ConspiraIn: how the Senain worked

For years no one knew who really ran the state's intelligence apparatus. It was known that the National Intelligence Secretariat persecuted, harassed and spied, and its chief's name was known: Rommy Vallejo. Below him, the structure was a void: no one had a face, no one had a title, no one answered for anything. Weeks before the publication, agents from the UCSI, the Presidency's internal security unit, contacted La Posta. They wanted to hand over information on how the Senain operated in its harshest era. On June 25, 2018, La Posta published ConspiraIn, a ten-minute report that was the first time anyone put faces and names to that structure: who handled the secret expenses, who ran the wiretaps, who directed the shock groups and who had gotten inside the president's security detail.

Reel 01

Vallejo, Rafael Correa's intelligence secretary, ran an espionage structure. His second-in-command was Carolina Andrade, the official tasked with making the Secretariat operational with a group of untouchables. Andrade stayed at the Senain after Vallejo left, when Jorge Costa replaced him. No one in that group had answered for anything in court.

The first thing Vallejo did when he arrived was set up a finance department. He hired Paulina Vázquez and Santiago Olmedo. Vázquez had previously managed the finances of the Ecuadorian Social Security Institute when it was headed by Ramiro González, now a fugitive. Olmedo was in charge of the secret expenses: presenting them polished to Carlos Pólit's Comptroller General's Office. Among those accounts were the 40,000 dollars for the kidnapping operation against Fernando Balda.

With the accounting sorted and a second-in-command in place, Vallejo put social media harassment into operation. The Alvarado brothers' troll center was replicated inside the Senain, this time run by an official identified in the intelligence reports La Posta obtained as Carolina Espinoza. The troll center attacked opposition politicians on the campaign trail. By 2018 it was attacking President Lenín Moreno, who signed the checks that paid its salaries.

Harassment outside the virtual world was handled by Francisco Saavedra, "the priest." He earned the nickname when he was caught dressed as a priest at an anti-Correa protest. He came from the General Intelligence Directorate and did the Senain's dirty work in the field: persecuting and harassing people in cities and also abroad, in Peru, targeting Ecuadorian citizens, according to chats La Posta obtained. Saavedra was on the verge of joining the Moreno government. The president himself blocked the move.

Vallejo's other key link was Paúl López, the connection to the world of hackers who tapped emails, calls and communications. He had a large team, and several of its heads had never come to light. The first was Santiago Mena, who coordinated with Saavedra, "the priest," on whom to follow, harass and persecute, based on monitoring their messages and communications.

10:20

Two figures stand out in the wiretapping. Ana Erazo, a captain, had eight agents under her command for the phone interception system and seven interceptors, sophisticated mobile equipment. All seven disappeared after Vallejo left the Secretariat, according to an Interior Ministry memo La Posta learned of. Esteban Benítez, a civilian, helped with contact with the hackers. He was the link to alias Ruso, a supposedly Argentine citizen identified by a passport number and names that, according to the Argentine authorities' response to the Comptroller General's Office, do not match: they do not exist.

Captain Gabriel Ramos was in charge of tapping emails and social media, with a team of 30 people. La Posta said it had all their names and offered to make them public if the authorities requested them. Ramos's technique was phishing. To get into the CREO movement's networks, he sent an email posing as César Monge, the party's director, to people within the movement, warning that one of them had been hacked. The technique was repeated with different parties at different times.

According to the intelligence reports, people close to Mauricio Rodas, Jaime Nebot and Guillermo Lasso were hacked, and especially the citizen collective Yasunidos.

The last person under Paúl López was Silvia Burgos. With her, the scheme moved from espionage to crude, almost paramilitary action. Burgos coordinated the Barrigas: people assigned to Rafael Correa's security who were not part of his official detail. Correa kept his official security until May 24, 2018, but the Senain illegally provided him with a second security detail, a second ring, coordinated by Burgos.

A third ring was coordinated between Burgos and Santiago Díaz, under Vallejo's orders. Díaz ran the Popeyes. Many intelligence sources identify them as responsible for serious abuses in landmark cases: the assault on politician Lourdes Tibán, the assault on comedian Carlos Michelena and the assault on journalist Alfonso Pérez, of Ecuador en Vivo. La Posta said it could identify each of the Popeyes, singled out by their own intelligence colleagues, and present their names if the authorities requested them.

The Popeyes' money was handled by the Ramos brothers and received by the group's leader, Víctor Hugo Beltrán: 15 dollars a day for food, 15 for lodging and 60 for transportation, in a van with Pichincha plates belonging to a company represented by Rolando Pazmiño, Santiago Díaz's brother-in-law. In many cases the Popeyes were employees on the Senain payroll, paid for by Ecuadorians. Beltrán selected the Popeyes in direct coordination with Saavedra, "the priest."

Controlling the opposition and setting up illegal protection for Correa was not enough for Vallejo. According to intelligence sources consulted by La Posta, he directed an internal conspiracy operation that reached the president of the Republic. When it was announced that Lenín Moreno would run for president, Vallejo asked Paúl López to identify someone capable of infiltrating the future president's security. The Senain then hired Lieutenant Jorge Pepinos. A minor hire, except for one detail: Pepinos was the cousin of two intelligence agents who could serve on the security details of two men who would soon wield enormous power.

From the campaign onward, Vallejo assigned Freddy Guzmán Pepinos and Esteban Guzmán Pepinos to the security of Moreno and of his closest associate, Eduardo Mangas. Once the president and the secretary general of the Presidency took office, the two agents supplied Vallejo with inside information. That way he had the opposition, the shock groups and the government itself under control. The president detected the infiltration in his security team, and Guzmán Pepinos was removed from it.

Three months before ConspiraIn, on March 26, 2018, La Posta had published a cartoon by Bonil, They Punished the Senain, about President Moreno's punishment of the Secretariat. The June 25 investigation put names to the structure. La Posta made publication of the full lists, the 30 on Ramos's team and the Popeyes, conditional on the authorities requesting them.

Reel 03

The follow-up came on October 30, 2018, on News and Coffee, with former assembly member Galo Lara, convicted in the Quinsaloma case. Lara said that seven days earlier he had filed a petition for review of his sentence with declassified documents from the Senain's secret archives. According to Lara, the declassification of the files on Fernando Balda, Galo Lara and David Romo was ordered by President Moreno.

Lara said the documents show that the UCSI assigned 11 police officers to follow him from the time he began making allegations in the Constituent Assembly, in an operation called Desarme, before the Quinsaloma crimes; that they planted a secretary of his, who passed information to the government for four years, which is why official responses came out a minute after he finished his allegations; that Major Silvia Burgos, the same person ConspiraIn identified as coordinator of the Barrigas, used 200,000 dollars in travel expenses to pursue him in Panama during his exile, until his extradition; and that two police officers, Zapata and Nieto, forged the video used to accuse him, coercing the person who recorded it with a knife to his navel and a screwdriver to his ear. Zapata, he said, was later rewarded with a post as police attaché at the embassy in Spain. That happened, according to Lara, under the Senain administration before Vallejo's.

Lara said his lawyer Lourdes Tibán, one of those assaulted by the Popeyes according to ConspiraIn, had filed an addendum to the pardon request in which 130 current and former assembly members, five former presidents and four former vice presidents asked Moreno to pardon him based on the Ombudsman's Office report and the declassified documents. He asked that the files on everyone who had been persecuted also be declassified: those of Martha Roldós, Fernando Villavicencio, the Luluncoto 10 and Mery Zamora. And he maintained that Correa's people returned only four of six phone interception devices and that a parallel, clandestine wiretapping center exists. The interview recalled that the Senain's records had gone missing and that the Comptroller General's Office had struggled to put together the reports on secret expenses.

The questions ConspiraIn raised in June remained open. Who alias Ruso is and where the more than 50,000 dollars went. Where the seven interceptors are. Why Carolina Andrade stayed at the Senain under Jorge Costa. And whether any of those named, from Vallejo down, would answer in court. What ConspiraIn put on the record was not a conviction but a census: for the first time, the state's intelligence apparatus stopped being an anonymous bloc and had an org chart with names, posts and duties. Eight years later, those names are still all that remains of the case.