López Obrador says the Mexican army was hacked

The files of the Secretariat of National Defense of Mexico were hacked, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador reported this Friday while ruling out that this could affect the country’s security.

Without specifying when it happened, López Obrador confirmed press versions about the hacking of the Secretariat’s computer systems and the extraction of several files that include reports on his health status and the failure of the operation to capture a son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán occurred in 2019.

“There is nothing that is not known,” said López Obrador in his morning conference, downplaying the event and indicating that the hacking occurred during a change in the communication system of the Ministry of National Defense of Mexico (Sedena), but not specified dates.

The hacking of the Mexican army’s systems was the work of a group of hackers known as Guacamaya, who also carried out similar actions on police and military security institutions in several Latin American countries.

In Chile they intervened the emails of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, in El Salvador they accessed the emails of the National Police and the military, in Peru they entered the emails of the joint chiefs and the army, and in Colombia hacked the emails of the General Command of the Armed Forces.

In the case of Sedena, they managed to access numerous files.

Among those files, which Mexican journalist Carlos Loret released on a news portal on Thursday night, is a report on the state of health of López Obrador who, according to the documents, has been diagnosed with gout, hypothyroidism and hypertension, and suffered a “severe risk unstable angina” on January 2 that warranted his transfer in an air ambulance from the south of the country to the Mexican capital to be admitted to the Central Military Hospital.

The 68-year-old president confirmed the information about his state of health and assured that he feels well and that he undergoes a medical check-up every three or four months. Referring to the January event, when he faced a risk of heart attack, López Obrador said that at that time his doctors recommended a catheterization, a procedure that was postponed until January 21 because he was infected with coronavirus.

In 2013 López Obrador suffered a heart attack that he overcame without major difficulties and that did not prevent him from continuing his political career and participating in the 2018 elections in which he was the winner. The ruler has indicated that at the end of his six-year term in 2024 he will retire from politics.

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