http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/wires2/ Mexican wiretapping scandal places political reforms in doubt March 26, 1998 By Mark Stevenson, Associated Press MEXICO CITY (AP) When members of an opposition party burst into a secret government wiretapping station this month, they did more than reveal a political scandal: They exposed some of the deepest secrets of common citizens in the coastal city of Campeche. The wiretapping, apparently orchestrated by the state government to get information on opposition groups, has spawned a scandal that reaches into at least four other states. In most cases, opposition politicians were the targets. But nowhere has the damage been as great as in Campeche, where a powerful eavesdropping system set up in a private home had the capacity to tap virtually all phones in the southern city of 200,000 people and record some of their darkest lies and infidelities. "We stood there in shock, in rage, impotence, as we heard recordings and read transcripts of our telephone conversations,'' said Layda Sansores, a senator for the leftist opposition Democratic Revolution Party who discovered the surveillance center on a tip. "There are difficult moments over the course of seven years, things you don't want to remember.'' "We heard a tape of one telephone call in which a man said he was with another man's wife. The wife was there in the room with us, listening,'' Sansores said at a news conference Wednesday. A local journalist present during the March 3 raid on the surveillance center was quoted in one wiretap transcript as denying accusations of rape, noting he `just had fun with' an unidentified woman. "We haven't seen him in public since,'' Sansores said. The taping in the city on the Gulf of Mexico, which used sophisticated computer equipment supplied by an Israeli firm, apparently began in 1991. Three men caught operating the bank of computers and phone switches have been arrested and charged with espionage and criminal association. Two had worked at some point for state police. "We are a small family in Campeche, and this hurts our very fabric,'' Sansores said. Documents uncovered by Sansores in the tiny, computerized wiretapping center including dozens of tapes and transcripts of her own conversations "and those of everyone around me, nieces, sisters, my parents'' suggest the eavesdropping was paid for by the Campeche state government. The current government, which took office in late 1997, has blamed the wiretapping on a previous state governor and said the current governor didn't know about it. Experts and politicians disagree on whether Mexico is experiencing a surge in wiretappings and surveillance, at a time when opposition groups are threatening the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party's 69-year uninterrupted grip on power. Sansores claims that there are up to 22 of the eavesdropping stations around the country, and mentioned four other states where her supporters or party colleagues believe they have evidence of such surveillance. On March 18, authorities seized a network of phone-tapping equipment and secret cameras in Monterrey that reportedly had been rented by politicians and businessmen in the northern city. Several weeks earlier, a top official in the Mexico City government and also from the Democratic Revolution Party the first opposition party ever to govern the capital said she found two tiny surveillance cameras in her office. "There is a new way of doing things when a new group comes to power,'' said Joel Estudillo, an analyst at the Mexican Institute of Political Studies. "Politicians say, `We have to find out what these people have done''' in the past. In a closed political circle like that which has dominated Mexico for most of the century, secrets like past corruption are often known but seldom publicized until a grudge or a competition makes such information a valuable weapon, Estudillo said. "Those kinds of understandings and internal arrangements have so far prevented espionage from becoming a big problem.'' ------------------------------------------------------------ David Honig Orbit Technology honig@otc.net Intaanetto Jigyoubu Maybe them boys in Jonesboro were trying out for Lon Horiuchi's job.