Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
The Guacamaya Leaks confirm, beyond any doubt, that no one is watching over the National Army. This lack of oversight and accountability represents a serious threat to the existence of the democratic State in Mexico. In democratic societies, security and intelligence agencies are subject to scrutiny by appointed citizens or legislators or by both mechanisms together. This scrutiny allows society to have validated instruments to ensure the correct functioning and use of intelligence for the purposes of the State in question.
In Mexico, the National Security Law, passed in 2005 during the administration of President Vicente Fox, established a mechanism for oversight of the official state intelligence body, the National Intelligence Center (CNI), by a legislative commission explicitly created for that purpose. Composed of three members from the Senate and three from the Chamber of Deputies, this special commission is legally bound to secrecy in its deliberations, reports, and access to sensitive documents. It is also supposed to receive regular confidential reports from the intelligence body to monitor and ensure that its practices and conduct are performed within the framework of the law. This surveillance aims to ensure that its practices are legal, given that the predecessor to the National Intelligence Center (CNI), the Federal Security Directorate (DFS), was a political police and was used as an instrument of political repression against opponents of the incumbent government.
Undoubtedly, the approval of the National Security Law and its subsequent modifications have helped society to feel accompanied by a professional intelligence service. But the gigantic black hole in this law can no longer be hidden. What has been uncovered, and what no public official has confirmed, is that the Mexican Army has no one to watch over it and evaluate what it does with the intelligence it gathers. Therefore, the Army acts with total impunity, both in its constitutional and martial activities and in its intelligence and espionage activities. This is what the Guacamaya Leaks reveal.
While the “official” intelligence body of the national State has existed for no more than 25 years, the Mexican Army has had an espionage network in the country since at least the six-year term of Lázaro Cárdenas, as an institution capable of gathering confidential information for the Army’s actions with or without the consent of the Federal Executive. Cárdenas created a department called Political Information Office under the Ministry of the Interior. The first civilian President, Miguel Alemán, had to receive daily reports from the Army without being able to contrast those data with some of his own from a reliable source.
Miguel Alemán decided to create the Federal Security Directorate (DFS) as an instrument to fight against communism in the Cold War and, at the same time, as self-defense against internal opponents in the official party and some external ones, agitators and provocateurs. Thus it resolved its chronic dependence on Army reports. The DFS disappeared in 1985 after the debacle of the assassination of DEA agent Enrique Camarena.
In 1989 the Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN) was created as a replacement for the DFS, and in 2018 it became the National Intelligence Center (CNI). And in all this time, with the political fluctuations of society, what remained stable was the intelligence gathering and illegal systematic spying by the Army on individuals and organizations it considers dangerous.
By what criteria and based on what legal parameters did the Mexican Army consider that it should monitor, follow or intervene communications of certain citizens and/or organizations? The Guacamaya Leaks revealed that the Army spied, through the Pegasus system, on human rights defender Raymundo Ramos and another journalist. The National Army does not have the legal power to monitor citizens.
The Army can spy, make decisions about suspicious activities, and then act against undesirable actors without consulting with civilian authorities, much less giving a public account of its actions. Military immunity serves to avoid civilian scrutiny of its activities. The full legal circle protects the Army from any external scrutiny. And this cloak of legal secrecy opens the giant impunity loophole in the Mexican State’s institutional arrangement.
There is no parameter of oversight over the Army. This lack or deficiency has dire consequences, whichever way you want to look at it. No organism, instance, or official body monitors what the Army does. The Guacamaya Leaks are the closest we have come to learn about this nonsense. It is a very serious flaw in our democracy that the Army is allowed to spy on society with systems such as Pegasus, which López Obrador has sworn no longer exists in Mexico. One of two things: either the President ignores what the Army does under his command, or he is lying to use the Army and allow it to do its misdeeds without adequate surveillance from society.
The case described by Guacamaya Leaks does not speak of huachicol thieves, drug traffickers, or human traffickers. No. It speaks of spying on human rights guarantors. In other words, the Army carries out political espionage against potential or actual opponents of the 4T, in addition to its spying on criminality. In fact, in 2022, there were more than a thousand complaints against the Armed Forces for murder, kidnapping, arbitrary detentions, torture, degrading treatment, and rape. As an example, there is a recent case of five murders in Tamaulipas recorded by citizens of that State.
While a bicameral commission reviews and supposedly exercises powers of scrutiny and control over the activities of the CNI, the Army spies outside the law and even against it. In this context, the Army promotes the destruction of the values of a democratic society by its potentially repressive role, applying criteria without accreditation or public and legal supervision.
The National Security Law must include a regulation defining the scope of the Army in public security activities and its work in intelligence gathering, especially due to its repeated use of illegal instruments such as Pegasus. Failure to do so will bring Mexico even closer to becoming a militarized state.
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