The Sinaloa Cartel hacked C5 to spy on the FBI in Mexico City.

In a revelation straight out of a spy thriller, the current Mexico City government has accused Miguel Ángel Mancera's administration of allowing a serious security breach in 2018: the Sinaloa Cartel allegedly hacked into the C5 camera system to monitor an FBI agent.

The accusation, which is generating a political storm, is based on a recently declassified report by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General. According to this document, in 2018, a Sinaloa Cartel informant confessed to hiring a hacker who not only tapped the phone of an FBI attaché in Mexico, but also used "Mexico City's camera system to follow him around the city and identify the people he met with."

The current head of the Command, Control, Computing, Communications, and Citizen Contact Center (C5), Salvador Guerrero Chiprés, took advantage of the revelation to take a direct swipe at the previous administration. He stated that these events occurred during the final stretch of Mancera's administration, a period in which, according to him, "the existence of organized crime was denied" in the capital.

Although the incident occurred years ago, its resurgence now is a calculated political move. By using a report from a credible external source like the U.S. government, the current administration positions itself as the one that discovered and exposed the flaw, while attacking a past political rival. The strategy is clear: present itself as the competent government that corrected the inherited vulnerabilities.

"To date, there are no known or detected public or institutional risks of successful intrusions into the C5 core," Guerrero Chiprés stated, contrasting the current situation with that of the past and reinforcing the narrative that the problem has already been solved.

However, beyond the political dispute, the revelation has a dangerous consequence: it erodes public confidence in the city's entire surveillance infrastructure. Even if authorities assure us that the system is now secure, the message that resonates in citizens' minds is that "the drug traffickers controlled the city's cameras."

This idea plants a seed of doubt and paranoia that is difficult to eradicate. If it happened once, could it happen again? The news, which combines the power of drug trafficking, international espionage, and local politics, touches the most sensitive fibers of the perception of security and raises a fundamental question about the true control of the technology that monitors the capital's residents.