This story was published in Spanish on 14 April 2024
By Marco Appel & Alberto Escorcia
Mexican journalist Dianeth Pérez Arreola lived in the Netherlands for 17 years.
During that time, she was involved in human rights activities in Mexico, including protests against the government of Enrique Peña Nieto following the disappearance of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa.
In August 2020, Pérez Arreola returned to Mexico to found and run the digital media outlet Brújula News in Baja California.
Her name, however, is one of those that appears in an internal report of the Mexican embassy in the Netherlands drawn up on 1 July 2021 – almost a year after her departure from that country – in which she is accused of having supported the visit of members of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) to the Netherlands in 2021.
The internal report states:
‘The private Facebook group ‘Gira Zapatista Holanda’ was detected, created to establish contacts between people and collectives in the Netherlands, in support of the Zapatista delegation that is heading to this country. The group coordinates preparations for the Zapatista delegation’s arrival in the Netherlands, including events, volunteer recruitment, fundraising, and promotional activities for the tour, among others. While the specific content of their meetings is unknown, they have been convened mainly by the following persons.
‘At that time I was no longer there (in the Netherlands). I don’t know why I appear in that report,’ Pérez Arreola told Underground from Mexico.
He recalls that the only thing he did was sign up for a chat room created to discuss the events of the Zapatista caravan in the Netherlands, but says he never actively participated in it. ‘I just read the comments,’ he says.
Pérez Arreola is part of a group of eleven Mexican and foreign Zapatista sympathisers based in the Netherlands whose names, surnames and profiles were passed on by the Mexican embassy in that European country – headed by José Antonio Zabalgoitia – to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) headed at the time by Marcelo Ebrard.
Based on emails hacked from the Ministry of National Defence (SEDENA) by the self-identified Guacamaya group, Underground revealed on 21 October 2022 that the Mexican embassies and military attaché offices in Europe followed up separately and through regular reports on the Zapatista delegation that travelled to the region between June and November 2021.
These communications also show that, in some of its internal reports, the SRE mentions names of sympathisers of the guerrilla group who allegedly gave active support to the so-called ‘Tour for Life’, and that this information was given to the SEDENA through its embassy in Brussels, Belgium, with the authorisation of its head, Rogelio Granguillhome Morfín.
Underground interviewed three activists mentioned in the SRE reports and found that in at least these cases there are errors in the information provided by diplomatic personnel about them, as none of them collaborated in the Zapatista visit and some had even ceased to reside in the country where they are located. One such case is that of the aforementioned journalist Dianeth Pérez Arreola; another is that of the artist Erika Sprey, who appears in the same report.
By 1 July 2021, when the Mexican embassy in the Netherlands sent its report to the SRE, Sprey had been living in another country, Belgium, for about three years. And when the Zapatistas travelled to Europe, she claims she was not involved in any calls or mobilisations. ‘I was in a Facebook group, yes, but I didn’t get involved at all,’ she told this journalist, adding: ‘If that’s how their (the Mexican embassies’) information services work, then they are terrible!
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Military tracking
Underground has gained access to a new series of emails related to the EZLN’s trip to Europe, which were hacked by the Guacamaya collective from the Mexican army. It is now possible to learn from them that the monitoring of the Zapatista tour by Mexican military attachés was not limited to open sources and included sending their personnel to activist events or meetings, and that they consulted with European military intelligence agencies.
In a report dated 28 August 2021, the Mexican Military and Air Attaché Office in Bern, Switzerland, informed SEDENA’s intelligence area that ‘communication was established with the Armed Forces Intelligence Centre (CIFAS) of Spain, with the purpose of consulting the information requested regarding the activities carried out by the EZLN delegation in Spain’ and that this information would be sent to SEDENA once it had been received.
In another report from the same military attaché’s office in Switzerland, sent on 31 August 2021, it is stated that ‘Mexican personnel’ arrived at the ‘Zapatista Camp in Basel’ at five o’clock in the afternoon of 27 August to be present at the reception of the Zapatistas, who had come from France. ‘They were received by a small number of people, followers of feminist and environmentalist (sic) groups fighting climate change’, reports the document, which contains 10 photographs of the event.
This monitoring practice was common in the military. In an email dated 19 October 2021, Lieutenant Colonel Héctor Enrique García Suárez sent the following message to the head of the military attaché’s office in Brussels, Belgium:
‘Good afternoon boss,
I am enclosing the draft of the form to report the activities of the Zapatistas tomorrow.
I could not find any more information on the Internet, if you want us to report something more detailed it would be necessary to go to the event, I remain attentive to your instructions’.
The surveillance of the Zapatistas was so meticulous that the SRE instructed its embassy in Cuba to keep it informed of the stopover on the Caribbean island of the first EZLN delegation – of seven members – that travelled to Europe on a German-flagged ship.
On 3 May 2021, one day after the boat set sail from Isla Mujeres, Quintana Roo, some of what the embassy in Cuba reported to the SRE – and to the embassies in Santo Domingo and Spain – was the following:
‘The vessel is known in Isla Mujeres for organising recreational trips between Quintana Roo and Cuba. The ship spent the night last night in Mexican waters and is expected to arrive in the port of Cienfuegos in the next two days and from there continue on to Santiago de Cuba or Santo Domingo’.
The third example is that of Carlos Ortiz.
Ortiz is identified in an internal report of the Mexican embassy in Switzerland dated 24 June 2021.
Signed by Ambassador Cecilia Jaber, the document informs the SRE that the Mexican is a broadcaster for Radio Lora, a community station in Zurich that broadcasts in Spanish. The report states that the station was at the time supporting the broadcasting of an artistic event in which a group of activists would inform the public about the EZLN tour.
The point is that Ortiz stopped working at Radio Lora from early 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began, he recalls. ‘If they involve me with Radio Lora (in the internal report), I was no longer there. And I didn’t participate (in the Zapatista tour) for work reasons,’ explains Ortiz, who has lived in Switzerland since 1991.
He acknowledges that he, as his profile in the document indicates, did ‘stage an act of protest in November 2014 at the University of Basel during the opening of a conference dedicated to the centenary of the birth of Octavio Paz’. But it insists that it is ‘totally erroneous’ to link him to Radio Lora and an alleged support for the Zapatistas’ trip to Switzerland.
The three Mexicans also have European nationality: Dianeth Pérez Arreola and Erika Spray have Dutch nationality and Carlos Ortiz has Swiss nationality.
Esta obra está bajo licencia CC BY-SA 4.0
