones or other devices to harvest data and potentially spy on their owners.
The revelation came one day after Mexico’s Supreme Court struck down a 2016 regulation that had allowed the military to place wiretaps on civilians’ phones without a court order.
López Obrador took office in December 2018 pledging to end government spying. The president said he himself had been the victim of government surveillance for decades as an opposition leader.
Asked about the alleged hacks Tuesday in his daily press briefing, the president did not answer directly, but repeated the distinction that what his government does is intelligence gathering, not espionage.
“We have a clear conscience to say that human rights are not going to be violated, no one is going to be spied on either,” López Obrador said. “We haven’t done it to anyone.”
The director of the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez human rights center, Santiago Aguirre, and the center’s international affairs director were targeted in the most recent hacks.
The report said their phones were infected between June and September of 2022, while the two activists were involved in investigations and protests regarding past army abuses, including the 2014 abduction and disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers’ college.
The other previous victims included journalist and author Ricardo Raphael in 2019 and 2020, and an unnamed journalist for the online media outlet Animal Politico.
In October, the same groups released a report saying the Mexican army has allegedly continued to use spyware against targets including rights activist Raymundo Ramos. The government apparently leaked a recording of a phone call in which Ramos’ voice is heard. The government says it had tapped the phone of an alleged drug trafficker, and that Ramos either was called or called the number.
