The “Top Secret” exhibition, dedicated to the Cinémathèque française to spy films until May 21, concludes with a presentation where reality in many respects exceeds fiction. It’s about three videos produced by the Forensic Architecture research group, with the support of the NGO Amnesty International and the Citizen Lab platform, on the use of the Pegasus spyware, among other things against journalists and human rights defenders.
One of these videos deals with the case of Mexico, and more specifically the “disappearance” of forty-three students, in the south-west of the country, in September 2014. It has indeed been proven that the former judge Tomas Zeron, whose the role had already been essential in the acquisition of Pegasus by the Mexican authorities, did everything to sabotage the investigation of this mass crime, the software targeting the families and the defenders of the victims to better spy on them. Despite an international arrest warrant, Mr. Zeron was able to find refuge in Israel, whose government refuses to extradite him to Mexico.
Target the victims rather than the culprits
The world was associated with fifteen other editors within the framework of “Project Pegasus”, a vast investigation into the use of this software developed and marketed by the Israeli company NSO. It appears that “Mexico was the first country in the world to buy the Pegasus software”from 2011, becoming “a kind of laboratory for this spy technology”.
NSO’s first two official clients in Mexico were two intelligence agencies, operating outside of any judicial control. But the acquisition of Pegasus by the office of the Attorney General of the Republic, Jesus Murillo Karam, trivializes the use of this software, with some 15,000 people spied on from 2014 to 2017. The key man in this judicialization of Pegasus is Mr. Zeron, appointed in 2013 by Mr. Murillo Karam to head the brand new Criminal Investigation Agency (AIC).
Mr. Zeron claims that rogue police officers turned the students over to a gang of drug traffickers
In September 2014, forty-three students from the Normal School of Ayotzinapa, who left by bus to demonstrate in Mexico City, “disappeared” after being attacked by the local police. Mr. Zeron is in charge, on behalf of the AIC, of shedding light on this drama which is arousing immense emotion in Mexico. He affirms that crooked police would have delivered the students to a gang of drug traffickers who, taking them for members of a rival cartel, would have massacred them, before cremating their remains in a municipal dump. Such is the official version of this carnage, which Mr. Zeron repeats under the name of “historical truth”.
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