Mexican Cartels Enslave Engineers to Build Radio Network (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Mexican Cartels Enslave Engineers to Build Radio Network (2012)

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88 pointsjosefresco66 comments

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Sure, if you are talking about smuggling illegal immigrants INTO the country. But immigration would have nothing to do with the kidnapped individuals that are being taken OUT of the US to be used in the sex, labor and (in this case) engineering trades.

It's insane that conservative Christian marketing and lobbying has made human trafficking synonymous with sex trafficking, which accounts for a miniscule portion of it.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/23/how-mexico-...

The cartels completely control passage over the southern border, which I'm pretty sure is more lucrative than all of US prostitution combined (although I'd be happy to be corrected.)

I dont think it is synonymous at all. It just happens. I am not sure if it is an imbalance of where it occurs, if it is as high in Mexico, as say it is in Russia or Africa.

But just a quick search shows that even in 2010 the sex trafficking and crimes were on the rise in California-

http://www.fbi.gov/sandiego/press-releases/2014/cases-involv...

I am the last person to be convinced by anything conservative or Christian for that matter. The trafficking situation just seems to have become more apparent to me over the last 5 years or so, whether or not the situation itself is actually worse.

Most people need not look further than a local Chinese restaurant to find human trafficking.

In one case in my area, waitresses are shipped up from NYC daily on the Chinatown bus (3+ hours) to work for pennies.

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.

Just to add some more. The legalization of pot hurts cartel's income. I read somewhere, that pot accounts for 60% of the cartel's profit in a multi-billion dollar industry! I mention this because of the recent trends in the US where states are beginning to legalize it. I'm sure they weren't too happy to hear that Oregon and Alaska legalize it as it only takes part of the profit away. Once the US is fully legalized, it won't be a hugely profitable business anymore so they will hurt. This means less profits, which means less power for them. With less power, then perhaps there will be less violence in Mexico?

What would stop the cartels from investing in legal storefronts and capturing profits regardless? (This certainly shouldn't be construed as an argument for the morass we have now, just an interesting aside.)

The cartels power is centered in Mexico. They can't monopolize USA storefronts.

What do Americans use to buy drugs? Hint: It's US dollars.

sketchy drug dealers on street corners

Presumably nothing if the money they use to invest is considered legitimate.

Nevertheless, it really seems logical that as a society we should prefer that market competition occurs legally in a open and free market rather than violently in an illegal and black market. The difference between the two types of economic activity is tremendous.

It's certainly logical but my question is if it will actually impact Mexican cartel revenue as much as some people claim.

If the alternative to cartel weed is industrially-farmed weed propping up another unholy conglomerate I'm not sure either is better.

Has anyone done a comparison of the death rate from unholy conglomerates and the Mexican drug cartels?

Are you asking because you plan on doing so? I'd be interested to hear what you find. Here's something to get you started: http://online.wsj.com/articles/j-p-morgan-fined-92-million-b...

Many of the states that have legalized marijuana require that no part of that trade cross state borders (including growing it, packaging it, investing in it, etc.) (This may be true of all the states that have legalized it, but I'm not sure.)

So the Mexican cartels can neither sell the stuff they grow in Mexico in the states nor own the storefronts legally. Doesn't mean they can't do it illegally (they seem to be good at hiding their illegal activity, after all) but they can't go legit.

My assertion is that, with the backing of enterprises raking in 12 figures annually, it's within their operational capability to obtain all the necessary parts to do exactly that.

To be fair, I think it's entirely possible that there are enough savvy businessmen in the cartel to realize that it's wisest to prepare for any number of likely outcomes of legalization. Just imagine Goldman Sachs with more beheadings.

Nothing would stop them, but there would less of an incentive in such business considering the profits wouldn't be as enormous as they are now in the underground market. Profits are huge because the supply is low (and risky) and the demand is high. Legalization, I would think would bring up the supply, after all it would be legal to farm it in mass-production just like tobacco, dropping prices significantly.

They're already heavily invested in Bay Area real estate according to my contacts.

There isn't as much profit in doing a legal activity.

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.

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.

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.

> Prohibition is an unambiguous social evil.

So, drugs should be legal, but "pushing and doing so with addictive substances" should be... also legal?

They should be regulated and taxed in proportion to their harmfulness, and addiction should be treated as a medical problem not a criminal one.

> 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.

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...

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

Why? You don't have to use it.

I don't understand how my personal non-consumption affects my imagination?

Not just your personal non-consumption, everybody's. I don't think jailtime is the sole reason people don't use coke.

>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.

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

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.

Disrupting the pharmaceutical industry!!

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?

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.

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

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.

Legalization with heavy regulation honestly seems like the best way forward at this point, to combat both the politico-economic (drug cartels) and health (addiction treatment) consequences of drugs that will always exist whether legal or not. From the perspective of someone who is from Mexico, I can attest that at least the general consensus is that the cartels derive the majority of their power from their interactions with the US market: most of their money from selling drugs north of the border, most of their strength from buying weapons from US sellers. They have some more local sources of income (extortion, protection rackets, kidnapping, theft) but in cash terms all of those pale compared with the drug business. As for weapons? They definitely don't have any local manufacturing capabilities and I doubt they have any suppliers not from the U.S. at the moment.

At this point, legalization won't be the full solution for the problems with the Mexican cartels, but it's probably the single best thing that can be done to combat the issue. More effective than armed intervention, faster and more reliable than any current attempts to boost the Mexican rural economy (lack of jobs and very low earnings from normal crops is part of what allows drug cartels to recruit enforcers easily and convince farmers to grow pot instead of wheat) and definitely easier to implement than any anti-corruption measure targeting the Mexican institutions (which have corruption as a very endemic historical problem and rooted in ways that most anglo-saxon countries cannot fully imagine).

Edit: That said, this is an interesting counterpoint: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/opinion/global/mexicos-dea... by a very respected subject expert (Dr. Buscaglia), arguing that larger and wealthier criminal organizations than the Mexican cartels exist in other countries, and that the main reason for the cartel-related violence in Mexico and not say in Russia, China or the U.S. is the relative weakness of the state and the job-generating economy.

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

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.

He's doing satire, my friend.

I was being sarcastic, as another poster pointed out. Daesh is not the point of discussion here, though yes, their actions are abominable.

Hint: if your comment is only a single line of sarcasm, you're probably not contributing anything to the conversation.

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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on John Hasnas' "Myth of the Rule of Law".

http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/MythWeb.htm

I'd like to refute your succinct list by posting this incredibly long essay. If you don't read it fully then you don't get to disagree with my point.

Effective!

Legalize all drugs. Full stop.

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