Source: San Jose Mercury News (CA) Contact: http://www.sjmercury.com/ Pubdate: Mon, 13 Apr 1998 Author: Molly Moore - Washington Post 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.