Mexican Cartels Enslave Engineers to Build Radio Network (2012)

http://www.wired.com/2012/11/zeta-radio/

by josefresco • 12 years ago

88 65 12 years ago

hoozters• 12 years ago

Yeah, let's keep drugs illegal, it really seems to work.

luckyno135• 12 years ago

While I agree with you, the illegal drug trade got these guys started and off the ground, I think at this point they would have other avenues to keep themselves in business. I hear the human trafficking business is quite lucrative and booming these days down their way.

pessimizer2• 12 years ago

We should keep tightening up immigration, too. Send 'em back where they came from!

edit: So nobody sees an association between human trafficking and tightening of immigration policy? Good to know.

tormeh• 12 years ago

Well, you can't really be a small cartel. Even if the other businesses are profitable, a cartel needs a certain size to pay for constant expenses like bribes, armed forces etc. Politicians and the police don't give you a discount because you're small and people still need to be just as intimidated even though you're doing less shit.

Just removing one illegal activity might knock the sum value of dangerous, illegal activities below the threshold where cartels can work.

bdavisx• 12 years ago

According to this: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-157.html, repealing alcohol prohibition "dramatically reduced crime, including organized crime, and corruption". While organized crime and "the mob" obviously still existed afterwards, they lost a lot.

ufmace• 12 years ago

The fight against the cartels seems to be more like a war than conventional police work. One of the main themes of any war is logistics. Anything you can do to disrupt the enemy's logistics is pretty much always good, even if it isn't a perfect solution. You rarely get to completely destroy the enemy at a stroke, but instead you have to keep chopping off bits until they are defeated and discredited.

Yeah, legalizing drugs won't make them vanish overnight, but it will remove a hugely profitable revenue source from their arsenal, and that's always worth doing.

api2• 12 years ago

That's what makes prohibition so ugly. It's like YCombinator for psychopaths.

Combine that with the psychological acclimatization that it offers and it gets even uglier. It creates this on-boarding process for hell. Dealing drugs really isn't wrong in most cases -- it's a voluntary activity. It only gets morally questionable when you start "pushing" and doing so with addictive substances. But it is illegal, and doing it lands you in a world of people who flout the law and commit other crimes as well. Once you're in that world you're apt to pick up a taste for other kinds of illegal activity that really does involve hurting people, especially if you are at all psychologically prone to amoral behavior. In some cases this can take people all the way to unspeakable evils like trafficking children for sex slavery or contract murder.

Prohibition is an unambiguous social evil. Anyone who still argues for it is either corrupt, ignorant, delusional, or simply hasn't thought about it very much.

jacquesm• 12 years ago

I hear the human trafficking business is quite lucrative and booming these days down their way.

You may be on to something there. How about removing restrictions on immigration at the same time? That should definitely knock the wind out of them.

SixSigma2• 12 years ago

While I don't wholeheartedly disagree, I also have trouble envisaging a world where cocaine is legally available.

If the actual barbarism of these people was on the regular news ore, I think that would make an impact.

People managed to make a difference through boycotting many products because of industrial practices. [1]

Maybe it's time to organise a cocaine boycott.

[1] http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/boycotts/successfulboycotts.a...

thisjepisje2• 12 years ago

I also have trouble envisaging a world where cocaine is legally available.

Why? You don't have to use it.

GregBuchholz2• 12 years ago

I also have trouble envisaging a world where cocaine is legally available.

But it was once legal and prominent, and I'm almost sure you've tasted the soft drink whose name was derived from it.

gohrt3• 12 years ago

Cocaine consumers aren't the sort of folks who make self-sacrifice for ethical causes.

paulhauggis• 12 years ago

Legalizing drugs won't fix the problem. The real problem is corruption. The only reason the cartels got this big in the first place is because it got easier and easier to commit terrible crimes with no law enforcement officials stopping them. Hell, it seems like the police are now part of the cartels in many areas.

gaius2• 12 years ago

Disrupting the pharmaceutical industry!!

hsod• 12 years ago

Meta: this feels like a cheap, lazy political potshot and I wish it wasn't the second highest comment here.

It seems like more and more low quality comments are being upvoted so long as they pander to the majority political leanings around here.

Are we a discussion board or a platform to push an agenda?

luckyno135• 12 years ago

I, for one, am always surprised yet impressed by the things the cartels do. All the while not being shocked at all.

They would be such an interesting psychological / sociological study if it didn't mean potential torture and beheading of researchers. I mean this level of organized crime makes Al Capone look like a petty pick pocket.

luckyno135• 12 years ago

I didnt mean I was impressed in a good way, only from an observational point of view. They are terrible, no doubt about that.

rodgerd• 12 years ago

Want to be really impressed and horrified? See if you can dig out the 90s Wired article on the Colombians using an AS/400 to do analysis of copies of telco records. Whenever they found the logs showing cartel members calling numbers registered to police officers, they'd kill the cartel member.

Big data before it was cool.

aaron695• 12 years ago

Not wired but - http://cocaine.org/cokecrime/

gwern• 12 years ago

http://www.geek.com/news/outclassed-by-technology-in-the-dru... http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-cartel-supercomputer-of...

drawkbox• 12 years ago

Hoards of money and guns can lead to very powerful unchecked capabilities. That funding has to be cutoff, they are a terrorist organization being funded by policy, concentrating wealth to criminals.

ChuckMcM• 12 years ago

Sad story. Transmitters though are generally easy to find (not perhaps to decode if encrypted but RF energy is easily localized). As a radio amateur we used to do transmitter 'hunts' where we could locate and disable a transmitter hidden in some area.

logicallee2• 12 years ago

The free market solution is for Mexican engineers to band together and raise a private army with their earnings.

You think I'm kidding, but I am actually making a point about rule of law - I literally just named the free-market solution. Think about it the next time you dismiss the state.

josu• 12 years ago

Well, the state is the one who started the whole ordeal by making drugs illegal. So I would argue that in a real free-market no engineer would have been kidnapped in the first place.

logicallee2• 12 years ago

That is an interesting point! But in failed states (where de facto nothing is "illegal" as there is no rule of law), life is hardly peaceful. The source of the strife may be drugs in this case, but it's just because that's what pays well enough to approximate a lack of a strong state enforcing rule of law, even in a Western country like Mexico.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Fragile_St...

eksith• 12 years ago

At this point, isn't it more accurate to call them a terrorist organization? They have their own military, communications network and a healthy (seemingly never ending) supply of soldiers to do their bidding and the citizens are sufficiently terrorized.

Forget fighting ghosts in far off lands; right next door is where the terrorists are.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

based on recent stories where they had to track down and arrest a mayor and his wife how are you going to tell friend from foe? With the recent legalization of marijuana in a few more states we might be getting to a tipping point where we reexamine the whole drug war and reduce the influence of these people by drying up their money supply

pyrophane• 12 years ago

One would hope. I honestly think that at this point legalization and regulation of all drugs would be the most sensible approach, even when it comes to "hard" drugs like cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine. Doing so would not only cut out the cartels, but also allow us to implement harm reduction strategies that are lacking from our current "War on Drugs" approach. Just being able to ensure that what is being sold provides a predictable dose of the drug and is free from unnecessary contaminants would be a huge step forward, not to mention all of the treatment options that would become available to abusers if we were to stop treating them like criminals.

apta2• 12 years ago

They're probably not Muslims, so they're not "terrorists". Only Muslims are terrorists nowadays.

seivan• 12 years ago

Daesh is butchering kurdish women. You know, selling 9 year olds christians and kurds because they are "kafirs". Majority of the kurds getting killed are muslims as well.

Genuinely dislike what you're insinuating but it borders close to clouding criticism as 'islamophobia' as the left-wing do in Sweden.

gaius2• 12 years ago

You're being down voted, yet remember that the US was quite happy for NORAID to operate there even after 9/11.

pizza2342• 12 years ago

"Terrorist" has a quite specific meaning; I think that there is a subtle difference with the fact that cartels don't use terror for ideological reasons, instead, very simply, as a business tool.

I think terroristic organization are characterized by asimmetry toward their enemy (that's where the terror strategies come from). Cartels are not asymmetric - I wouldn't surprised if their "GDP" would be higher than Mexico.

I would rather think of them either as a state inside another, failed, state, or a corporation who controls its state of residence through guns instead of money.

lazaroclapp2• 12 years ago

The goal of the cartels is not terror or using terror to achieve any political or ideological goals. The goal of the cartels is profit in most cases and local political power in some others. They are criminal enterprises for sure and warlords as well in many cases, but they are not terrorists. Whether profit-motivated un-accountable and violent criminal syndicates are more or less harmful than fundamentalist terrorists, well, that's a different question.

joshkpeterson• 12 years ago

Legalize all drugs. Full stop.

ZenoArrow• 12 years ago

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that dismantling these radio networks is backwards? By using these radios the cartels are giving the authorities free information about their movements and evidence that's useful in their conviction. Even if the traffic is encrypted there are ways around that. The logical thing to me is keep the radios going and listen to them.

ddrt2• 12 years ago

The sad part is that the authorities are just as bad in SA.

pizza2342• 12 years ago

I'd say more "useless" thank backwards.

Having evidence is not really a problem. In Mexico, you will see narcos in the streets with very outlandish behavior. With a functioning judiciary system they would be arrested and jailed easily and immediately.

The problem is that drug cartels have control of the everything, including the police and the judiciary system. You should read about the meetings where they show to the policemen what they do to the ones who betray them; it's terrifying.

Mexican Cartels Enslave Engineers to Build Radio Network (2012)

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