Andrés
Sepúlveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a
decade. He tells his story for the first time.
PART 1
It was just
before midnight when Enrique Peña Nieto declared victory as the
newly elected president of Mexico. Peña Nieto was a lawyer and a
millionaire, from a family of mayors and governors. His wife was a
telenovela star. He beamed as he was showered with red, green, and
white confetti at the Mexico City headquarters of the Institutional
Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which had ruled for more than 70 years
before being forced out in 2000. Returning the party to power on that
night in July 2012, Peña Nieto vowed to tame drug violence, fight
corruption, and open a more transparent era in Mexican politics.
Two thousand
miles away, in an apartment in Bogotá’s upscale Chicó Navarra
neighborhood, Andrés Sepúlveda sat before six computer screens.
Sepúlveda is Colombian, bricklike, with a shaved head, goatee, and a
tattoo of a QR code containing an encryption key on the back of his
head. On his nape are the words “
” and “”
stacked atop each other, dark riffs on coding. He was watching a live
feed of Peña Nieto’s victory party, waiting for an official
declaration of the results.
When Peña
Nieto won, Sepúlveda began destroying evidence. He drilled holes in
flash drives, hard drives, and cell phones, fried their circuits in a
microwave, then broke them to shards with a hammer. He shredded
documents and flushed them down the toilet and erased servers in
Russia and Ukraine rented anonymously with Bitcoins. He was
dismantling what he says was a secret history of one of the dirtiest
Latin American campaigns in recent memory.
For eight
years, Sepúlveda, now 31, says he traveled the continent rigging
major political campaigns. With a budget of $600,000, the Peña Nieto
job was by far his most complex. He 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, a right-of-center candidate, eke
out a victory. On that July night, he cracked bottle after bottle of
Colón Negra beer in celebration. As usual on election night, he was
alone.
Sepúlveda’s
career began in 2005, and his first jobs were small—mostly defacing
campaign websites and breaking into opponents’ donor databases.
Within a few years he was assembling teams that spied, stole, and
smeared on behalf of presidential campaigns across Latin America. He
wasn’t cheap, but his services were extensive. For $12,000 a month,
a customer hired a crew that could hack smartphones, spoof and clone
Web pages, and send mass e-mails and texts. The premium package, at
$20,000 a month, also included a full range of digital interception,
attack, decryption, and defense. The jobs were carefully laundered
through layers of middlemen and consultants. Sepúlveda says many of
the candidates he helped might not even have known about his role; he
says he met only a few.
His teams
worked on presidential elections in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, El
Salvador, Colombia, Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Venezuela.
Campaigns mentioned in this story were contacted through former and
current spokespeople; none but Mexico’s PRI and the campaign of
Guatemala’s National Advancement Party would comment.
As a child,
he witnessed the violence of Colombia’s Marxist guerrillas. As an
adult, he allied with a right wing emerging across Latin America. He
believed his hacking was no more diabolical than the tactics of those
he opposed, such as Hugo Chávez and Daniel Ortega.
Many of
Sepúlveda’s efforts were unsuccessful, but he has enough wins that
he might be able to claim as much influence over the political
direction of modern Latin America as anyone in the 21st century. “My
job was to do actions of dirty war and psychological operations,
black propaganda, rumors—the whole dark side of politics that
nobody knows exists but everyone can see,” he says in
Spanish, while sitting at a small plastic table in an outdoor
courtyard deep within the heavily fortified offices of Colombia’s
attorney general’s office. He’s serving 10 years in prison for
charges including use of malicious software, conspiracy to commit
crime, violation of personal data, and espionage, related to hacking
during Colombia’s 2014 presidential election. He has agreed to
tell his full story for the first time, hoping to convince the public
that he’s rehabilitated—and gather support for a reduced
sentence.
Usually, he
says, he was on the payroll of Juan José Rendón, a Miami-based
political consultant who’s been called the Karl Rove of Latin
America. Rendón denies using Sepúlveda for anything illegal, and
categorically disputes the account Sepúlveda gave Bloomberg
Businessweek of their relationship, but admits knowing him and using
him to do website design. “If I talked to him maybe once or
twice, it was in a group session about that, about the Web,” he
says. “I don’t do illegal stuff at all. There is negative
campaigning. They don’t like it—OK. But if it’s legal, I’m
gonna do it. I’m not a saint, but I’m not a criminal.”
While Sepúlveda’s policy was to destroy all data at the completion
of a job, he left some documents with members of his hacking teams
and other trusted third parties as a secret “insurance policy.”
Sepúlveda
provided Bloomberg Businessweek with what he says are e-mails showing
conversations between him, Rendón, and Rendón’s consulting firm
concerning hacking and the progress of campaign-related cyber
attacks. Rendón says the e-mails are fake. An analysis by an
independent computer security firm said a sample of the e-mails they
examined appeared authentic. Some of Sepúlveda’s descriptions of
his actions match published accounts of events during various
election campaigns, but other details couldn’t be independently
verified. One person working on the campaign in Mexico, who asked not
to be identified out of fear for his safety, substantially confirmed
Sepúlveda’s accounts of his and Rendón’s roles in that
election.
Sepúlveda
says he was offered several political jobs in Spain, which he says he
turned down because he was too busy. On the question of whether the
U.S. presidential campaign is being tampered with, he is unequivocal.
“I’m 100 percent sure it is,” he says.
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