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Mexico is the largest user of Pegasus. This is how the New York Times headlined last Tuesday, April 18, revealing how journalists and activists continue to be monitored electronically through the Israeli program acquired by the Mexican Defense Secretariat. Among the targets of these cyberattacks are members of a human rights defense center. In 2022, their mobiles were attacked again.
A message on the phone was enough for Santiago Aguirre and María Luisa Aguilar, two activists from the Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center, to realize that they were being spied on. Aguilar says that this is not the first time they have been targeted by the Israeli Pegasus program.
“I had been the target of digital attacks in 2017 and we had filed a complaint. The use of Pegasus was also denounced by other activists and journalists. Last year, thanks to a message sent by the Apple company itself, we learned that our phones could have been the target of an attack by agents sponsored by the State, ”he recalls.
They found support at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, a platform that has published reports on the risks of using Pegasus technology. “And you’ve done some very important work over the past few years to fairly identify it. Citizen Lab is the one who can corroborate that the ProDDHH Center on these two phones had been attacked with the use of this malware on five occasions during the year 2022”, details Aguilar.
In 2021, Israel said it would ban the sale of Pegasus to countries with possible human rights violations. However, it did not include Mexico, to whom it had already sold the technology as of 2011, especially its military. María Luisa Aguilar suspects that the authorities monitored her work as activists.
“We accompany people who seek justice, who have seen their rights violated. We also work on what the deepening of militarization implies in public security tasks and in public life in Mexico. This attack shows that the armed forces are disproportionately empowered and unchecked,” he says.
He recalls that the cyberattacks occurred in June and July 2022, “when we were working very openly around the murders of two Jesuit colleagues who were doing invaluable work in the Sierra Tarahumara, in Chihuahua” and then in September of that year “in the context of the anniversary of the disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School in 2014”.
Andrés Manuel López Obrador promised in 2018 to end government espionage. The members of the Centro ProDDHH plan to present another complaint, as they did in 2017. “But we are very clear that the then Attorney General of the Republic and now the prosecutor’s office has not carried out an adequate and thorough investigation of these events because they do not have the will to politics and because it does not have the capacity to investigate this type of complex crime”, he laments.
