An imprisoned Colombian hacker has sensationally claimed that he helped Enrique Peña Nieto win the 2012 Mexican presidential election.
The allegations were made by jailed computer expert Andres Sepulveda in Bloomberg Businessweek. One of the central assertions concerns Jalisco, which was a key swing state in the elections. Sepulveda, 31, claims he arranged to call tens of thousands of voters with recordings purporting to be from Citizen’s Movement (MC) gubernatorial candidate Enrique Alfaro Ramirez. The calls were made at 3 a.m., waking and angering voters, and contributed to Alfaro’s narrow electoral loss to Aristoteles Sandoval, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate.
Sepulveda says that he was on the payroll of Miami-based political consultant Juan Jose Rendon. Although Rendon denies using Sepulveda for a clandestine campaign, he admits knowing him and hiring him to do website design.
In the Bloomberg article, the hacker claims that Rendon paid him US$600,000 to commit a wide variety of crimes designed to influence voters.
Sepulveda “led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices, all to help Peña Nieto,” the article maintains.
The hacker alleges he created around 30,000 fake Twitter profiles to create discussion around Peña Nieto’s favorite topics, such as his plans to end the drug war. One trend he started sparked fears that the higher rival presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador rose in the polls, the lower the peso would fall.
According to the article, “Sepulveda knew the currency issue was a major vulnerability; he’d read it in the candidate’s own internal staff memos.”
The hacker also describes Peña Nieto’s election as the end result of “one of the dirtiest Latin American campaigns in recent memory.”
Sepulveda is currently serving a ten-year sentence in a Colombian prison for a series of charges related to conspiracy and espionage. His life is reportedly in danger so he is kept in solitary confinement, sleeping under a bulletproof blanket, behind bombproof doors.
According to the article, the Colombian made his admissions because he is “hoping to convince the public that he is rehabilitated – and gather support for a reduced sentence.”
Lopez Obrador’s campaign manager says that similar illegal tactics are still being used in Mexican politics to this day.
“Of course they spied and interfered in the social networks,” said former campaign coordinator Ricardo Monreal. “They continue to do so now. Back then we publicly denounced the existence of a network of foreign publicists and bot operators.”
Sepulveda says he used similar tactics in eight other countries across Latin America: Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and Venezuela.
In light of the allegations, Jalisco Electoral Institute (IEPC) director Mario Ramos argued that it was necessary for electoral regulations to keep up with technological realities.
“Every day technological advances generate new practices that electoral contenders can use,” Ramos said. “At times, I think the legislation lags behind, but we need to review any cases where illegal conduct is detected.”
Alfaro, the Jalisco opposition candidate at the time of the allegations, said he is analyzing the possibility of filing a formal complaint against the PRI.
“Here we have the truth of the PRI’s dirt and the way they operate,” said Alfaro, who is currently the mayor of Guadalajara. “We are going to study our options and may even take legal action, but first we want to know all of the information.”
A spokesperson for Alfaro’s Citizen’s Movement (MC) said they had denounced the dirty tactics at the time but had been ignored.
“The authorities were deaf to our pleas,” said Guillermo Medrano, the coordinator of the Citizen’s Movement (MC) in Jalisco. “They didn’t want to hear us, but after all this time the truth is coming out.”
PRI National President Manlio Fabio Beltrones denied the accusations when a reporter questioned him at a press conference.
“We cannot give any credibility to someone who is in jail,” Beltrones argued. “That can do great damage to society.”
“Are the PRI thinking of hiring hackers for the next eletion?” one reporter asked.
After hesitating a few seconds, the PRI leader finally responded: “I think that question is even more absurd than the first.”
The victor in Jalisco’s 2012 state election, Governor Sandoval, also rejected the allegations this week.
“(The winning margin of) 130,000 votes leaves no room for doubt. I wholeheartedly endorse what has been said by the party,” the governor replied when asked about the issue at a press conference Tuesday.