US Widely Surveyed Electronic Exchanges Between Mexican Citizens The Voice of Russia
go to original December 15, 2013

This autumn South America was outraged by a leak that implicated the NSA in tapping the phones and e-mail exchanges of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and her Mexican counterpart, Enrique Pena Nieto. A number of classified documents that have been revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden contained evidence that the US National Security Agency had widely surveyed electronic exchanges between Mexican citizens, including politicians of the highest rank and even former and current presidents.

According to Snowden, in May 2010, the NSA hacked into the e-mails of Nieto's predecessor Felipe Calderon. The surveillance on Nieto himself started when he was campaigning for office in the early summer of 2012. The NSA targeted his phone and the phones of nine of his close associates, building a map of their regular contacts and intercepting 85,489 text messages. On October 23, Enrique Pena Nieto gave the order to conduct the country’s own thorough investigation on the espionage by the US and demanded official explanations from the White House. Mikhail Belyat, expert on Latin American studies for the Russian State University for the Humanities, says the astonishment and outrage demonstrated by the Mexican authorities were only for show.

“The first and main reason is that it had all happened before. Most Mexican Presidents knew they are being listened to. I read an interview with the former Mexican President Vicente Fox in one of the Spanish newspapers, where he said “yes, we are all watched by the American intelligence services – both the ordinary people and politicians so there is nothing to be surprised about”. The second reason is even more important – Mexico is economically dependent on the US because of NAFTA - North American Free Trade Agreement - where Mexico is obviously the weakest link. So we shouldn’t expect any radical steps from the Mexican government,” Mikhail Belyat said.

But it’s not only about the political relations between the two countries. Latin American media claim that surveillance has also helped the US to make several profitable investments in Mexican enterprises. The NSA operation dubbed “Whitetamale” allowed the agency to gain access to the emails of high-ranking officials in the Mexican Public Security Secretariat, a law enforcement body that combats drug cartels and human trafficking rings. In a single year, this operation produced 260 classified reports that facilitated talks on political issues and helped the Americans plan international investments. Economic espionage is a serious motive for spying, which the US vocally denied. Michail Belyat agrees that the NSA was unlikely to be involved in it.

“There is no doubt that economic espionage was used widely by Americans but I don’t think this kind of data was collected by the NSA, there are other services for these matters. The NSA does much more serious things than economic espionage. I also don’t think the information collected about Mexican enterprises was of any interest to the White House. It’s highly unlikely that the US President is so concerned with the economic data of Mexican companies,” Mikhail Belyat said.

US President Barack Obama has promised his Mexican counterpart that an investigation into this story will be launched and that those found guilty of hacking into private e-mails will be punished. Still, it seems like the relations between the two close neighbors are even more far from being trustworthy than in previous years.

See the original at The Voice of Russia

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