In March 2017, weeks before he was shot and killed while washing his car, the phone of Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda was included in the hit list of Pegasus software, the controversial spy program owned by the Israeli company NSO Group acquired by the Government of Enrique Peña Nieto.
In April of the same year, a group of Mexican journalists and activists accused the PRI government of having been victims of espionage through
malware
.
The controversy is now growing after the revelation that at least 15,000 phone numbers in Mexico, including journalists, activists, union leaders and human rights defenders, were on Pegasus' list of targets, according to an investigation published this Sunday by the NGO Forbidden Stories together with Amnesty International and a media consortium.
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They kill another Mexican journalist in the State of Guerrero
Pegasus, the program that spies on Mexican journalists and activists
This type of technology is justified in the governments' fight for national security, the fight against terrorism or drug trafficking.
The scandal escalates the Mexican sphere.
Last year, the Facebook-owned messaging company WhatsApp sued the program's maker
,
NSO Group, for having penetrated its system to spy on journalists, diplomats and activists around the world.
The list of targets revealed this Sunday includes more than 50,000 phones from around the world.
Almost half correspond to Mexican numbers, the country with the most presence on the list.
At least 26 journalists from Mexico are included among the targets of the spy program according to the revealed list, which covers the years 2016 and 2017.
The journalist Cecilio Pineda, murdered in 2017.RR.
H.H.
Pineda, 38, was a local reporter from Guerrero, one of the most violent states corroded by organized crime. At the end of April, weeks before his murder, he had started receiving death threats through anonymous calls. The beginning of the threats coincides, according to information from
The Guardian
, one of the media associated with the consortium that has led the investigation, with the inclusion of Pineda's phone in the list of espionage targets.
On the afternoon of March 3, several individuals on a motorcycle shot him at point-blank range while he was washing his car.
Pineda's phone disappeared after the crime, so it cannot be confirmed whether he had previously been infected by the
malware
.
Once inside the devices, Pegasus allows full access to information, from contacts, call traces to geolocation.
Just two hours before his murder, Pineda had posted a video on his social networks denouncing that local politicians were in collusion with a gang of kidnappers that was wreaking havoc in Tierra Caliente.
"There will continue to be deaths, since [the authorities] do not want to act as they should," he denounced.
Three years later there is no one arrested for the murder.
The
Pegasus case
, one of the biggest scandals of the past administration, again haunts Peña Nieto, who has denied on several occasions that his government has used NSO software for purposes other than national security.
The president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has made an effort to distance himself from the controversy.
"We are not involved in that, here it was decided that no one was going to be persecuted," said the president in November.
The current Government has opened an investigation in this regard, but the slowness of the investigations worries activists and those affected.
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