During my years in Mexico, I began to form a theory — not out of fantasy, but from observing how certain people moved through the world untouched while others were abruptly cut off. It didn’t seem to matter whether someone was a tourist, an expat, or a permanent resident. The dividing line was something else entirely. You were either permitted to exist within a particular perimeter, or you weren’t. And that decision was often made long before you realised you were being assessed.

A question for the CJNG: do you agree that it is an act of profound cowardice for anyone to harass and bully an innocent mother and her four children while they are alone in a foreign country - MEXICO?

Looking back, I can’t dismiss the possibility that I was, in some limited way, permitted to exist within that perimeter. Not welcomed — simply tolerated. Allowed to survive long enough to leave, and long enough to tell the story. It remains a hypothesis, but it fits the available evidence better than any official explanation I’ve been given.

One of the first things I learned about that world was this: there are no rules. At least, none that make sense from the outside. People like to imagine there’s a clear logic to who becomes a target and who doesn’t, as if danger follows a predictable formula. If that were true, my family would have been the last people anyone bothered with. We were ordinary. We were foreign. And my ex‑husband, a retired member of the Australian Defence Force, should have made us statistically uninteresting.

By every rational measure, the possibility of us being targeted should have been close to zero.

But that’s the problem with trying to apply logic to a system that doesn’t follow any. The moment you think you understand the rules, you realise there aren’t any — or rather, the rules shift depending on who is watching, who is benefiting, and who is expendable in the moment.

What made sense on paper didn’t match what unfolded in real life. And that discrepancy — the gap between what should have happened and what did — became one of the first clues that I was dealing with something far more unpredictable than anything I had prepared for.

The group operating in the background — the one that rarely appears in official narratives — is not a fringe presence. Public reporting describes them as one of the most powerful criminal organisations in the hemisphere, with resources that rival small governments and counter‑intelligence networks that, according to multiple investigations, outmatch those of many state agencies. Their reach is not accidental; it is engineered.

This isn’t admiration. It’s observation. I don’t romanticise them, and I don’t pretend they operate with honour. Many of the individuals I encountered displayed a level of calculated detachment that bordered on Machiavellian — ruthless, self‑serving, unapologetically cruel.

By the time the collapse came, it was already well underway. The deterioration was incremental, almost imperceptible at first — the kind of slow unravelling that only becomes visible in hindsight. The conditions were already in place: abandonment in a foreign country, financial instability, four children depending solely on me, and the psychological strain of trying to maintain a life without support. What followed was not a single breaking point, but a sequence of small failures accumulating into something larger.

Stress and fear were constants. But then a different pattern emerged — a series of incidents that did not align with the usual explanations for travel mishaps or bad luck. Each event, taken alone, was dismissible. Together, they formed a pattern that demanded attention.

The questions surfaced quickly.

Who was controlling the environment.

Who had the capability to interfere with communications.

Who would monitor a mother travelling with four children.

And for what purpose.

These were not dramatic questions. They were the practical questions of someone trying to understand why the world around her had stopped behaving predictably.

One night in Lo de Marcos, after hanging out the laundry, I sat behind the house at 10 Luis Echevarría. The children were asleep. The night was quiet. Then a drone descended — low, deliberate, close enough to suggest intention. It hovered long enough to register as a threat. Long enough to indicate that something was wrong.

It was not an isolated incident.

By the river.

At the beach.

In moments when I believed I was alone.

Drones are now a global commodity — a multibillion‑dollar industry, a ubiquitous presence in both civilian and criminal contexts. A 2025 UN report described their proliferation as a “failure of humanity.” But that did not explain the timing, the proximity, or the repetition. Nor did it explain the contradiction visible everywhere around me: a country marked by deep poverty, where children sold trinkets on the beach to survive, yet saturated with technology that far exceeded the economic realities of the communities using it. The imbalance was impossible to ignore.

So the inquiry deepened.

Who monitors a financially vulnerable mother of four.

Who interferes with someone already destabilised.

Who benefits from creating confusion or fear.

We were an ordinary Australian family. My ex‑husband was a retired military officer. We travelled quietly. The only public incident was an argument at the Mexico City airport — hardly the kind of event that would draw sustained attention.

But Mexico has a long and well‑documented history with advanced surveillance tools, particularly the Israeli‑made Pegasus spyware. Over more than a decade, investigations by Citizen Lab, ARTICLE 19, R3D, SocialTIC, Amnesty International, The New York Times, and Aristegui Noticias have documented repeated misuse of Pegasus against individuals who posed no legitimate threat: journalists, lawyers, activists, public‑health advocates, and even the teenage son of a reporter.

One category is consistently absent from these reports: tourists.

Not because tourists are exempt, but because they are structurally invisible. They lack legal representation. They lack NGO support. They do not remain in the country long enough for forensic analysis. They do not know where to report anomalies. And even if they did, no institution is designed to investigate the claims of a foreign mother who leaves the country before any inquiry can begin.

I understand that now.

I did not understand it then.

What I also did not understand was the broader surveillance environment I had entered. In Mexico, surveillance is not limited to state actors. Criminal organisations maintain their own systems — not military‑grade spyware, but networks built from human lookouts, corrupt officials, commercial tracking apps, radio scanners, and drones. Information circulates through informal channels: a taxi driver who notices a newcomer, a shopkeeper who reports unusual behaviour, a municipal employee who shares a detail without considering the implications. These systems are designed to monitor territory, not individuals, but visibility can be misinterpreted as significance.

A foreign woman alone with four children is visible in ways she cannot anticipate. Visibility is not the same as targeting, but in certain contexts, it can feel indistinguishable from danger.

In retrospect, my circumstances created a vulnerability profile that should have raised alarms: sudden abandonment, financial precarity, isolation in a foreign country, responsibility for four children, and proximity to regions shaped by organised‑crime dynamics. I had no support, no protection, and no framework for distinguishing coincidence from intent.

Public perception assumes that surveillance targets are “important” — journalists, activists, political figures. But the documented misuse of Pegasus contradicts that assumption. Surveillance overreach follows opportunity, not status. Vulnerability is its own form of exposure.

So when I ask whether my experience merits investigation, the question is not rooted in ego or paranoia. It is rooted in pattern. In precedent. In the documented reality that Mexico has repeatedly deployed tools far beyond their legal mandate, often against individuals who posed no threat at all.

I was not important.

But I was unprotected.

And that is often enough.

The absence of documentation does not indicate the absence of harm. It indicates the absence of oversight. No one expected a tourist — a mother with four children — to be a data point worth examining. But invisibility is not immunity. And what happened to me aligns too closely with known patterns to be dismissed simply because I do not resemble the individuals who typically appear in investigative reports.

This is why I write.

Not to assert certainty, but to document what occurred.

Not to demand belief, but to situate my experience within a broader, well‑established context of surveillance overreach and institutional blind spots.

If journalists and activists warrant investigation — and they do — then so does the woman who fell through the cracks. The one with no platform, no protection, and no way to interpret why her environment suddenly shifted into something she could no longer explain.

I was not the exception because I was unimportant.

I was the exception because no one was watching for people like me.

The irony is that the people who projected the greatest menace — the self‑styled “Masters of the Universe,” the supposed elite hackers, the so‑called controllers, ghosts, spies, spooks — were nothing close to what they imagined themselves to be. Their influence depended entirely on remaining unseen. They hid in the shadows not because they were powerful, but because exposure would have revealed how little they actually were.

With distance, the scale of their actions appears very different. The fear I lived inside magnified their presence, but once the immediacy of survival faded, the illusion of power collapsed. What remained was a more accurate assessment: not masterminds, not strategists, not shadowy operators, but small, frightened, and fundamentally incompetent individuals functioning inside a larger, dysfunctional system.

Cowards, idiots, morons, pineapples, clowns, the Brady Bunch.

The mythology they projected — the posture of expertise, the suggestion of control, the performance of authority — does not withstand scrutiny. Their behaviour, once terrifying, now reads as insecurity posing as authority, incompetence dressed up as capability, chaos mistaken for strategy, fear disguised as control.

They were not orchestrating anything sophisticated. They were reacting. Scrambling. Covering their tracks. Performing for one another inside a structure that rewards bluster over intelligence. And I was the one who absorbed the consequences of their confusion.

The terror I felt was real. But the people behind it were not worthy of the fear they generated. They were never giants. They were shadows cast by a broken system — shadows that appeared enormous only because I was standing too close, too vulnerable, and too alone.

This realisation does not undo what happened, but it reframes it. It shifts the power back to where it belongs. It clarifies the truth:

I was not dealing with brilliance.

I was dealing with bluster.

Not with strategy, but with disorder.

Not with strength, but with cowardice.

And that shift — from fear to clarity — is the most significant discovery of all.