It is dinner time at Barrett Brown's flat. In the cramped kitchen, two locals whom Brown calls his “cholos” are cooking huevos a la mexicana and beans. A jumping mixture of The Doors, David Bowie, and MF Doom blares from a knackered, old laptop. Mice dart across the floor.
Brown, a journalist and former member of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, sits opposite me. He lights a crack pipe packed with “ice”, the local version of meth, takes a long drag, and exhales towards the floor to avoid blowing smoke in my face. He then hands it back to one of the cholos — all eyebrow slits and tattoos, backwards cap and basketball shorts — who’s taking a break from stirring the eggs.
A few hours earlier, Brown, 44, had asked if he could “borrow” 150 pesos. He said he wanted to tip the cholos for sweeping and mopping the apartment. Essentially local gangsters, they play a confusing Jekyll and Hyde role: part diligent housemaids, part fellow ice enthusiasts. Later, Brown admits the money had actually been for the drugs.
Between coughing fits and a phone call from an ex-girlfriend, he outlines his latest obsession: “I plan to incite war from the Mexican people against my enemies.”
Those enemies, he explains, include Peter Thiel, Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and much of America's surveillance-intelligence establishment. Brown has spent the second half of his life waging what he describes as a personal crusade against them. Here, in San Miguel de Allende, a colonial city in the mountains north of Mexico City, he is preparing for its next phase.
For Brown, surreal scenes like this are almost routine. He’s lived in Texas and Tanzania. He won a National Magazine Award from inside a US prison. He was arrested in Britain after “accidentally” carrying a placard reading “Kill Cops” at a protest. He has always lived on the crooked margins of respectable society.
After taking a hit, one of the unnamed cholos offers me the pipe. I politely decline, for now.
For the past decade and a half, Brown has been investigating what he interchangeably calls the cyber-intelligence-surveillance-tech-misinformation-far-right-paedophile industrial complex. Writing in The Guardian in 2013, he described it as “that unprecedented conglomeration of state, military and corporate interests that together exercise growing power over the flow of information”. It is, he believes, the defining struggle of our age.
Brown’s work against this sprawling network is why he has ended up in San Miguel de Allende. He resides in a state of self-imposed exile, convinced that returning to the United States would expose him to renewed FBI scrutiny after the prosecution that followed his work with Anonymous. He moved to Mexico eight months ago after failing to secure political asylum in the UK. Now, his attention is fixed on Peter Thiel, Palantir and what he regards as the wider intelligence establishment. He talks of future investigations aided by political contacts inside Mexico's new government.
San Miguel itself is a quaint town: the streets are hilly and cobbled, the houses cute and colourful, and the bars filled with expats. At a bar one evening, someone describes San Miguel as similar to Paris in the 1920s, brimming with writers. Margaret Atwood even has a house here.
While the town itself is relatively calm, Brown’s flat writhes in chaos. We first sit outside in his courtyard, surrounded by five barking dogs who belong to the family next door. Inside is no better. Small rooms are hot and stuffy at the best of times in Mexico. Add together three chain-smoking cholos, two chain-smoking gringos, a constant fume of meth smoke, and the high altitude of San Miguel, and it’s hard to breathe, let alone concentrate.
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