Staff at the Jesuit-sponsored Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez Human Rights Center (also called the Centro Prodh) in Mexico City have been targeted at least twice with sophisticated spyware since 2017. Staff at the center suspect the infamous Pegasus spyware—made by the Israeli cyberintelligence company NSO Group—was surreptitiously deployed against them by the Mexican military, based on reporting by The New York Times and an analysis by Citizen Lab, a watchdog group at the University of Toronto.
The espionage began as Centro Prodh represented families of the 43 victims of the infamous 2014 abduction and murder of teacher-trainees from the Ayotzinapa Rural Normal School, an all-male boarding school with a tradition of political activism. Their families wanted the military investigated for failing to prevent or respond to the atrocity. But the Ayotzinapa families faced stiff resistance from army officials, who stonewalled investigators and disobeyed presidential orders to open their archives.
Then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador denied carrying out any espionage activities and even criticized Centro Prodh for its work on the Ayotzinapa case. The former president, who left office last Sept. 30, criticized the center on at least 30 occasions from the bully pulpit of his morning press conference, according to Centro Prodh staff.
But fears of espionage are surfacing again for Centro Prodh and other human rights groups in Mexico. The country recently overhauled a suite of laws in security, military, telecommunications and intelligence matters. The laws centralize power, expand state surveillance capacity and grant more powers to the army, an institution with a history of resisting civilian authority.
Staff at Centro Prodh express concerns that the new measures will lead to abuse, especially as the military assumes greater responsibility for public security—a trend in Mexico over the past 20 years as the country contends with the wide reach of drug cartels.
Surveillance efforts that many in the human rights community long suspected despite government denials were laid bare by the Pegasus scandal, according to María Luisa Aguilar, the newly installed director of Centro Prodh. She worries that previously surreptitious government spying campaigns are now buttressed by the new laws. “Unfortunately, that regulatory framework does not come with any civil controls,” she said.
The laws, collectively derided by critics as “Ley Espía” (“spy law”), were approved in a special legislative session. One of the laws, the National Intelligence and Investigation System Law, introduces a catch-all platform for collecting public and private data. This includes biometric and health information, along with personal banking and telecom details.
Updates to government databases “are mandatory across the public and private sector and must be made daily,” Alexandra Helfgott, a graduate student at Yale University’s Jackson School of Public Affairs, wrote in The Mexico Brief, a newsletter tracking Mexican politics. “Critically, no warrant is required for access, and [artificial intelligence technology] will assist in processing the information.”
An amendment to the General Population Law introduces a national identification system known as CURP (Unique Population Registration Code) that relies on biometric information, replacing the widely accepted voter I.D. cards issued by Mexico’s National Electoral Institute, an autonomous agency. The new CURP, a unique 18-character alphanumeric identifier assigned to every resident of Mexico, will be required for carrying out any bureaucratic procedure, with the identification conducted through fingerprints and facial recognition technology. Private companies are also required to ask for CURP for many common commercial transactions.
The new system “conceals serious risks to human rights, such as mass state surveillance or exclusion from access to public services,” La Red en Defensa de los Derechos Digitales, a digital rights watchdog, said in a post on the social media platform X.
“As a whole, these laws serve to link our identity with our daily activity, so that this information can be accessed by authorities, both civilian and military,” the group warned in another X post. “All [of this is] at the discretion of the government and without democratic controls or checks and balances.”
A change to the General Law on Forced Disappearances—ostensibly to address the nearly 130,000 Mexicans missing amid the drug war—introduced the CURP platform, which will allow authorities to search for people using the biometric database. Families of the missing objected to the measure, saying it “has the objective of imposing a system of mass surveillance.”
“The biometric CURP implies that the government will have a registry of all your activities,” said Jorge Verástegui González, an activist for Mexico’s missing people, whose brother and nephew disappeared in 2009.
He expressed doubts that CURP in the end would locate many of thousands of “disappeared” in Mexico. The system assumes that missing persons—who are often kept “disappeared” by captors who quickly murder their targets or force them into involuntary servitude—will be discovered using their biometric identification data as they make use of government services or make purchases.
“There’s a malicious or biased use of the problem of disappearances to justify the need for this data. And I think this mass surveillance system also speaks to the government’s lack of real interest in addressing this problem,” Mr. Verástegui said.
Critics contend the most recent measures deepen Mexico’s authoritarian drift under the governments of Mr. López Obrador and his protégé, President Claudia Sheinbaum, who present themselves as left-wing and democratic. Their supporters had decried previous attempts at expanding surveillance and militarization.
“It’s not going to change anything in terms of security, but it’s going to change a lot in terms of citizen oversight,” said Diego Petersen Farah, a columnist with the Guadalajara newspaper El Informador. “It’s about control over opponents and oversight over pesky journalists,” he charged, adding that “human rights defenders are the main target.”
The measures in Congress follow the government’s shutdown of Mexico’s National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Data Protection. That institute had assisted investigative journalists who uncovered scandals that weakened the political positions of Mr. López Obrador and Ms. Sheinbaum’s predecessors.
Speaking to Mexican media on July 2, the president denied that the government would use CURP as a tool to track Mexican citizens, accusing critics of the new standards of lying about the law’s reach. “It’s meant to build a safe, peaceful country,” she said. “It’s not true that anyone is being spied on.”
In addition to extending the government’s surveillance powers, the Mexican Congress recently expanded the number of crimes that warrant automatic pretrial detention—potentially swelling Mexico’s prison population, where many behind bars languish without being sentenced.
The measures also follow a controversial judicial reform, in which hundreds of judges and magistrates across Mexico, including all nine supreme court justices, were put to the popular vote for the first time on June 1. Mexicans showed a crushing disinterest in the judicial election, which had a participation rate of just 13 percent.
The process was ostensibly nonpartisan, but candidates appearing on cheatsheets distributed by the ruling Morena party swept the positions on the Supreme Court, as well as on the nation’s electoral tribunal and a newly created judicial disciplinary body. Controversial figures such as the lawyer for the imprisoned former drug cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán won judgeships.
Mexico’s bishops urged the newly elected jurists to create a more just Mexico. “We hope that those elected will assume their duties with honesty, professionalism, independence, and love for Mexico and their delicate mission of impartially applying the law,” the Mexican bishops conference said in a post-election statement.
Ms. Aguilar acknowledged that Mexico’s justice system has long had shortcomings, pointing to the steady stream of people coming to the Centro Prodh, but expressed doubts about this judicial “reform.” She said the overhaul creates the strong potential for political control over the judiciary at both the federal and local levels by Ms. Sheinbaum’s Morena party, neutralizing “major checks and balances in the democratic system.”
Ms. Aguilar became the first female director of Centro Prodh when she was appointed in June. She had first arrived at Centro Prodh in 2016, serving as its director of international affairs and assuming deputy director duties in 2024.
Her appointment followed a tumultuous period for the human rights center under former director Santiago Aguirre. Mr. López Obrador blasted Centro Prodh for its work on the Ayotzinapa case and claimed the center was “manipulating” the students’ families—a charge the parents seeking their missing sons rejected.
The Jesuit province in Mexico also came under presidential fire for demanding justice in the June 2022 murders of Javier Campos, S.J., and Joaquín Mora, S.J., who were slain in their parish in Sierra Tarahumara, a rugged region in northern Chihuahua state. The suspect was a known crime boss, who chased a local tour guide, Pedro Palma, into the church.
“Hugs are not enough to stop bullets,” Javier Ávila, S.J., said at the priests’ funeral Mass. The comments were a call for Mr. López Obrador to change his stated security policy of “hugs, not bullets” in response to violence from drug cartels or other organized crime. Mr. López Obrador subsequently blasted both the Jesuits and the bishops’ conference as “spokesmen and cronies” for his “adversaries.”
The bishops’ conference, the Society of Jesus and the Conference of Major Superiors of Religious of Mexico launched the National Dialogue for Peace, which set about listening to and attending to victims of violence, after the murders of Fathers Campos and Mora.
“The country continues to shed blood everywhere: in the countryside, in the city, in the ravines, in the town squares, in the streets, in the prisons, in the subway stations, and at the borders. It’s time to redouble efforts to stop this violence,” the National Dialogue for Peace charged in a statement on June 2 ahead of the third anniversary of the Jesuits’ deaths. “More than 18 years of violence that, far from stopping, is overwhelming us; the social fabric is fragmented by distrust, fear, and indifference among citizens.”
Ms. Aguilar sees some stances and practices from Mr. López Obrador’s administration have been carried over to his successor’s. For example, Mr. López Obrador refused to meet with the families of Mexico’s missing—instead downplaying the problem and launching a reassessment of the missing persons’ registry, alleging that it had become inflated and was being used as a campaign against his leadership. Ms. Sheinbaum’s administration finally met with families of the missing in April, but Ms. Aguilar noted that this came only after months of demands from the families and the discovery of an extermination camp near Guadalajara by a group of madres buscadoras (a collective of families searching for the missing).
“The president’s office was forced to open those dialogues,” Ms. Aguilar said, adding that the Forced Disappearances law, which followed the talks, fell short of expectations. “This doesn’t reflect a listening process that genuinely tries to build responses to the magnitude of the crisis of disappearances, and human rights in general,” she added.
On the bright side, Ms. Aguilar says, Ms. Sheinbaum has lowered the tone in her daily press conference. The president targets fewer critics and social activists in the usually verbose affair, which can last more than an hour—though, like her predecessor, she lets few slights go unanswered.
“From the presidential podium, you don’t hear direct messages against civil society organizations trying to delegitimize our work or directly attacking organizations,” Ms. Aguilar said. But, she added, “I wouldn’t say there’s more dialogue.”
