Mexico’s former Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam (left) next to Tomas Zeron, former director of Mexico’s criminal investigation department, in Mexico City October 9, 2014. TOMAS BRAVO/ Portal
The “Top Secret” exhibition, which the Cinémathèque française is dedicating to spy films until May 21, ends with a presentation in which reality exceeds fiction in many ways. These are three videos that the research group Forensic Architecture produced with the support of the NGO Amnesty International and the Citizen Lab platform about the use of the spyware Pegasus against journalists and human rights defenders, among others.
One of these videos deals with the case of Mexico, more specifically the “disappearance” of 43 students in the south-west of the country in September 2014. It has in fact been proven that former judge Tomas Zeron, whose role already played in the takeover of Pegasus by the Mexican authorities had played an essential role, did everything to sabotage the investigation of this mass crime, the software targeted the families and the defense lawyers of the victims to better spy on them. Despite an international arrest warrant, Mr Zeron was able to find refuge in Israel, whose government has refused to extradite him to Mexico.
Target the victims, not the perpetrators
Le Monde has joined forces with fifteen other editorial offices as part of “Project Pegasus”, a comprehensive study of the use of this software, developed and marketed by the Israeli company NSO. It shows that “Mexico was the first country in the world to buy the Pegasus software”, in 2011, “became a kind of laboratory for this spy technology”.
NSO’s first two official clients in Mexico were two intelligence agencies that operated outside of any judicial control. But the takeover of Pegasus by Republic Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam’s office trivializes the use of this software, as it spied on about 15,000 people between 2014 and 2017. The key man in this legalization of Pegasus is Mr. Zeron, who was appointed in 2013 by Mr. Murillo Karam to head the brand new Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC).
Mr Zeron alleges that rogue police officers turned the students over to a gang of drug dealers
In September 2014, 43 students from Ayotzinapa Normal School who were taking a bus to Mexico City to demonstrate “disappeared” after being attacked by local police. Mr. Zeron, on behalf of AIC, is responsible for shedding light on this drama that is causing immense emotions in Mexico. He asserts that corrupt police handed the students over to a gang of drug dealers who believed them to be members of a rival cartel, massacred them before burning their remains in a municipal dump. This is the official version of this slaughter that Mr. Zeron repeats under the name “historical truth”.
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