The Subject of Discord

This Wednesday, Toluca will become the capital of North America thanks to President Enrique Peña Nieto, who persuaded his colleagues from the United States and Canada that this is the place to hold the eighth North America Leaders Summit. The capital of the state that catapulted him to the presidency is impeccable. The Toluca city center is a fortress under the watch of the Presidential General Staff — and the Secret Service and the Mounted Police. Nothing should break with the schedule or the protocol in the face of public opinion, where there will be smiles and warm greetings. But behind closed doors, Mexican diplomats think that the bilateral meeting between Presidents Peña Nieto and Barack Obama will be rough.

The subject of discord, about which nobody wants to speak in public, is espionage. Diplomats from both countries have emphasized the economic character of this summit and underscored that the three North American nations have the same amount of trade between them as the 26 European Union members and the 13 top Asian countries — with the exception of China. There will be a joint statement from the three leaders at the summit, and 26 working documents reflecting how vast the agenda is. But before the party and the celebration will come the moment of truth about the espionage.

Mexico, like a large number of other countries, was subjected for years to systematic espionage by the National Security Agency, which is under the Pentagon’s jurisdiction. According to German newspaper Der Spiegel, which had access to the documents that the agency’s ex-contractor Edward Snowden took with him into exile, in May 2010 it penetrated the server of the Presidency of the Republic and was able to monitor the email of ex-President Felipe Calderon and the cabinet, which gave it a privileged view of “Mexico’s political system and internal stability.”

Previously, Brazilian TV network Globo revealed that the NSA expanded its espionage in 2012 to include Peña Nieto, then a presidential candidate. The NSA tapped his telephone and those of nine aides, through whose phone calls they drew a map of his regular contacts, which allowed them to spy on over 85,000 text messages, including an indeterminate number belonging to Peña Nieto.

The Mexican government initially had a restrained response, compared to the loud protest of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was also a victim of the NSA espionage. According to Mexican diplomats, the Brazilian reaction caused their demands to be ignored for a long time, while [Mexican] Sub-secretary of Foreign Affairs for North America Sergio Alcocer and CISEN [Center for Research and National Security] director Eugenio Imaz were received in Washington. In all cases, unsatisfactory. According to these sources, the first reaction was to deny they knew about NSA espionage. The Mexican stance escalated, and President Peña Nieto declared to the foreign press that the espionage was “illegal” and “unacceptable.”

Mexican diplomatic sources point out that, like all espionage in the world, this inhabits a universe of ambiguity, where the United States government has not yet admitted that it carried out massive espionage, but at the same time cannot deny it after Snowden’s revelations. A source with expertise in security matters observed that until now, despite having about a million documents, Snowden has only revealed procedures but has not divulged information. He is currently living under asylum in Russia; one of the goals of the American government is to prevent its whistle-blower from disclosing the contents of the espionage.

As long as we don’t know exactly what was uncovered through espionage, no government can go beyond proposals such as Rousseff’s, who has asked for the creation of an alternative platform to bypass the Web — which was born of a Pentagon communications network — or that of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has asked for commitments to restore mutual trust between the allies.

Peña Nieto was never as belligerent in his speech as his colleagues, but in the end all three have received the same reply. Mexican diplomats said the explanations given by the Obama administration to the Mexican ambassador in the United States, Eduardo Medina Mora, have been weak and reveal nothing regarding the content of the espionage except that details of potentially embarrassing conversations could come out.

What kind of details is something only known in Washington, where they do not want anybody else except themselves to know how deeply they delved into their partners’ political, economic and military secrets, and how many vulnerabilities they know about.