Andrés
Sepúlveda rigged elections throughout Latin America for almost a
decade. He tells his story for the first time.
PART 4
In Mexico,
Sepúlveda’s technical mastery and Rendón’s grand vision for a
ruthless political machine fully came together, fueled by the huge
resources of the PRI. The years under President Felipe Calderón and
the National Action Party (also, as in Partido Acción Nacional, PAN)
were plagued by a grinding war against the drug cartels, which made
kidnappings, street assassinations, and beheadings ordinary. As 2012
approached, the PRI offered the youthful energy of Peña Nieto, who’d
just finished a successful term as governor.
Sepúlveda
didn’t like the idea of working in Mexico, a dangerous country for
involvement in public life. But Rendón persuaded him to travel there
for short trips, starting in 2008, often flying him in on his private
jet. Working at one point in Tabasco, on the sweltering Gulf of
Mexico, Sepúlveda hacked a political boss who turned out to have
connections to a drug cartel. After Rendón’s security team learned
of a plan to kill Sepúlveda, he spent a night in an armored Chevy
Suburban before returning to Mexico City.
Mexico is
effectively a three-party system, and Peña Nieto faced opponents
from both right and left. On the right, the ruling PAN nominated
Josefina Vázquez Mota, its first female presidential candidate. On
the left, the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, chose Andrés
Manuel López Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor.
Early polls
showed Peña Nieto 20 points ahead, but his supporters weren’t
taking chances. Sepúlveda’s team installed malware in routers in
the headquarters of the PRD candidate, which let him tap the phones
and computers of anyone using the network, including the candidate.
He took similar steps against PAN’s Vázquez Mota. When the
candidates’ teams prepared policy speeches, Sepúlveda had the
details as soon as a speechwriter’s fingers hit the keyboard.
Sepúlveda saw the opponents’ upcoming meetings and campaign
schedules before their own teams did.
Money was no
problem. At one point, Sepúlveda spent $50,000 on high-end Russian
software that made quick work of tapping Apple, BlackBerry, and
Android phones. He also splurged on the very best fake Twitter
profiles; they’d been maintained for at least a year, giving them a
patina of believability.
Sepúlveda
managed thousands of such fake profiles and used the accounts to
shape discussion around topics such as Peña Nieto’s plan to end
drug violence, priming the social media pump with views that real
users would mimic. For less nuanced work, he had a larger army
of 30,000 Twitter bots, automatic posters that could create trends.
One conversation he started stoked fear that the more López Obrador
rose in the polls, the lower the peso would sink. Sepúlveda knew the
currency issue was a major vulnerability; he’d read it in the
candidate’s own internal staff memos.
Just about
anything the digital dark arts could offer to Peña Nieto’s
campaign or important local allies, Sepúlveda and his team provided.
On election night, he had computers call tens of thousands of
voters with prerecorded phone messages at 3 a.m. in the critical
swing state of Jalisco. The calls appeared to come from the campaign
of popular left-wing gubernatorial candidate Enrique Alfaro Ramírez.
That angered voters—that was the point—and Alfaro lost by a slim
margin. In another governor’s race, in Tabasco, Sepúlveda set
up fake Facebook accounts of gay men claiming to back a conservative
Catholic candidate representing the PAN, a stunt designed to alienate
his base. “I always suspected something was off,” the candidate,
Gerardo Priego, said recently when told how Sepúlveda’s team
manipulated social media in the campaign.
In May, Peña
Nieto visited Mexico City’s Ibero-American University and was
bombarded by angry chants and boos from students. The rattled
candidate retreated with his bodyguards into an adjacent building,
hiding, according to some social media posts, in a bathroom. The
images were a disaster. López Obrador soared.
The PRI was
able to recover after one of López Obrador’s consultants was
caught on tape asking businessmen for $6 million to fund his
candidate’s broke campaign, in possible violation of Mexican laws.
Although the hacker says he doesn’t know the origin of that
particular recording, Sepúlveda and his team had been
intercepting the communications of the consultant, Luis Costa Bonino,
for months. (On Feb. 2, 2012, Rendón appears to have sent him
three e-mail addresses and a cell phone number belonging to Costa
Bonino in an e-mail called “Job.”) Sepúlveda’s team
disabled the consultant’s personal website and directed journalists
to a clone site. There they posted what looked like a long defense
written by Costa Bonino, which casually raised questions about
whether his Uruguayan roots violated Mexican restrictions on
foreigners in elections. Costa Bonino left the campaign a few
days later. He indicated recently that he knew he was being spied on,
he just didn’t know how. It goes with the trade in Latin America:
“Having a phone hacked by the opposition is not a novelty. When I
work on a campaign, the assumption is that everything I talk about on
the phone will be heard by the opponents.”
The press
office for Peña Nieto declined to comment. A spokesman for the PRI
said the party has no knowledge of Rendón working for Peña Nieto’s
or any other PRI campaign. Rendón says he has worked on behalf of
PRI candidates in Mexico for 16 years, from August 2000 until today.
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