2023-11-10 05:26:30
MEXICO CITY (AP) — Santiago Taboada, opposition candidate for head of government of Mexico City, accused the Mexican capital’s prosecutor’s office on Thursday of having submitted a request to have access to his telephone records and those of others. relevant politicians.
The accusation is the latest suggestion that elements of the capital’s prosecutor’s office have abused their power for political purposes. The prosecution “categorically denied” the allegations on Thursday.
The city is governed by the Morena party of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has promised to end political espionage in Mexico but apparently has not done so.
The case, first reported by The New York Times, involves Taboada, who governs the Benito Juárez mayor’s office, one of the districts with the highest economic level in the city. Taboada aspires to run for the head of government of Mexico City in 2024.
He said the request for political records was “political persecution.”
“Now more than ever the political persecution of which I have been a victim for months is exposed,” Taboada wrote on his social media accounts.
As part of an alleged investigation, elements of the capital’s prosecutor’s office allegedly asked the cell phone company Telcel to hand over the telephone records and text messages of Taboada and more than a dozen politicians, including opposition figures and some senior members of the president’s own party.
Taboada’s office said the requests for the phone records were discovered in prosecutor’s office files, and the records apparently were turned over. Telcel did not immediately respond to requests for comment on whether he did so.
Ulises Lara, spokesman for the prosecutor’s office, said on Thursday that “this institution does not spy on political figures,” but did not deny the existence of the documents that Taboada claims were discovered in a lawsuit.
Instead, Lara said that the requests “are false” and that the case has been referred for investigation to the Prosecutor’s Office for the Investigation of Crimes Committed by Public Servants, suggesting that someone within the prosecutor’s office or some other government employee was the one who submitted the requests for telephone records.
In Mexico, prosecutors can file urgent requests for phone records in emergency cases, but must ultimately obtain a court order. Lara assured that there are currently no criminal cases or open investigations regarding the people whose records were requested.
It is a sensitive issue for López Obrador, who was the target of government espionage during the 1970s and 1980s.
Although it claims that the government is no longer carrying out espionage at the national level, press freedom groups declared in April that the government was apparently still using Pegasus spyware to tap the phones of human rights defenders even at the end of 2022.
It would not be the first time that elements of the capital’s prosecutor’s office apparently use the law for political purposes.
In August, capital prosecutors took an unusual and extreme measure when they requested that elements of the Marine Corps accompany them to another state to arrest Uriel Carmona, attorney general of the neighboring state of Morelos, and transfer him back to Mexico City.
The courts later determined that Carmona’s arrest was improper and ordered him to be released. In Mexico, prosecutors are only allowed to intervene within their state, unless they receive permission from another state.
Mexico City prosecutors said Carmona was arrested on charges of obstructing the investigation into the 2022 murder of a woman from the capital, whose body was found shortly following crossing state lines into Morelos.
But Carmona claims that he is the victim of a political conspiracy involving former soccer player Cuauhtémoc Blanco, current governor of Morelos. Carmona said López Obrador ordered his arrest because his office was investigating Blanco’s alleged ties to organized crime.
Blanco, a political ally of López Obrador, has rejected having any relationship with drug traffickers, following a three-year-old photograph came to light in which he appears with three men identified as leaders of a local cartel.
Months earlier that year, prosecutors in the capital arrested an opposition councilor on corruption charges. But the prosecution has not managed to imprison or convict anyone for the collapse of an elevated section of the capital’s metro in May 2021 that left 26 dead and almost 100 injured.
It was a humiliating case because Marcelo Ebrard, who ordered the work when he was head of government, and the then head of the capital Claudia Sheinbaum — whose government apparently did not detect the problem or provide adequate maintenance to the roads — belong to Morena. Now Sheinbaum is the party’s presidential candidate heading to 2024.
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