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Comment by flatline | Hacker News Reader

Why on earth would cartels kidnap engineers when they could just pay them? This seems like the kind of specialized knowledge you cannot meaningfully get out of someone with a $5 wrench, just how they hire lawyers and other professionals to work with existing modern infrastructure that you cannot just avoid.

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You vastly underestimate how intense the cartels are.

They want total control, not bribes.

One of the more medium size cartels, Jalisco New Generation, specializes in training assassins against their will. Let that just sink in. They do this by advertising jobs, kidnapping the people who show up to interview, and then torturing them in horrific ways until they get the total compliance of learned helplessness. Then they send them on suicide missions.

I don't want to go into the details of the torture because its bad stuff, involving cannibalism even. If you are morbidly curious there's a couple interviews with survivors you can find somewhere on youtube.

And this is far from the only instance of this sort of thing. Sinaloa has been known to kidnap entire buses and make folks fight to the death, winner gets the dubious honor of becoming a member.

These are people who assume every single person in their world is plotting to overthrow them in an instant, and leave nothing to chance vs that. They don't want to hope their bribe is enough to keep you loyal, they want to know you're loyal because you've seen them torture to death countless people. You don't get any agency in the matter.

How do you know all this? Were you a former member?

I don't think organizations like this have any former members.

they do, they just might be... in a non-talkative mood ;-)

There's a number of brave journalists that cover this stuff locally, but a lot of what I'm talking about has been covered in national media in the US, it just doesn't get much traction.

I have friends that live in Mexico so we talk about it fairly often as well. One of my friends in particular is a wireless business owner with customers near Brownsville/Matamoros, where those telcom engineer kidnappings happened, so he's acutely aware of things.

Adding to this, they are growing fast [1] and rumor has it they are moving into Texas. Curious what the U.S. will do to try to stop them. Military perhaps?

[1] - https://es.insightcrime.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Mexic...

I mean what they are setting up is entirely legal systems it may not be legal to set them up in certain places but nothing illegal. They don't have to kidnap anyone to achieve this goal unless they are too poor to pay someone to help them. However drugs that is bad, mmm kay?

>One of the more medium size cartels, Jalisco New Generation, specializes in training assassins against their will. Let that just sink in. They do this by advertising jobs, kidnapping the people who show up to interview, and then torturing them in horrific ways until they get the total compliance of learned helplessness. Then they send them on suicide missions.

This sounds like:

1. Just a rehash of the original Hashashin tale.

2. A spooky story cartel members might tell.

HNews never fails to be the place where people who know not even the basics of a topic are confidently contrarian.

Here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxP-TMArlV0

This is far from the only source you can find that supports what I'm saying. Search for CJNG to find more about them. They're sort of the Phoenix that rose from the infamous Los Zetas.

> Why on earth would cartels kidnap engineers when they could just pay them?

Why would an engineer willfully take a cartel job, when there is a high risk of them killing you instead of paying you, and killing you by cutting off your face just because they were bored and disturbed? If a cartel even offered me a job, I'd fear for my life.

I have no interest of watching it myself, but there's an infamous video that's been talked about so much I'm reasonably confident it is more or less as described, and yes, it involves skinning someone's face off while they're alive, and using amphetamine injection to ensure they don't pass out.

These people really are as bad as it gets. You don't want to be anywhere close to involved with them.

The video is often re-posted on 4chan and is not the worst of their behavior. Their worst behavior is not permitted on 4chan.

Man I came in here curious about some solar-powered antennas and shit just escalated bigtime. Wow. :(

Yeah torture description is not appropriate for HN IMO.

Why then is so much HN discussion centered around installing and running Windows 11?

That is why I left it out. I would not even begin to describe their activities. I merely pointed out it is not even permitted on the other site.

Yeah, that's the one I'm thinking of. I've only seen the first second of it before turning it off. Truly awful.

Why would they pay someone when they could kidnap them, like they've done to many others?

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