Mexico Sees Big Brother on the Loose

Not that anyone was all that surprised by the evidence that Elba Esther Gordillo can be a ruthless operator who swears like a sailor. Or by the move to embarrass her by tapping and leaking 42 of her phone conversations to Mexican newspapers, which excerpted them last month with no expletives deleted.

But the wiretapping qualifies as the most sensational here in years, if only because of its mysterious origin. Until recently, every Mexican knew who Big Brother was. Now they are not so sure.

For seven decades before President Vicente Fox's election in 2000, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, held a monopoly on political power and a near-monopoly on espionage, which it routinely employed to intimidate its foes. Fox himself was bugged while running for president. He read the leaked transcripts, including a chat with his mother, in a newspaper.

But while Fox appears to have honored a pledge to stop the use of wiretapping as a weapon against dissent, remnants of Mexico's once-centralized spying apparatus are acting beyond his government's reach.

Scattered freelance spies now serve criminal enterprises such as kidnapping and drug trafficking rings as well as political party leaders, local officials, legitimate entrepreneurs and even sports authorities intent on gathering dirt on their adversaries.

The same week Gordillo's loose tongue made headlines, so did the wiretapping of Felipe Ramos Rizo, the country's best-known soccer referee. What he said on the phone has not been made public, but the recordings ended up in the hands of a Mexican soccer official -- apparently as ammunition in a dispute over alleged bribe-taking -- and led to the referee's two-month suspension from work.

"Wiretapping has been privatized," said Sergio Aguayo, a leading human rights campaigner who worries that Mexicans' right to privacy is eroding on Fox's watch.

The spying on Gordillo, the PRI's second-ranking official and its newly elected whip in the lower house of Congress, is widely believed to be the work of rivals in the faction-ridden party who were determined to neutralize her growing authority.