Jorge Carrasco

Surveillance

Jorge Carrasco was targeted with the Pegasus spyware on June 2, 2016. Forensic analysis of his phone conducted by Amnesty International’s Security Lab detected a malicious text messages associated with Pegasus.

The text message read: “Hi Jorge, I’ll share with you the article that Animal Político published today and that I think is important to republish.”

Who is he?

Jorge Carrasco is the director of the weekly magazine Proceso since February 2020. The magazine has the reputation of publishing in-depth features and serious investigations. Before he was appointed director, he worked for 15 years as a reporter. He covered extensively the crisis of the Mexican justice system.

In 2013, he published an investigation on the murder of his colleague Regina Martínez. The work was continued by the Forbidden Stories consortium in 2020.

In 2016, when he was selected, he was working on the Panama Papers, an international investigation into tax evasion. His research focused on the Mexican clients of the Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca.

At the time he was also looking into abuses committed by the army (SEDENA), with the help of well-informed sources within the institution. Carrasco collected damning testimonies from soldiers. They said they were forced by their superiors to act outside of the law. A soldier said that, in July 2015, during what was later called the Tlatlaya massacre, he was ordered to “kill… blindly”.

His work

Response

Mexican authorities did not answer Forbidden Stories’ questions on the surveillance of journalists. NSO Group did not answer Forbidden Stories’ questions on specific targets but said it “will continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action based on the results of these investigations.”