He's leading Mexico's probe of the Dirty War. Who's spying on him?

[Judi Lynn]

By Oscar Lopez and Mary Beth Sheridan
June 3, 2023 at 8:57 p.m. EDT



Relatives of Mexicans who disappeared in the country's Dirty War demonstrate at a military base in Naucalpan on June 22, 2022. (Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty Images)

MEXICO CITY — President Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office vowing to investigate Mexico’s worst human rights scandals. And none was graver than the Dirty War waged by security forces from the 1960s to the 1980s, in which hundreds of suspected leftist guerrillas were tortured and disappeared, some tossed off planes into the Pacific Ocean. Yet nearly two years after the president established a truth commission to pry open the secrets of that dark chapter, signs have emerged that the government’s lead investigator has been targeted with military grade spyware, according to a report obtained by The Washington Post.

Pegasus spyware was detected in the phone of Camilo Vicente Ovalle, according to the forensic analysis by Citizen Lab, a digital research center at the University of Toronto. Vicente Ovalle, who coordinates the work of the truth commission, had received an email in December from Apple warning he might have been targeted by “state-sponsored attackers.”

The alleged hack is part of a mounting trove of evidence that civilians looking into human rights abuses by Mexico’s armed forces — including activists, journalists, even officials close to the president — are being targeted with malware.

The Citizen Lab report did not address the question of who might have used Pegasus to hack Vicente Ovalle’s phone. The NSO Group, which developed the spyware, says it is licensed only to government agencies. (NSO questioned the Citizen Lab findings). Investigations by digital rights groups and media organizations have pointed to the Mexican army as the institution behind the alleged hacks. They have cited the timing and targets as well as documents on its acquisition of surveillance software in 2019. The New York Times in April reported that the army was the sole agency in Mexico still operating Pegasus, citing sources familiar with the contracts.

Under López Obrador’s predecessor, President Enrique Peña Nieto, the Mexican government aggressively used Pegasus to secretly track drug traffickers as well as journalists, activists and opposition politicians, according to investigations by Citizen Lab, digital-rights groups and journalists. But when López Obrador took office in 2018, he promised to end the illicit spying on Mexicans not suspected of crimes. He raised hopes that the country would finally unravel what happened during the Dirty War and another notorious case, the 2014 disappearance of 43 young men studying at the Ayotzinapa teachers college.

More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/03/mexico-pegasus-dirty-war-lopez-obrador/

Or:
https://archive.ph/SXfN6