Latest Mexico Wiretap Scandal Spurs Move to Curb Widespread Practice : Latin America: Sex and spies case focuses new attention on government espionage.

The phone rings. “Hello?” a woman answers.

“Hey, baby. What’s up?” an unmistakable male voice says.

“I miss you, my love,” the woman replies, her voice equally well-known. “Jose, my love!”

“Monday I can see you,” he says.

An intimate moment, presumed private. But it was frozen on tape, and when the 1992 chat surfaced a few weeks ago, it sent shock waves through Mexico’s rich and famous.

The official intelligence service that reportedly recorded it and leaked it to the media identified the male voice as that of Jose Cordoba Montoya, who at the time was chief of staff to then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari--and titular head of the intelligence service that invaded his privacy.

The woman, the service said, was Marcela Bodenstedt, a former cop and glamorous TV host who has been publicly linked to one of Mexico’s most notorious drug lords--a tie she denies.

It is not the first wiretap scandal to rock Mexico. There was “Morelia-gate,” in which three men tried to spy on the ruling party’s political opposition with hotel-room bugs in 1992. A month before that, the government’s Human Rights Commission fumed with outrage when it found government wiretaps in its offices.

Mexico’s latest sex, spies and audiotape scandal--recorded intimacies of a man once considered the second-most-powerful in the land--riveted public attention on the eavesdropping issue.

If intelligence agents could listen in on Cordoba, they could eavesdrop on anyone, people figured.

And the leak appears to have hit an official nerve. It ultimately may curb Mexico’s official practice of electronic espionage--a practice so widespread that it has become synonymous with decades of Big Brother government.

Even President Ernesto Zedillo’s administration has come out in favor of legislation to regulate wiretapping by its own intelligence services--part of the president’s campaign against official impunity, aides said. Zedillo’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, agrees and is now considering a new set of laws to rein in the practice, which is technically legal.

The head of Mexico’s telephone workers union described the scope of the problem in a recent interview: No fewer than 200,000 telephones nationwide are bugged at any given time, he said, most by the nation’s intelligence services.

That disclosure came as little surprise to many Mexicans, especially those in sensitive jobs. For them, few serious conversations take place on the phone or even in many offices in the capital.

Victor Clark Alfaro became an overnight expert in electronic espionage this year.

The director of the independent Binational Center for Human Rights in Tijuana, Clark always suspected his phone lines were tapped.

“But we didn’t have the money to find out for sure,” he said.

Then, in March, the San Diego-based Don Casey & Associates security firm offered to check Clark’s lines for free. It took 20 minutes to find the state-of-the-art microphone and microchip embedded in his telephone receiver.

“This is not an ordinary bug,” Clark said. “It records not just the telephone calls but all conversations in the office.”

The security firm said the device cost about $4,000 and appeared to have been planted by the government.

“It is our experience in dealing with electronic countermeasures that the frequency range of this device is used mostly by government agencies, both foreign and domestic,” the company’s report states.

Clark said he suspects the Baja California state government installed the device during a mysterious break-in after his center published a 1993 report titled, “Torture and Corruption, an Endemic Evil.” A state official declined comment on the allegation.

“A lot of Mexicans live with the constant suspicion that we are being watched--business people, journalists, politicians,” Clark said.

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Don Casey, the retired police sergeant who owns the San Diego firm that swept Clark’s offices, said the Tijuana case was hardly isolated. During the past year, he said, his investigators have worked for as many as 100 clients in Guadalajara, Tijuana, Mexico City and elsewhere.

“Thirty percent of the time, we find something,” he said. “That’s considerably higher than in the U.S.”

In the Cordoba-Bodenstedt case, there has been no public explanation of where the taps were placed or how the tapes were leaked.

The transcripts first surfaced in several Mexico City publications. Commentators have speculated that they were leaked as part of a campaign by the intelligence services to discredit Salinas’ administration.

After the tapes made headlines, even top officials of the ruling party--which many Mexicans suspect has been behind the official eavesdropping for decades--found themselves on the same side as civil-liberties advocates, who have been fighting government wiretapping for years.

“Everyone has been recorded and nothing has been done about it,” said Miguel Aleman Velasco, a PRI senator who is among the lawmakers horrified by the wiretapping of so high-ranking a politician as Cordoba--who now represents Mexico at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington.

Lawmakers say they are planning legislation to regulate electronic eavesdropping.

Opposition parties also lent their voices to the cause.

“This practice should be allowed only with a judicial order,” said Rafael Ayala, a legislator with the conservative National Action Party.

And Carlos Navarrete, a legislator with the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, concluded: “If they were capable of spying on the director of national security, who won’t they be spying on?”

Even Atty. Gen. Antonio Lozano, whose investigators depend upon wiretaps to build many of their criminal cases, is calling on Congress to lay down legal ground rules for electronic espionage.

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“I believe that these activities must be clearly regulated and sanctioned by law,” Lozano told reporters recently. “As in any part of the world, the authorities should have access to instruments that permit their investigative work, but these should be used under a legal act.”

Some analysts said they hope that the counterespionage movement is another sign of Zedillo’s crackdown on official impunity, which has already included charges against former President Salinas’ brother, the former deputy attorney general and dozens of police officers in a range of alleged crimes and conspiracies.

“No one and nothing is untouchable,” Zedillo declared last week.

Others, though, say the anti-wiretapping crusade could well meet the same fate as those before it.

Amid similar outrage after the Morelia-gate scandal three years ago, the PRI-controlled Congress formed a commission on telephone espionage and held hearings.

Commission Chairman Juan Sabines concluded at the end of the hearings: “Telephone spying is an illegal activity however you look at it, but it is not covered by the law.”

But when Morelia-gate faded from public memory, so did any plans for legislation.