Last Thursday night there was a emergency meeting at the National Palace between President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the Secretary of Defense, the General Luis Cresencio Sandoval. A package of secret documents from the Secretary of National Defense had just been released were hacked by a group of recent irruption in the public arena called “Macaw”.
What they talked about is kept secret, but the strategy the next morning was totally López Obrador: minimize and dismiss them with the usual spin: we have nothing to hide, and nothing to fear. President Andrés Manuel López Obrador hit the issue, probably understanding the problem that is coming his way, if it is true that greater disclosures of confidential information are coming.
A taste of the health of Lopez Obrador, had a strong impact on the public opinion, especially after the president He admitted his sufferings that include some new to those that he had when he assumed the Presidency, and despite trivializing them, it does not mean that it is irrelevant. The health of the president is a matter of national security, and in the case of López Obrador, of governability. His permanent presence in the morning gives stability despite the current national instability, although to give an idea of what the health of a dignitary means, of having been Mexico a country with real weight in the world, the revelation would have caused a crisis in international markets.
The little weight of Mexico in the world -which goes beyond the actions of the current government-, does not mean that internally it is something inconsequential, as suggested by the president, whose austerity policy allowed a computer coup of this nature that, if confirmed the volume of information obtained will be the largest leak of secret reports in the history of the country.
An uncomfortable reality, if it does not escalate to a nuclear bomb on the Presidency, was caused by the decrease in budgets, which has come since November 2019 when the Federal Republican Austerity Law was published, establishing that no one could buy new computer equipment or programs. . And at least during the first two years of the six-year term, the Secretary of National Defense did not have a budget to buy antivirus.
Those mistakes that are typical only of someone who has a strategic vision who is born and dies on the same day, has allowed him to potentially lead to personal catastrophe and drag everything that smacks of López Obrador and his hackneyed transformation project. The high risk that this means means that within the specialized civil and military areas, work is being done to identify the source of the leak, despite the public disinterest of the president, who says that what has been published does not add anything new.
The way the president’s mind works is peculiar, but it reveals how strong he perceives himself. He should be worried, but he isn’t. On Friday he speculated that they were international hackers, belonging to a “foreign agency.” The phrasing is interesting, due to the use of the word “agency”, which leads to the only one that has inhabited his head since 1973, when the coup d’état in Chile: the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA. Morena, his party said they were internal adversaries. As a working hypothesis, if it is true that there are millions of documents hacked, the work requires a very good budget and the certainty that the origin will not be discovered. In the same line of thought, there does not seem to be any group on the Mexican horizon that fits these premises.
The group of hackers that calls itself Guacamaya has been very active since September 22, when it released some 400,000 documents from the Chilean Army, although the Hacktivist Link page, its manger, has been at operational levels for at least 10 years. months. In a statement, he revealed that they had infiltrated military and police systems in Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Chile and Colombia, and that they handed over the hacked data “to those who legitimately do what they can with this information.”
The language used is interesting, which seems to be leftist and anti-globalist, although the countries where its first batteries targeted are countries governed by the left or, in the Salvadoran case, by a budding autocrat. Those antecedents were probably the context for López Obrador to identify Guacamaya as a foreign group, which seems to have a clear agenda against a profile of a Latin American ruler.
The hack, according to computer experts, did not occur in the entire database of the Ministry of National Defense, but only in emails, which include photos and videos as well as texts. The Chilean government, which suffered a major hack the previous week, has explained that it was possible due to the lack of Exchange mail security services, which Microsoft normally announces and releases patches to apply. In Mexico, superficiality prevails. López Obrador said on Sunday that there would be neither sanction nor investigation.
The president does not understand that what happened is a violation of the security of the Mexican State, of the highest priority for national security, and that he is in a no win-no win situation. By confirming the hack and the veracity of the military reports on Friday, he legitimizes what could come next. The intelligence division of the Ministry of National Defense is highly capable. I have seen it firsthand when I learned about some of the files that they made about me, which had detailed and precise information about my life. A journalist is a natural object of interest, but a president, his family, his entourage and his government, is a strategic objective.
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Perhaps you will begin to take things seriously and understand the scope that a hack of this nature can have if documents begin to come out that show acts of corruption or collusion of your environment or the government with organized crime. The president should know that “winter is coming”.
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