Espionage in Mexico has always been an open secret.
Declassified documents, defectors with revealing memoirs and the work of historians have allowed the veil to be lifted from the dark world of the intelligence services, almost always decades after the events, that they will be buried by the past.
On some rare occasions, however, they emerge in the present.
Last week, General Glen VanHerck, head of the United States Northern Command, turned that secret into a wake-up call about the presence of Russian spies in Mexican territory.
“Currently, most of the GRU [Central Intelligence Department] troops in the world are in Mexico,” VanHerck said at a hearing before the US Senate.
The four-star general's statements were the highest peak in a succession of events that put the Mexican government at the center of the train wreck between Russia and the United States over the invasion of Ukraine.
Hours before VanHerck's visit to the Senate and almost on the anniversary of the first month of the start of the armed conflict, a group of deputies from Morena and the Labor Party, part of the ruling bloc, decided to create the Mexico-Russia friendship group in the Lower House, a collective to strengthen ties with the Government of Vladimir Putin, while his troops suffocated the main Ukrainian cities.
The opposition spared no claims, nor did Ken Salazar, the US ambassador, who disapproved of the displays of solidarity with the Kremlin in the Mexican Congress.
For Francisco Gil Villegas, a specialist in the relationship between Mexico and Russia, what happened was not a coincidence.
In less than 24 hours, before the first signs of fissures in the Mexican government's position of condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine, Washington reacted.
"This has always been known, but it was kept discreet," says Gil Villegas about international espionage in the country.
"What is new is that a high military authority says it publicly, that is unprecedented," says the academic from the Colegio de México.
The Russian Embassy described VanHerck's remarks as "American propaganda."
"They have no basis on the presence of 'Russian military spies'," the diplomatic representation has refuted on their social networks.
Accusations against Russia for promoting intelligence work have intensified recently.
Just this week, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic expelled 43 Russian diplomats over national security concerns.
Poland expelled 45 Russian diplomats on March 23 on suspicion of espionage.
The United States also fired 12 Russian officials from the Embassy in Washington and from the Russian representation at the United Nations since the invasion of Ukraine.
unpleasant people
.
"The embassies play a crucial role because they are the GRU's operations centers," says Beata Wojna, former Polish ambassador to Mexico and professor at Tec de Monterrey.
The Russian embassy in Mexico.
Isaac Esquivel (DARKROOM)
In Mexico, the old controversy over the overrepresentation of Russian diplomats in the capital resurfaced.
In 2020, Russia ranked 35th among the trading partners of the Latin American country, according to data from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Paradoxically, Russia has 49 representatives in Mexico, more than the United States, China and any other diplomatic mission, according to official statistics, which consider consular staff separately.
"Who are the more than 1,000 US diplomats working in Mexico?", refutes the Russian legation before the questions.
Mexican authorities have no interest in straining relations with the Kremlin, but their history is not unrelated to the expulsion of Soviet diplomats amid accusations of espionage.
Vanni Pettinà, a historian specializing in the Cold War in Latin America, recalls two episodes.
In 1959, a naval attaché and a second secretary were fired for having secretly supported and financed with $80,000 the railroad strike led by Valentín Campa and Demetrio Vallejo.
In 1971, a group of Mexican guerrillas from the Revolutionary Action Movement, who received scholarships to study in Moscow and later trained in North Korea, were arrested and the government of Luis Echeverría expelled several USSR diplomats who had provided the scholarships.
“Mexico was, without a doubt,
After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Mexico was the only Latin American country that maintained relations with the island after its expulsion from the Organization of American States in 1964. The proximity to the United States, the proximity to Cuba, the geopolitical and economic relevance of the country .
Gil Villegas says that all these ingredients made Mexican territory an "ideal place for espionage" and that this gave rise to a tacit agreement by the United States: to keep Mexico as an "open window" to collect information and probe the position of the Soviets and Cubans, and vice versa.
"There was an increase in US tolerance of foreign secret services in Mexico," he asserts.
The internationalist Gerardo Alfonso Méndez documented in his thesis that in Mexico the
rezidentura
of the KGB promoted the first Sandinista attempts to overthrow the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, welcomed American deserters and communists and touched base with its undercover agents in the United States and the Mexican Communist Party, as well as with left-wing media.
The most relevant operation of the Soviet apparatus was the orchestration in 1940 of the assassination of León Trotsky, exiled in Mexico for three years before, at the hands of the Spanish Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader, who assumed a false identity, infiltrated his social circle and killed him. killed with an
ice ax
.
Jaime Ramón Mercader, Spanish communist militant and agent of the Soviet NKVD security service, known for assassinating the Russian politician and revolutionary León Trotsky.
He is accompanied by the attaché of the Czechoslovak Embassy in Mexico, Olldrich Novicky, and Mornard's lawyer, Eduardo Ceniceros.STR (AP)
But the United States also acted freely.
Being a priority country, Mexico has exceptionally established offices of the FBI (in charge of intelligence on US soil) and of the CIA (responsible for operations abroad).
US agencies actively exchanged information with Mexican governments and trained and equipped their services and secret police.
Winston Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico for thirteen years, became so entrenched in the Mexican political system that he had weekly breakfasts with former President Adolfo López Mateos and bought a car for the mistress of his successor, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, of according to the files reviewed by Méndez and multiple bibliographical references.
But perhaps the most scandalous thing was the direct collaboration of the CIA with three possible presidents López Mateos (code name: LITENSOR), Díaz Ordaz (LITEMPO-2) and Luis Echeverría (LITEMPO-8), and more than a dozen figures of the regime post-revolutionary mexican
Were they agents, collaborators, infiltrators of the CIA?
"They were fundamentally politicians, who saw a benefit in cooperating," says Méndez.
The image of mysterious men in long trench coats, tapped phones and cameras shooting off into the distance has changed.
Wojna gives as context that the Kremlin's intelligence operations outside Russia now fall to two KGB successors, the GRU and the SVR [Foreign Intelligence Service], whose agents are deployed in the diplomatic corps.
That gives them three advantages, he points out: proximity to the political-military and economic power of the receiving countries, freedom of movement and immunity.
Therefore, the ultimate consequence has been the expulsion of diplomatic agents.
According to this version, elements of the GRU collect information;
recruit collaborators and manage networks of contacts;
they promote propaganda and disinformation campaigns, and support envoys in charge of special operations outside the legal order.
In Europe,
the agency has been singled out for poisoning deserters, assassinations, and attacks on military and weapons installations.
In the US, to interfere in the elections that brought Donald Trump to power.
The SVR tends more to the civilian, with Russian citizens who are prepared for years to assume new identities or foreigners who are convinced or coerced.
"Espionage has become more sophisticated," says Wojna.
In the context of new technologies, the Polish diplomat assures that Russian intelligence has added cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns and destabilization of democratic regimes to its portfolio through seeds that are planted from large
hacks
to profiles that launch propaganda on TikTok.
“There is no doubt that the human element, however, remains crucial,” she says.
"Structures that already existed in the Cold War have been recovered, they are not invented from scratch," adds Pettinà.
Tour of former presidents Lyndon Johnson and Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, from the United States and Mexico in the State of Chihuahua.
Bettmann (Getty Images)
The marriage between the work of espionage and propaganda is more current than ever.
Specialists say many recruits go to great lengths to promote the current Russian narrative and put pressure on critics.
Wojna has been the target of a lynching in networks from the Russian Embassy in Mexico, calling her a "liar" and accusing her of spreading "simulations".
"The pyramid of Russian propaganda is gigantic and underneath there is a huge network of connections," she says.
In addition to the expulsion of diplomats and the financial siege established by the US and its allies, the veto has been added to Russia Today and Sputnik, two media outlets financed by the Russian authorities, which accuse "an unprecedented media war" against them.
Gil Villegas recalls that in the 1990s, when he spoke in favor of Russian measures in Chechnya, the then ambassador invited him to dinner at the Embassy, in the beautiful former hacienda of Santa Catarina del Arena.
Vodka and caviar included.
When he criticized the repression of Serbia, Russia's historical ally, in Kosovo, he was harassed and branded an American informer.
The researcher says that Moscow uses communist nostalgia and assumes itself as the heir to an alternative political model, despite the fact that in his opinion the Putin regime tends more towards fascism and imperialism than communism, to woo the media and politicians related.
"Russia's friends are not only in Congress, but in many other places," he says.
“The interest that the Russians have in Mexico is fundamental due to geopolitics and all the connections with the US due to migration,
Throughout history, virtually no country has been shielded from espionage.
A certain porosity has always persisted, although the tolerance towards intelligence is variable.
This week, the head of Foreign Affairs, Marcelo Ebrard, challenged VanHerck to present evidence of the presence of Russian spies, something
a priori
very unlikely.
This is the same general who last year said that more than a third of the Mexican territory was controlled by drug traffickers and it is probable that in the calculation of the Mexican authorities it is more harmful than in Washington to spread the idea that the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador has lost control of key security and governance preserves, which recognize the operation of foreign agents, a terrain, by definition, opaque and clandestine.
In this trance, no matter how much Moscow has shaken Mexico's nationalist nerve and despite all the sympathetic histrionics, the country's official position on Ukraine has not budged.
General Glen VanHerck, Commander of the United States Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Washington, DC.
Drew Angerer (Getty Images)
In another way, far from the apparent, espionage has gone in all possible directions.
According to the Cato Institute, a
think tank
that oscillates between libertarian and conservative ideas, the United States has identified almost 1,500 spies in its territory between 1990 and 2019, and of them one in ten was Mexican, the second largest group after Chinese agents.
What completely changes the political chessboard and the tolerance of the blurred terrain between diplomacy and intelligence is the war in Ukraine, points out Gil Villegas.
Despite the reappearance of the ghost of espionage, irrefutable answers, detailed confessions from all sides and declassified reports are almost always slow in coming.
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