In October of last year, Margarita Simonián, the editor-in-chief of the cRT television anal and eternal member of the list of the 20 most influential women in Russiaannounced the start of transmissions of the Russian television channel in the system of Metrobus of the Mexico City, “where passengers can now familiarize themselves with the news while waiting for their bus.” The advertising spread to Meter already spectacular in several parts of the country, which made visible the concern expressed in March 2023 by General Glen VanHerck, head of the Northern Command of USA during a hearing in Senatewhere he revealed that Mexico had the largest number of russian spies in the world.
There was no reaction from government of the President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, but it sparked the interest of Dolia Estévez, dean of Mexican correspondents in Washington, who a month after VanHerck's statement published that in a matter of weeks the number of Russian diplomats in Mexico had grown to 49. In May she found that the Embassy Russia had accredited 36 new diplomats, bringing the number to 85; an increase in months of 60%.
The number of Russian diplomats in Mexico has no precedent, even in the years of the Cold War, when Moscow and its then Eastern European satellites carried out intense intelligence and espionage activity in Mexico City, which in the 60's, 70's and 80's, was converted into the new Casablanca. The United States had the largest embassy, after Vienna, the West's gateway to the communist world at that time, to counter the espionage of its enemies, and developed two counterintelligence operations, the Military Intelligence Project Verona that monitored communications , and Cointelpro, carried out by the FBI, which infiltrated the Communist Party, unions and media, among other institutions.
The Russian presence, which can be argued was at least endorsed by the president Vladimir Putin, KGB officer For 16 years, it has been part of a disinformation scheme through RT – the acronym for Russian Television – and since 2009 it has been a fundamental piece for 500 million Spanish-speaking consumers of information from the Kremlin's propaganda machine, whose transmissions have been blocked. and prohibited in the United States, Canada, Australia and the European Union.
A study by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford revealed how RT and the Sputnik news agency increased their presence in Latin America after the invasion of Ukraine, adding to their team of disseminators a group of influencers from the region. Vladimir Rouvinski, associate professor at the Icesi University of Colombia, pointed out that these media have eroded liberal democracy in the hemisphere, and “increase polarization because they never talk about consensus.”
In the new edition of the Cold War, Mexico is as trapped as when the Berlin Wall still existed, but unlike those times when it opted for the alliance with Washington, all signs now are that the president chose the Moscow trench, As The Hill, the most read newspaper in the Capitol, revealed last Sunday in a long report where it observed that Russian media and messages were growing in Mexico, underlining the presence of RT on public transportation in Mexico City. “Since our advertising began, our audience has grown immensely,” Russian ambassador to Mexico Nikolay Sofinskiy told Ignacio Rodríguez, nicknamed El Chapucero, one of the first influencers recruited by the propaganda team of Lopez Obradorto disseminate the president's messages and lambast his critics.
The potential impact that the presence of the Russian propaganda machine may have on Mexican society cannot yet be evaluated, but it has entered the minds of Mexicans in a culturally easy way – as was the support for the Nazis in the run-up to the Second World War -, for the very well-founded North American anti-imperialism.
We have perceived Russian penetration as important and relevant, but somewhat limited until this weekend, when Javier Tejado published a monumental discovery in SDP Noticias. When analyzing the INE data on television media coverage of the presidential campaign, it was found that the one who has given it the most space was Channel 13, which is not Televisión Azteca, which we knew under that name for a long time, nor did it have anything to do with its owner Ricardo Salinas Pliego.
Tejado found that Channel 13's frequencies are assigned to the company Telsusa Televisión Mexico, owned by Ángel Remigio González, a Mexican and naturalized Guatemalan, who has an electronic media empire in Central America. “The ghost,” as he is nicknamed, has a company in Miami managed by Guillermo Cañedo White, with 35 television stations, 114 radio frequencies and two movie chains, Tejado explained.
The big surprise, the columnist admitted, was finding an official document from the Federal Telecommunications Institute dated just over four months ago, where it states that all the 15 Telesusa concessionaires that cover Campeche, Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacán, Nuevo León, Oaxaca , Puebla, Quintana Roo, Veracruz and Campeche, had multiprogramming authorized in favor of RT. The financing of Channel 13 helps its expansion, which is the only explanation that Tejado found for the intensity and breadth of the presidential coverage with the usual strain of “media manipulation and information warfare.”
There are two scenarios as a working hypothesis in this new version of the Cold War, where on the one hand it is the strengthening of the current regime to reinforce support for Putin, filling the minds of Mexicans with disinformation, exacerbating their contradictions and accelerating polarization, and on the other, in this new fight that is not ideological – both are capitalists – but for absolute power, where perhaps for Putin, the damage to the United States and its destabilization, involves first doing the same in Mexico, as a piece disposable from your equation.
X: @rivapa
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