Mexican Spies in the US

The case of Edward Snowden has troubled the world. And something else: A young man became public enemy No. 1 to the West, from conservative Obama to “leftist” Hollande. Despite their many soccer championships, Brazil did not escape. The shock even reached Mexico, where nothing ever happens and when something does happen, even then it does not matter, as a disgraced Mexican politician explained.

Espionage is not a novelty; it is a profession as old as prostitution and journalism. During the Stone Age, there were people who looked for information on what others thought, and they wanted other clans’ information. Since then, the process has become more sophisticated, like war. Novels and legends are told, based on true stories, of beautiful spies like Mata Hari or innocent spies such as Dreyfus, a French officer of Jewish origin suspected to serve the Germans, immortalized by the famous Emile Zola’s “J’accuse.” Long before, ancient Greece prepared itself to fend off their enemies. Homer gave the Greeks a romantic halo and, instead of an Aston Martin, he gave them a huge Trojan horse. The Romans used to determine the value and power of barbarians whom they planned to conquer by putting them to work as slaves in the grandeur of the greatest empire history has ever known, ahead of the United States.

Now spies are not like James Bond, nor like those who monitored one another during the Cold War: typically men completely committed and very well trained, with sophisticated resources, enormous courage and devotion to their cause, which was no hindrance to changing sides. Indeed, Hemingway said that at some time he spied for his country, like Ian Fleming and Graham Greene.

The new spies are cyber spies, computer experts, owners of unusual electronic skills. Most work for the U.S. Others, as Snowden said, prefer to claim the CIA provides its services to the planet. In other words, they have been stripped of their humanity: they spied or let themselves be spied upon.

Mexico has spied. Diaz Ordaz was fond of espionage, but he used to practice it with critical students. During the early years of the Cuban Revolution, the Mexican government deployed a poor spy, Humberto Carrillo Colon, who took advantage of encrypted messages to the Foreign Ministry and the CIA to order bottles of scotch. The Cubans discovered him, they threatened our spotless country to withdraw or Cuba would break relations with us. We now know that the patriotic member of his Partido Accion Nacional, Felipe Calderón, was authorized by the U.S. to spy on us in 2007, but that was a mere formality; they always have done it, sometimes through their diplomats such as Joel Poinsett, whose help was invaluable to beat Mexico, and sometimes with modern elements, as performed these days.

Information is power. Between the U.S. and the USSR there were all kinds of espionage. The disappearance of the Soviet Union influenced the socialist world, where spies seemed to be in museums or within bureaucracy. But no, they found work spying for companies. Industrial espionage gave them new alternatives. Some spied on large industrial consortia, and these in turn delved into the archives of their opponents. What could be a beneficial business, exchanging inventions, is practiced in the traditional way so as to not to lose the habit. In the U.S. it has reached the extreme, with large telephone companies demanding their clients be spied on. Perhaps because of this, every time a Mexican hears a strange noise on their land-line or mobile, they suspect that the government wants to know how much money you want to give your wife to spend at the supermarket.

Mexico, with painful difficulty, wants to recover the prestige lost by years of lousy governments. In an attempt to avoid the embarrassing discussion about the past election process, the country drives the media to adopt a patriotic attitude: Mexico demands the U.S. explain the reasons why they spy on us. Experts, in their genius, reinforce the idea by stating the obvious: They are violating international law and perhaps jeopardizing national security. Russia, more sensibly and knowing that their claims will stay hidden, had a brilliant idea: Forget computers and send state secrets as before, with mechanical typing machines and pencils. Intelligence stopped being so intelligent in the possibility that some cunning hacker would intrude on the networks and obtain secrets about new weapons or movements of secret agents.

The trouble is that Snowden put the U.S. back to where it should be, in an international trial. But Mexicans, as with Brazilians or Germans, are so used to suffering from espionage, up until suddenly befriending a talented spy and unwittingly entrusting him with the secrets of the Saltillo serapes*. Another possibility is to enter the perverse work and send our own to investigate new technologies for tourist amusement parks and use them for the city government. The government can use them in the main square, a place that is uncivil and, yes, very fun.

*Editor’s note: An ironic reference to the production of a traditional Mexican shawl or blanket.