Ariel Zanchetta is a retired sergeant of the Buenos Aires Police who recently gained notoriety for the revelation of his conversations with the Kirchnerist deputy Rodolfo Tailhade and the AFIP spokesperson, Fabián “Conu” Rodríguez, in which the former police officer spoke of sending “folders”, “reports” or “make the strip” of different opposition figures such as Elisa Carrió, Luis Juez and even government officials such as Victoria Tolosa Paz. The same man also accessed an illegal database, sudamericadata.com.ar, to investigate the most eminent leaders of Argentina: from Sergio Massa, Javier Milei, Patricia Bullrich, Máximo Kirchner and Horacio Rodríguez Larreta to judges of the Court like Horacio Rosatti and Ricardo Lorenzetti, union members like Hugo Moyano or media entrepreneurs like Jorge Fontevecchia, CEO of Perfil Network and founder of NOTICIAS.
At first glance, it can be assumed that the spy Zanchetta, now detained, provided his services to Tailhade and Rodríguez doing this type of investigation and that he received official payment from the province of Buenos Aires, because he worked as a journalist and had a portal called enclave. .com.ar, where the ads appeared. But behind that information there is a much worse and more complex plot.
This story has its origins in the trip made in October 2022 to Lago Escondido by judges Julián Ercolini, Carlos Mahiques, Pablo Cayssials and Pablo Yadarola; the City Attorney General, Juan Bautista Mahiques; the former Minister of Security of Buenos Aires, Marcelo D’Alessandro; former Intelligence agent Leonardo Bergroth; consultant Tomás Reinke; the president of Grupo Clarín, Jorge Rendo; and the director of Telecom, Pablo Casey, nephew of Héctor Magnetto. After that trip, Marcelo D’Alessandro’s cell phone was hacked and his conversations were published on a portal called patagonianfacts.com.
From that moment, all the protagonists of the journey set out to take revenge on those who had exposed them and they targeted two people: José Glinski, director of the Airport Security Police, and Deputy Tailhade.
For “the huemules” – as they were called in their hacked chat group – the path is linear: Glinski, due to his role in the PSA, finds out about the trip, obtains the list of the plane’s passengers, the images of the Bariloche airport and leaks them to the press, and then another parallel Intelligence group is activated that includes Zanchetta and a missionary hacker called Elias Nuñes Pinheiro, who steals D’Alessandro’s line to be able to access his conversations on the Telegram application and give them to Tailhade.
The “huemules” had an unexpected ally: Silvio Robles, the main advisor to the president of the Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation. Because? As already said, Zanchetta was a compulsive user of the website sudamericadata.com.ar, which illegally offers the service of databases of natural and legal persons from all over the country. The service includes information such as DNI, addresses, companies, employment history and other public data that is part of the basic content offered by the AFIP, Anses or Renaper of any citizen. But, in addition, this website also allows you to obtain information on patents, cell phone numbers and even salaries, which are private. Zanchetta had made more than a thousand inquiries about different people, including Robles. Informed of this, Rosatti’s secretary became a plaintiff and, diving through Zanchetta’s files, found the link with the Kirchnerists Tailhade and “Conu” Rodríguez. Bingo!
The information had been in their possession for months and what was known so far is only a small part of what there is, but Justice still needs to connect the dots.
Connections. Zanchetta appears in the file because he had made a query about judges Mariano Borinsky and Gustavo Hornos on the website sudamericadata.com.ar on September 8, 2022. That same day, but earlier, both judges had been hacked. For investigators, Zanchetta was the one who provided the hacker with the victims’ personal information, but for now the times do not coincide and the link between the two is not proven either.
For now, what could be verified is the following:
– In Eldorado, Misiones, there were two hackers: Elías Nuñes Pinheiro, who hacked the phone of the Buenos Aires minister Marcelo D’Alessandro, and Santiago Machado, who created six mobile phone lines in the name of Horacio Rosatti.
– Ariel Zanchetta accumulated and systematized private information about people and sent it to Fabián “Conu” Rodríguez and Rodolfo Tailhade.
Both the judge and the prosecutor in the case, Marcelo Martínez de Giorgi and Gerardo Pollicita, need to connect the Kirchnerist officials with the hackers. There is a hypothesis on this point. D’Alessandro’s Telegram account was activated in Santiago, Chile and suspicion is placed on the AFI delegate in that country, Diego Raitano. Researchers are advancing along these lines.
Another mysterious character in this plot is a 19-year-old young man, Tomás Hvalica, who would be the creator of a website called DarkPFA, where databases from the Federal Police and Immigration that were leaked in different previous hacks would have been uploaded. The restless Hvalica, a resident of Quilmes, where he lives with his mother, would have provided a username and password to Nuñes Pinheiro so that he could do searches. It is not clear how Nuñes Pinheiro and Hvalica knew each other, but they could be dark web forum members.
It is a challenge for investigators to unravel this entire network of relationships and connect them with those truly interested in hacking D’Alessandro or creating telephone lines in the name of the president of the Court, Rosatti. Tailhade, who before becoming a deputy worked as a spy for the AFI, is the closest they came to Cristina Kirchner. For the “huemules” who traveled to Lago Escondido, the leaders of all this are the failed pre-candidate Eduardo “Wado” De Pedro and Juan Martín Mena -undersecretary of Justice and former second of the AFI-, who have knowledge about these areas.
At the time of going to press, De Pedro had presented himself as a plaintiff because he was on the list of intelligence reports that Zanchetta had in his house. How is it possible that, if Zanchetta worked for Kirchnerism, she had information about De Pedro? It is likely that in these cases these were autonomous decisions of the spy, and not orders from above. There are professionals and also self-employed.
On the other hand, on Thursday the 9th at noon, prosecutor Pollicita requested the arrest of “Conu” Rodríguez, who before that was raided in the same case. For now he said nothing about Deputy Tailhade. Because? In the more than 100 pages of his opinion he does not mention the spy-dipu once and it is for a strategic reason: he wants to prevent him from challenging him for manifest enmity because, in 2020, Tailhade wrote some harsh tweets accusing the prosecutor of having different bar for Peronists and Macristas: “Against Peronists, prosecutors Pollicita and Mahiques act urgently and ask for preventive detention even of the children. Against macristas, they put the cause to rest, they cover up the heads of corruption, and they even let them travel around the world wasting the money they stole from everyone,” he said. When Pollicita accuses him, Tailhade will be able to say that there is obvious enmity between him and the prosecutor.
Darkness. Alberto Fernández is ending his mandate by failing to fulfill one of the many promises he made the day he took office: that the intelligence services, those basements of democracy, were going to end during his government. He said it almost four years ago and last month he returned to the same topic: “None of your cell phones are interdicted by the State. “No journalist or opposition is spied on by the national State.” He was close. A month after the end of his term, it is proven that he failed. Because? Because he did not know how to lead his political force, much less the intelligence services, or because it is an organism with a life of its own that is impossible to control?
In the government of Mauricio Macri there was the “Mario Bros gang”, which spied on journalists, politicians and businessmen. In Cristina Kirchner’s administration we witnessed the war between “Jaime” Stiuso and his political bosses, which ended with the SIDE being beheaded at the end of 2014, just two months before the death of prosecutor Nisman. In 2001, a fight between SIDE gangs ended with the public exposure of the head of the CIA in Buenos Aires, Ross Newland, whose photo was published in the newspaper Página/12. Further back in time, in the ’80s, the intelligence war was between the agents of democracy and the military remnant that offered its services as unemployed labor.
Now, this espionage case breaks out two weeks before the elections and contaminates Sergio Massa’s campaign. What will the candidate-minister do? When the Insaurralde case broke out, he asked him to resign from the candidacy in Lomas de Zamora and from the head of the Buenos Aires Cabinet. Will he do the same with Tailhade and “El Conu” Rodríguez? These are two valuable people for Cristina Kirchner’s scheme, one for his role in Deputies and the other for his work in La Cámpora. An example of Rodríguez’s influence: when in 2022 the march took place to Cristina’s house and the surroundings were fenced off, in the confrontation with the Police, Rodríguez was arrested. A few hours later, the entire leadership of La Cámpora was asking for his freedom. At the police station they didn’t understand why there were so many people calling to ask about that skinny bald guy.
Even the vice president is aware and concerned about the situation of her activist. She understands that what “El Conu” did is not that serious. Because, as in all times and in all governments, there is good espionage and bad espionage.
