Mexico is the latest country to be caught up in the NSA leaks story. It seems the agency had access to president Enrique Peña Nieto's email account while he was running for office last year. The disclosure offers us a remarkable, if unsurprising, window on how the US government treats its close political allies.
Mexico's president reacted with contrived indignation and an acceptance of Barack Obama's assurance that there will be an investigation into the matter. Peña Nieto's tepid response to the hacking of his emails by the NSA is of little wonder; a perfunctory duty of high-level Mexican politicians is to publicly denounce the infractions of US imperialism while doing nothing concrete to oppose it, lest it upset the close political alliance with Washington.
The Mexico/US partnership goes far beyond political and economic co-operation, however. Spying on the Mexican citizenry has been mutually consensual since World War II.
La CIA
Following the war, at the behest of the US, Mexico established its own internal spying operation. The new secret police, known as the DFS, was modelled on its sister agencies, the FBI and the CIA. It was charged with spying on trade unionists, left-wing political opposition groups, journalists, dissident intellectuals, guerrilla organisations and social movements.
The DFS worked closely with the CIA, which had its biggest Latin America operation in Mexico City. During the heightened paranoia of the Cold War, one of the DFS's principal functions was to spy on and eradicate popular social movements, whom the government labelled as "subversives", "anti-Mexicans", "terrorists" and "Marxists".
By the 1970s and 1980s the DFS was spying on and eliminating political undesirables at a ferocious rate. But it had also become heavily involved in narcotrafficking and organised crime. The impunity afforded to the agency by the Mexican and US governments meant that, so long as the agency was spying on and eliminating subversives, all manner of other criminal behaviour was tolerated, despite the supposed commitment to fighting the "war on drugs".
According to famous CIA whistleblower Philip Agee, the spying network and relationship between the DFS and CIA was such that even Mexican presidents (such as Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and Luis Echeverría) acted as informants to the CIA.
Eyes on subversives
A few years ago, I sat at a desk poring over declassified government documents in one of Mexico City's largest archives. I was looking into how the state spied on dissidents during the 60s and 70s and found that government agencies kept incredibly detailed information on anyone they deemed "subversive".
