Macaw is a type of native bird that travels through Central and South America. This September 19, he was also recognized as the name of the group of “hacktivists” that leaked about 10 terabytes of emails from different military organizations in Central and South America.
With the message “(…) the military armies and the police forces of the States of Abya Yala are the guarantee of the domination of North American imperialism, they are the guarantee of the extractivist presence of the Global North”, the military establishments of Chile, Peru, Colombia, Mexico and El Salvador suffered this cyberattack.
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Defenders of the Abya Yala
The debut of this organization was on March 6 of this year, when they carried out their first cyberattack against the Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN) and the Izabal Nickel Processing Company (Pronico), also from Guatemala.
After that attack, they made their definition: “We are all macaws, all those people ancestrally affected by the invasion and dispossession of Abya Yala; we are the daughters and sons of those who defended life, with life itself, we are from the south, from the center, from the north, from the Caribbean, we are daughters and sons of mother earth, we were, are and will be in any corner where the invader, settler, neo-settler, extractivist looter, violates rights by passing over communities, ancient cultures, exterminating forests, rivers and seas to accumulate what they consider wealth”.
The Abya Yala concept, according to research Abya Yala Wawgeykun, of Beatriz Carrera Maldonado Y Zara Ruiz-Romero For the Pablo de Olavide University in Seville, Spain, it means Mature Land, Living Land or Flourishing Land, and is used by the original Kuna people, who live in Colombia and Panama.
In his first attack, Guacamaya defines the entire American territory as Abya Yala and adds that his main interest is to protect Mother Earth from any extractive project that threatens the ancient communities and cultures that are part of the damaged territories. “We have resisted with sticks, with arrows, with stones, with thought and spirit. We are not afraid because we have come from the land and we return to it,” they clarify in the statement that the media reported. Community Press from Guatemala.
This information was obtained after the interview that, after that attack, they gave to the media Forbidden Stories.
To date, the organization has carried out four attacks, three regarding environmental contamination and the last one on America’s military organizations.
Phoenix
The first of them consisted of the leak of 4.2 terabytes of documents on the Fénix mining project, by the Guatemalan Nickel Company (CGN) and the Izabal Nickel Processing Company (Pronico), which are in charge of the Russian-Swiss multinational Solway.
The main accusation against the Solway group was that they were killing the communities in the sector in order to start the mining project. In the document they make a list of all the activists who lost their lives defending their territories.
Likewise, they filter the “Magic Carpet Case”, in which they point out that representatives of the Government of Guatemala received bribes from Solway to achieve their objectives.
“The Solway mining company is part of the Russian, Kazakh, Israeli and Ukrainian network involved in the Magic Carpet scandal. People from the Guatemalan government have received millionaire bribes in favor of the mining and port interests of the Mayaniquel mining company, a territorial neighbor of the FENIX mining project. of Solway. Russian directors of Mayaniquel are also directors of Solway and its subsidiary CGN in Guatemala”, they specify (watch the statement on the cyber attack).
Guacamaya’s statement served for a massive project in which 65 journalists from around the world participated, who managed to expose not only the contamination but also efforts to manipulate local governments, and the surveillance of journalists. This project consists of four major reports –including the aforementioned interview with Guacamaya– within a series called Mining Secrets (Mining Secrets in Spanish).
South American mining companies
The second attack occurred on August 1 and was directed against mining companies from different countries in Central and South America, to expose the contamination and damage they were causing in the communities and in the territory in which they were located.
According to cyberscoop, the companies affected were: ENAMI, an Ecuadorian state mining company; the National Hydrocarbons Agency (ANH) in Colombia; New Energy Corporation of Granada in Colombia; Quiborax, a Chilean mining company; Oryx, an oil company in Venezuela; Tejucana, a Brazilian mining firm; and the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources of Guatemala (watch statement about the attack).
Colombian Prosecutor’s Office
The third time the Guacamaya group appeared was on August 7, when they leaked 5 terabytes of emails from the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office.
The reason for this attack was to denounce that the starting point –according to what they declared– of the criminal policy of the Colombian State begins in the Prosecutor’s Office, accusing it of being one of the most corrupt organizations in that country, managing –in their opinion– its I crave the evidence, processes, incriminations, etc. They point to her being involved with businessmen, public entities, the military, members of the State and drug traffickers (watch statement about the attack).
military
The latest attack by this group is the one we are aware of these days, precisely since September 19 -Day of the Glories of the Army in our country-, when 10 terabytes of emails were leaked, as well as other materials from military and police agencies from Chile, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador and Peru.
In his statement – as recorded CyberScoop– They point out that, in addition to being a guarantee of domination by US imperialism towards local communities, they are also “violent repressive forces, criminals against the peoples themselves and their internal pyramidal organization charts of power are also reprehensible.”
The bodies affected were: the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Chilean Armed Forces; the Secretariat of National Defense of Mexico; the National Civil Police of El Salvador and the Armed Forces of the same country; the General Command of the Colombian Military Forces; the Joint Command of the Armed Forces of Peru and the Army of said country (watch statement about the attack).
“There is no confirmation about its origins”
Despite what is expressed in their communications and what the press has “defined” about Guacamaya, for experts on the subject it is necessary to clarify that there is no accurate confirmation of its origins.
To the co-founder and CEO at the 8.8 Computer Security Conference, gabriel bergel, it is key to think that in cybersecurity there are different types of groups that want to appropriate certain information, from cybercriminals to activists. Starting from this base, the expert believes that it is not necessary to confirm the origin of this group, since they now appear on the national scene.
Bergel deepens his idea, comparing this case with what happened in 2018 with the Lazarus group attack, where they attacked national banks and it was established that it was a North Korean military group, or what happened with the Shadow group. Brokers, who were presumed to be Russian, but in the end turned out to be South American.
“We have not been able to verify it yet, nor what was really the attack vector that was carried out in this case. Because what one does in this type of case is a forensic analysis. It is the same thing that the police do when there is a murder” , clarifies the CEO of the 8.8 Computer Security Conference.
