Obama Promises Investigation On NSA Spying To Mexican President Pena Nieto In Phone Conversation

One day after Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto called for a "delineation of responsibilities and an investigation on the topic" of the US National Security Agency's spying on him while still on the campaign trail for the presidency in June 2012, officials in Peña Nieto's administration said on Thursday that he and President Barack Obama had spoken on the telephone about the revelations. In their conversation, said Mexican officials, Obama had promised to order an "in-depth investigation" into the incident.

On Sunday, Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed to the Brazilian television station TV Globo that a June 2012 document from what have become known as the "Snowden files" - a vast array of classified NSA documents which former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden has given to Greenwald and other journalists to sift through and report on - showed that the agency had intercepted text messages and emails between Peña Nieto and members of his staff. One of those text messages contained information about a probable appointee to his cabinet were Peña Nieto to win the presidency the following month. The document, which also included information on NSA spying on Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, doesn't indicate whether or not Peña Nieto continued to be the object of espionage by the agency after he was elected.

After the revelations, the Mexican president said he would seek out Obama to "make very clear our position that, eventually having existed some type of espionage with behavior or forms that do not adhere to law, obviously Mexico rejects them, condemns them and demands that there be a delineation of responsibilities and an investigation into the topic". He also emphasized that surveillance of the sort outlined in the document would constitute an illegal act if the NSA had indeed carried it out.

"If it is proven that an action took place, with the use of espionage means, this is clearly not permitted and it is outside the law," he told reporters on Wednesday while on his way to Russia for a Group of 20 (G20) meeting. Obama will also be there for the talks on Thursday. "There will surely be space at the G20 for some sort of meeting, either casual or informal, with the US president to make our position very clear," he said.

Peña Nieto's call for the demarcation of responsibility echoed an earlier move by his administration to reestablish distance between his government's drug-enforcement agencies and US counterparts, which during the tenure of his predecessor Felipe Calderón had shared classified intelligence to an unprecedented extent in an effort to crack down on drug cartels.

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