Known as Guacamaya, this group of hackers would be responsible for leaking regarding 10 terabytes of emails from military and police organizations from different countries in Central and South America, including, 400 thousand emails belonging to the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Chilean Armed Forces (EMCO), work organization and permanent advice of the Ministry of Defense.
“We filter military and police systems from Mexico, Peru, Salvador, Chile, Colombia and we deliver this to those who legitimately do what they can with this information,” declared the group, which framed its action in an operation called “Repressive Forces.”
According to CyberScoop, a site specializing in cybersecurity, this data breach It is the latest action by Guacamaya, a group that has focused on infiltrating mining and oil companies, the police and various Latin American regulatory agencies since March 2022.
The leak from the hacker group, which calls itself the Macaw following a type of bird native to Central and South America, follows a pattern of targeting entities the group believes play a role in both the environmental degradation of the region and the repression of native populations, says the portal.
Data from the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces of Chile, General Command of the Armed Forces of Colombia, National Civil Police of El Salvador and Armed Forces of El Salvador, Secretariat of National Defense of Mexico, Joint Command of the Armed Forces of Peru and the Peruvian Army have been leaked by the group on the Enlace Hacktivista website in retaliation for the entities’ role in the repression of the indigenous population and environmental degradation in the region, according to Guacamaya.
“To make it clear, the military armies and police forces of the States of Abya Yala – the original indigenous name for the region between northern Colombia and Panama – are the guarantee of the domination of North American imperialism, they are the guarantee of the extractivist presence from the Global North,” the group said in a statement, according to CyberScoop. “They are violent repressive forces, criminals once morest the peoples themselves and their pyramidal internal organization charts of power are also reprehensible,” he adds.
In August, the hacktivist collective published more than 2 terabytes of emails and files from a large number of mining companies in Central and South America, in a move apparently aimed at exposing environmental damage in the region.
“All we really want, as our own mother warns us, is for this to stop,” Guacamaya’s statement said. “We want them to stop, to stop once and for all exploiting, mining, polluting, that desire for domination.”
The leaked documents came from ENAMI, an Ecuadorian state mining company; the National Hydrocarbons Agency (ANH) in Colombia; New Granada Energy Corporation in Colombia; Quiborax, a mining company in Chile; Oryx, an oil company in Venezuela; Tejucana, a Brazilian mining company; and the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources of Guatemala, details CyberScoop.
Previously, in March, Guacamaya published 4.2 terabytes of hacked material from mining subsidiaries of a Swiss investment group detailing apparent contamination by companies in Guatemala. The files became part of a massive reporting project that involved 65 journalists from around the world and exposed not only evidence of contamination, but also efforts to manipulate local governments and surveillance of journalists.