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Mexico City (AFP)

Forty minutes into our interview, noted Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui picks up her phone and jokingly greets the government agents she alleges have been spying on her.

"Hello? Interior ministry? Ah well, you knew all this anyway. Thanks for listening!" says the veteran anchorwoman, who is famous for hard-hitting reports on government corruption.

Humor is helping Aristegui, 53, overcome the unsettling discovery that her cell phone -- and her teenage son's -- were hacked with a spyware called Pegasus, which accesses a target's communications, camera and microphone.

According to the New York Times, which broke the story last week, the secretive Israeli company behind the spyware, NSO Group, says it only sells it to government agencies.

The spyware is meant to be used to fight terrorists and criminals.

But Aristegui and eight other leading journalists and activists, who commissioned an independent investigation after finding the spyware on their phones, last week accused the Mexican government of using it on them and their families -- a claim the government denies.

It is the latest crisis for the freedom of the press in Mexico, which is ranked the most dangerous country for journalists after the war zones of Syria and Afghanistan, and where more than 100 journalists have been murdered since 2000.

Q: Your investigation found that spyware was installed on your phones when you clicked on links in fake text messages. What did those messages say?

"We received messages where they would use the name of a friend (of my son's). 'Hi Emilio,' it said. 'I'm so-and-so, will you friend me on Facebook?' But oddly enough, that person was already his friend on Facebook.

"Another was a news headline saying 'Druglord "El Chapo" Guzman's right-hand man detained at such-and-such an address' -- which happened to be right in front of our house."

Q: How did you feel when you realized you were being spied on?

"No matter how normal your life is, how transparent you are with yourself and your family, it's intimidating to know they know everything about you.

"This spying obviously has a fundamental objective: to intimidate, to make you vulnerable to your own fears, your own human weakness, your own personal history or whatever. It's a sinister thing, something a dictatorial regime would do. These are the tools of tyranny.

"Is this Mexico? Does Mexico behave like a tyrannical regime? Judging by its espionage practices, I would say so. We can't allow this to happen in what is supposedly a democracy."

Q: The spying started in 2015, and you suspected it for a long time. Why did you wait so long to go public?

"Put yourself in my shoes at that point. It was a serious thing. A delicate thing. I didn't have enough trust in the Mexican government to report it.

"We didn't know what to do. The question was: Who do we report this to? To the very same people who are surely spying on us? So we did nothing, we just left it at that.

"My personal reaction was also to downplay it at first, assuming that it's quote-unquote 'normal' to spy on journalists.

"But the big news is we've now carried out a scientific study to prove it. Now the question is whether it was the Mexican government. I presume it was. Absolutely."

Q: How did you react when you realized your son had been targeted?

"I felt bad. Very bad. I thought the Mexican government had crossed a very serious line.

"He's one of the (targets) who received the most messages. Why did they push so hard to access Emilio's phone? Why so many messages targeting this boy? Only the people who did it know why."

Q: Are you afraid?

"I try to live my life in peace, without being paranoid that there's a knife lurking behind every door. If you do that, they've won.

"I have faith -- and I always tell myself this -- that my public work as a journalist is our best protection."

© 2017 AFP