Marcela Turati

Surveillance

Marcela Turati was selected for surveillance by a Mexican client of NSO Group in 2016. Forbidden Stories could not confirm the infection because Turati no longer had messages from this time period on her phone.

Who is she?

Marcela Turati is an independent journalist in Mexico. In 2007, she co-founded “Periodistas de a Pie”, an organization that promotes investigation into human rights abuses. Since 2014, she has worked on numerous investigative projects, including one on the disappearance of 43 students in Ayotzinapa, and more specifically the role played by the military in their disappearance.

As a result, her team and her received threats. “We were told that if we kept going, we weren’t going to make it out alive,” she said. Turati ended up giving up going out into the field to investigate on clandestine graves. Instead, she decided to use public information requests to do an inventory of all the clandestine graves in Mexico. After a year and half of requests to local prosecutors, her team and her managed to identify two new graves daily.

In 2016, she co-founded Quinto Elemento Lab, an investigative news outlet. The investigation into clandestine graves was published in 2018 and won the Gabo journalism prize, which rewards the best investigation in Latin and South America.

Her 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.”