In fealty to US foreign policy, México has long refused to recognize Palestinian statehood. That has just finally changed, with AMLO’s government officially acknowledging Palestinian statehood and establishing a full embassy in México City, as veteran political journalist Kurt Hackbarth explains in this analysis drawn from his coverage of Mexican political affairs that appears regularly in the Jacobin journal.

In recent years, Israel security firms have plied their wares within Mexico, with toxic results. In 2011, the Defense Department of conservative president Felipe Calderón  became the first in the world to acquire the infamous Israeli Pegasus spy software. 

In his 2012 administration, president Pena Nieto employed it widely, spying on journalists, businesspeople, human rights lawyers, and politicians, including current president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and some fifty members of his family and inner circle.

A prime mover of Pegasus in the Peña Nieto administration was Tomás Zerón. As head of the Criminal Investigation Agency, a now-defunct part of the Attorney General’s Office, Zerón authorized the purchase of millions of dollars’ worth of spy software from Israel.

In September 2014, forty-three students from the Normal Rural School of Ayotzinapa were disappeared in the town of Iguala, Guerrero. As the head of the Criminal Investigation Agency, Zerón was assigned to lead the investigation, a task he performed with a singular combination of cruelty, mendacity, and ineptitude.

Zerón and his team actively interfered in the investigation, planting evidence at the site where the students’ bodies were allegedly burned and obtaining evidence through torture. In a video released in 2020, Zerón, dressed in black and marching around the cell like a grand inquisitor, is seen interrogating a semi-naked, hooded suspect identified as Felipe Rodríguez from the Guerreros Unidos cartel.

“Just one fuckup and I’ll kill you, buddy,” Zerón is heard to say.

All of this led to Zerón and Attorney General Murillo Karam creating an official “historic truth”: that the students were killed by the cartel, which mistook them for a rival gang, a self-serving thesis that has since then been totally discredited. Murillo Karam was arrested in August 2022 on charges of torture, forced disappearance, and obstruction of justice.

An arrest warrant had earlier been issued for Zerón in 2020. But the grand inquisitor had already fled the country, first to Canada and then to Israel. AMLO’s government requested his extradition in September 2021 and renewed that request last month. Israel has refused.

It's hard to overestimate how Israel’s shielding of Zeron has rankled public opinion in México. AMLO has returned to the subject repeatedly in his morning press conferences, calling clearing up what really happened to the young people at Ayotzinapa “most important to us.” Adds AMLO: “No nation should protect torturers, much less a country whose people have suffered from tortures.”

Despite massive US State Department pressure, México has moved a step further from Washington and closer to the settled regional consensus in Latin America. With México’s increasing clout, this decision will have international resonance.