MEXICO SPIES ON ITS CITIZENS, SENATOR REVEALS

Politicians', journalists' phones bugged

MEXICO CITY -- Just after 9 o'clock on a recent night, Sen. Layda Sansores
Sanroman banged on the front door of a concrete house in the historic
center of the southern Mexican city of Campeche. What she discovered when
the janitor opened the door unleashed a scandal that has ripped open the
underbelly of Mexican politics.

A back room was crammed with electronic eavesdropping equipment.

Another room contained files stuffed with thousands of pages of transcripts
of telephone conversations of politicians, journalists and private
citizens.

The raid on the government espionage center -- complete with financial
records and seven years of tapes and transcripts -- has exposed
extraordinary details of the government's bugging operations against its
citizens, political foes and prominent business leaders.

``I was furious to discover my life on papers, documents, recordings and
computer files,'' said Sansores, 52, a federal senator from the opposition
left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution.

Surveillance uncovered

In recent weeks, more than a dozen other cases of government espionage have
been uncovered across the country, ranging from hidden microphones and
cameras found in the offices of the new government of Mexico City to
interceptions of the telephone calls of a state governor. According to
Sansores, the Campeche discovery revealed there are 22 similar operations
throughout the country.

In Campeche and elsewhere, every government agency identified with the
electronic surveillance operations -- the federal attorney general and
Interior Ministry, the military, the national security agency and a
plethora of state institutions -- has denied any knowledge. Officials of
the Institutional Revolutionary Party have accused Sansores of manipulating
the information to buttress her claims that the party used fraud to defeat
her in last year's gubernatorial election.

The discoveries -- and the willingness of the targets to go public with
evidence -- confirmed many Mexicans' long-held suspicion that their
government has acted as an omnipresent Big Brother spying on its citizens,
its perceived enemies and, frequently, on some of its own agencies and
officials.

Crime links alleged

The bugging operations have become particularly troublesome in recent years
with an explosion in kidnapping, drug trafficking and other crimes that
many citizens and human rights activists say has been abetted by corrupt
law enforcement officials with access to wiretaps.

Although wiretapping was illegal in Mexico until last year, when a new
criminal reform package was approved allowing court-ordered wiretaps for
law enforcement purposes, bugging scandals have made headlines regularly
for years. But never before have victims hit the evidentiary jackpot that
Sansores discovered March 3.

Tipped off by an anonymous note pressed into her hand during a campaign
rally, Sansores and her aides collected thousands of files. They unearthed
records that showed state government checks were used to buy more than $1.2
million in surveillance equipment from Israel. They found a list of names
of the main bugging victims. And they found transcripts of telephone
conversations and boxes of audiotapes dating to 1991.

On the night of the raid, Sansores -- whose aides videotaped the entire
episode -- could not persuade local or state authorities to investigate the
spy center or make arrests. The federal attorney general's office has begun
an investigation but declined requests to discuss the case.