A large number of emails from the Mexican Ministry of Defense are among a mass of electronic communications that were extracted by a group of hackers from military and police agencies of several Latin American countries, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador confirmed on Friday.
Last week, the Chilean government acknowledged that someone had stolen emails from its Joint Chiefs of Staff.
López Obrador spoke at his daily news conference following a report by journalist Carlos Loret de Mola that hacked files revealed previously unknown details about a serious health problem he suffered in January.
The 68-year-old president downplayed the act of hacking, saying “there is nothing that is not known.” He stated that the intrusion apparently occurred during a change in the cyber systems of the Ministry of National Defense.
But Chile was so concerned about the intrusion into its own systems that it asked its defense minister, Maya Alejandra Fernández Allende, to return from the United States last week, where she was participating in the United Nations General Assembly alongside President Gabriel Boric.
The 10 terabytes of information stolen by the group also include emails from the armed forces of El Salvador, Peru and Colombia, and the Salvadoran National Police. Apparently Mexico was the country that suffered the most data theft.
A group calling itself Guacamaya, made up of anonymous elements claiming to be warriors for social justice, claims to use hacking to expose injustice and corruption in defense of indigenous peoples. Previously, hackers using the same name stole and disclosed the emails of a mining company that had long faced accusations of human rights violations and environmental damage in Guatemala.
In a statement accompanying its most recent action, the group complained about the plundering of Latin America — which it calls Abya Yala — by colonizers, and the persistent extractivist goals of the “global North.”
The group issued a 1,400-word statement saying that the armed forces and police of Latin American countries — often trained by the United States — are used by governments “to keep their inhabitants imprisoned.”
“The police minimize the risk that the people exercise their worthy right to protest, to destroy the system that oppresses them,” he added.
The group said it would make the documents available to journalists, but so far only a small portion has been reported, perhaps because of the sheer volume of information.
In a series of emails, the hackers said their review of emails from Mexico so far indicated that much of the information was already publicly available and they doubted there were any “explosive” emails, possibly because more sensitive communications are better protected. .
But they said there is evidence that the armed forces are closely following political and social movements.
They indicated that this includes the relatives of the 43 students from the state of Guerrero, in the south of the country, who were kidnapped by local police officers and allegedly handed over to the Guerreros Unidos drug-trafficking group for murder in 2014 – a case in which some The military have been accused of having participated, as well as the Zapatista rebel movement that took up arms in southern Mexico in 1994, and groups opposed to the construction of the so-called Mayan Train in the Yucatan peninsula.
Rather than attempting to monetize or demand a ransom for penetrating government computer systems through a cyberattack, Guacamaya appears to be more of a “hacktivist” operation intended to leak documents for social justice purposes.
Loret de Mola said that among the stolen emails were medical records about the president, including an emergency flight to the country’s capital from his ranch in January, at a time when he was suffering from severe angina and was at risk of to suffer a heart attack. It was previously unknown that this flight had taken place.
Later that month he underwent cardiac catheterization, which was disclosed, but was said at the time to be a routine exam. López Obrador suffered a heart attack in 2013 and suffers from high blood pressure.
The president indicated in his press conference that he has several health problems and undergoes medical check-ups every few months.
