Sources and analysis: Alejandro Encinas, Mexico's undersecretary for human rights, was targeted with Pegasus while he investigated the country's military abuses
New York Times : Tweets: @arturoangel20 , @falko_ernst , @diazbriseno , @lkatzenberg , and @adam_wola Tweets: @arturoangel20 : He Was Investigating Mexico's Military. Then the Spying Began. https://www.nytimes.com/... Falko Ernst / @falko_ernst : Mexico's army is a black box within the 🇲🇽 State - one that's being handed increasing powers while enjoying near-perfect impunity and opacity And it's making damn sure it'll stay that way - including by spying on state officials looking into its crimes👇https://www.nytimes.com/ ... @diazbriseno : AMLO's military illegaly spying on his own fellow Govt officials. Yet, AMLO has said that the Mexican military are beyond reproach & has expanded their power as never before. Not a victim but an enabler. https://twitter.com/... Lauren Katzenberg / @lkatzenberg : While looking into abuses by Mexico's armed forces, the country's top human rights official was targeted with Pegasus, the world's most notorious spyware, The Times found. New from @Nataliekitro @ronenbergman https://www.nytimes.com/... Adam Isacson / @adam_wola : It's not unreasonable to say that #Mexico's military is now an out-of-control institution, beyond the reach of the rule of law. This is the result of years of docile deference from presidents (especially @lopezobrador_) and prosecutors. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Encinas report lands on top of an unusually dense paper trail. The New York Times' April investigation traced how Mexico became Pegasus' first and most prolific client, while Citizen Lab research documented that attacks on Mexican activists and reporters continued through 2021 — after President AMLO had publicly called the spyware a thing of the past. Separately, the attorney general's office has been probing a ~$23M Pegasus purchase by the prior administration.
First-order effects
- Encinas, the undersecretary for human rights, is himself a sitting senior official — so the targeting confirms what observers like Falko Ernst describe as a military operating as a 'black box' willing to surveil its own government's investigators, not just journalists and activists.
- Any sources, witnesses, or collaborators feeding Encinas' investigation of military abuses are immediately exposed, compromising the integrity of the inquiry itself.
Second-order effects
- The finding puts direct pressure on the attorney general's ongoing investigation into the ~$23M Pegasus purchase — if the army is using the tool against state officials, questions widen from procurement legality to which agencies actually control deployments.
- It sharpens the contradiction for AMLO: his administration promised to stop using Pegasus, yet reporting keeps surfacing new targets inside his own government, raising the political cost of defending the military's opacity.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, commercial spyware's target set has structurally expanded from press and civil society to domestic accountability mechanisms themselves — meaning oversight bodies can no longer assume their own channels are secure.
- This reinforces the finding that US sanctions on NSO Group have not slowed state spyware adoption (the DEA's own Graphite deployment being a case in point), suggesting export controls alone won't constrain demand without domestic governance reform.
The trend: Commercial spyware is migrating from surveillance of journalists and activists toward the officials tasked with holding security institutions accountable.