Ongoing revelations of spying on foreign allies by the U.S. government’s National Security Agency (NSA) continue to cause diplomatic upheaval throughout the world.
The revelations by former-NSA-contractor turned whistleblower, Edward Snowden, point towards the agency breaching widely accepted standards of diplomatic trust.
They also bring into light the dark dimensions of the modern U.S. security state in its relations with Latin America.
U.S. intelligence services had been engaged in spying on longtime ally, Brazil, and its state-owned oil company, PETROBRAS, amongst dozens of other friendly countries.
President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff was so incensed that the NSA was engaging in broad espionage—including the monitoring and recording of her private cell phone— that an official State visit for October 2013 to the United States was cancelled just weeks before.
The government of Mexico, on the other hand, had a much milder response to the news that the NSA was spying on former Mexican President Felipe Calderon and current President Enrique Peña Nieto.
In 2012, electronic intelligence gathering programs called Flatliquid and Whitetamale spied on the nine closest associates of then presidential candidate Peña Nieto, intercepting a 85,000 text messages.
The spying story continues to unfold in another Spanish-speaking country, Spain, a nation with over a million Latin Americans.
A longtime U.S. ally that has never posed a threat to domestic national security, NSA spying in Spain amounted to five million calls monitored in one single day, according to Snowden.
The real reasons for such high levels of spying remain unclear, but the NSA justified its interest in the Spanish economic crisis and its challenges in combating the drug war.
The conservative Spanish government’s condemnation of the spying has been miled compared to the reaction in Brazil.
good writing, thanks for keeping us informed 🙂