Feminists under army surveillance in Mexico
Image and photo by Ojalá.
Reportage • Alejandra Padilla • April 1, 2023 • Originally published in Spanish on March 1, 2023 by Serendipia.
The Mexican army spies on feminists. In decades previous, the Federal Security Directorate (DFS) and the Center for Investigation and National Security (CISEN) did the same.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador turned the CISEN into the National Intelligence Center (CNI) at the beginning of his term. The disappearance of CISEN came with a promise: there would be no “spying on opponents or citizens” during his government. So said the president on December 1st, 2018, when he took office in Mexico City’s Zócalo.
But even without the CISEN, espionage continues. And part of this “intelligence” work is directed at a group that has been targeted by government surveillance for at least half a century: feminists.
The army carries out intelligence work to monitor feminist women in Mexico City, including on 16-year-old minors and students of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). This was revealed by internal documents from the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA) leaked in September 2022 by the Guacamaya hacking collective, which breached the army’s email service.
The information, analyzed by Organized Collectives Against Espionage (COCE), can be found in a PowerPoint presentation shared internally by SEDENA through an email. This data is part of the information release known as Guacamaya Leaks, which will not be published here so as to ensure the privacy of the women under surveillance. What follows is a reproduction of the content of the files we created with fictitious information so as to illustrate their structure and order.
Example of the structure and content of SEDENA files. Created by the authors based on the original files with fictitious data. The photograph was generated using artificial intelligence software DiffusionBee.
The leaked documents confirm that the Mexican army spies on feminists during this six-year term and compiles their personal data, including:
Full name
Nicknames
Cell phone number
Unique Population Registry Number (CURP)
Federal Taxpayers Registry Number (RFC)
Date of birth
Birth certificate (in some cases)
Geographical coordinates of home address
Directions to their home (including directions by public transport and private car)
Description of home and surrounding area
Identification numbers of surveillance cameras near their homes
Information about their parents (names, addresses, occupations and cell phone numbers)
Links to social media profiles
Number of followers on their social media profiles
Self-published likes and interests
Activities as activists
Protests that they’ve participated in
Activities at the protests
Activists they know and have interacted with
Additionally, the files generally contain the following photographs:
Photos of those under surveillance leaving their home and different locations in the city (showing the women were watched and followed by Sedena)
Photos of their full face (generally from social media)
Photos of the women in one or more protests
Photos of the front of their house
Still footage of surveillance cameras near their homes
Photos inside of the buildings they live in
Photos they’ve published from the inside of their homes on social media
Satellite images of their home (in some cases)
Satellite maps of the exact location of their homes
Example of the structure and content of SEDENA files. Created by the authors based on the original files with fictitious data. Address and photos correspond to Televisa offices in Mexico City. Photos of the building were taken from Google Maps. Surveillance stills were retrieved from Mexico City’s C5 command center.
COCE found these documents within the Guacamaya leak. By comparing them with declassified DFS files, we were able to confirm Mexican feminists have been spied on by various government agencies from 1947 to at least 2019. There is no evidence that these intelligence operations stopped after Lopez Obrador’s first year as president.
“There is no doubt that the Mexican army has a long tradition of carrying out intelligence work. Together with the CNI—previously CISEN and DFS— they are in charge of conducting intelligence activities with national security in mind,” said Otto René Cáceres Parra, PhD in Political Science. Cáceres Parra heads the Postgraduate Department at the Mexico State Security University and co-author of the book Intelligence Services in Mexico: Yesterday and Today.
Still, “it is not within their faculties to carry out intelligence work to persecute civilians,” said Cáceres.
COCE requested an interview with SEDENA, but did not receive a response before publication.
Half a century of spying on feminists
“At the end of the event in the Open Forum at the Casa del Bosque de Chapultepec, a group of women called for a protest in front of the Monument to Mothers, on the 31st of the present month at 1200, for the purpose of demanding ‘free and unrestricted abortion (sic),’” reads a DFS file dated March 26, 1979.
A DFS file documenting a pro-abortion march in 1979, National General Archive of Mexico.
Files on feminist women shared by the Mexican army via email in October 2019 are similar. But 40 years later, SEDENA records include information that did not exist in the 1970s, such as social media profiles and serial numbers on public surveillance cameras near the targets’ homes. In some reports, military officials analyze the possibility of installing fixed and mobile surveillance services in the women’s homes.
The most recent documented spying by the army was directed at women and trans women after they created and hung pro-abortion banners at marches that took place during in 2019 or the years before, when they allegedly made (but didn’t detonate) a “supposed Molotov cocktail” and damaged furniture in a commercial establishment.
Example of the structure and content of SEDENA files. Created by the authors based on the original files with fictitious data. The photographs were generated through the artificial intelligence software DiffusionBee.
These “acts of vandalism”, as they were labeled by the Mexican army, resulted in surveillance operations targeting at least seven women. At least two of them were minors at the time they were being monitored by members of the Mexican army, according to the data from the SEDENA report.
More dangerous than feminists, only Al Qaeda
In her article “Women’s Liberation. Abortion marathon,” published in Cihuat (the news outlet of the Coalition of Feminist Women) in September 1977, writer Erika Montiel stated that feminists at that time did not believe that the government would legalize abortion “just by sending signatures and letters asking them to do so. We should not rely on government officials’ ‘good will’. This is why we need to hold widespread mobilizations that bring together as many women as possible to achieve the legalization of abortion.”
Cihuat was reviewed by COCE in the National General Archive.
Clippings from this feminist media outlet are included in DFS surveillance reports from the late 1970s. Forty years later there are annual marches across the country to demand that the government guarantee safe, legal and free abortion nationwide. To date, the procedure has only been decriminalized in 10 of Mexico’s 32 states.
The 2019 SEDENA files continued to list pro-abortion activism as one of the justifications for surveillance operations targeting feminist women.
Feminists “are not going to take up arms, they seek to inform the population on very specific rights issues, but that is not something that endangers national security or domestic security,” said Otto René Cáceres. “In any case, it would be a public security matter that is up to the government of each state.”
The files located by COCE within the archives leaked by Guacamaya are only one instance of the Mexican army spying on feminists. In October 2022, days after the leak was made public, several local and national media outlets reported other cases of army espionage against feminists. According to these reports, the hacked emails contain intelligence information on members of feminist collectives in San Luis Potosí and Puebla.
In this leak there is also a document on “risk evaluation for General Felipe Ángeles International Airport” in which feminist collectives are listed as representing a “medium high” risk, on par with the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel (CJNG).
According to this risk evaluation, only Al-Qaeda poses a bigger threat than feminists. Al-Qaeda is the paramilitary terrorist group founded by Osama Bin Laden in 1988, which is credited with the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
Meanwhile, the files on feminists that were spied on by the Mexican army contain photos of the women wearing green kerchiefs—a pro-abortion symbol—and participating in assemblies. In the most extreme cases, photographs show them smashing windows during a march.
SEDENA’s budget priorities
President López Obrador ordered the creation of the CNI to replace CISEN at the outset of his term. The CNI is under the Secretariat of Security and Civilian Protection (SSPC), as opposed to the CISEN, which was under the Secretariat for Home Affairs (Segob).
In July 2018, after he won Mexico’s presidential elections, López Obrador promised in an interview with newspaper Excélsior that, with the end of CISEN, espionage on civilians would also end. “Files on adversaries won’t be opened. That is over for good. We won’t act viciously. Citizens’ rights will be respected,” he said.
But that hasn’t been the case.
SEDENA’s 2023 budget is almost 12 billion pesos (over $660 million). Since 2018, its budget has fluctuated between 80 and 112 billion pesos each year, according to the Federal Expenditures Budget (PEF).
The leak from Guacamaya exposed the vulnerability of Mexico’s cybersecurity. The government’s email service, containing national security information, was infiltrated by an external group, according to national and international media reports.
But the vulnerability wasn’t new. The Supreme Auditor of the Federation (ASF) had previously warned the Department of Defense about deficiencies in its security system, and had noted anomalies in the services it contracted. According to an audit published in 2021, between 2013 and 2019 no comprehensive reviews of SEDENA’s information technology were carried out. In other words, there was no examination to ensure that it was compliant with established norms.
In addition, its audit the ASF warned that SEDENA’s system hadn’t been updated, that it didn’t have an operating manual, and that security mechanisms to prevent unauthorized access to the provider’s portal hadn’t been implemented.
At the same time as the Mexican army ignored its own internal information security, it used its budget to spy on feminists demanding free, safe and legal abortion. How much did that spying cost?
Such operations are “not cheap, and one has to wonder how the use of public resources to collect intelligence on feminist groups can be justified,” said Cáceres Parra.
Information about spending isn’t public and as this story went to press the SEDENA didn’t respond to interview requests from COCE.
According to Cáceres Parra, the Mexican government carried out a National Risk Agenda every year, in which it determines external and internal threats to the government. Were feminists part of this list in 2019? There’s no way to know for sure, because these documents are classified for five years according to the CNI’s request to Serendipia’s request #0410000013921 via the National Transparency Platform.
The reason these documents are classified until 2024, according to the CNI’s statement, is because they “represent a real, demonstrable and identifiable risk of significantly damaging national security,” since they deal with phenomena like armed groups, terrorist or organized crime groups. And, it would seem, feminist groups.
Translation by María José López for Ojalá. Read the original here.
