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Mexico shuts down drug gang's antennas, radios

Army says deadly Las Zetas used some of the kit to track the military

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The Mexican government has shut down a secret mobile network reckoned to be run by one of the country's drug cartels, possibly the ruthless Zetas.

Military army troops confiscated 1,400 radios, 2,600 mobile phones, computer equipment, 167 antennas and 166 power supplies including solar panels as part of the operation. The kit is thought to have powered an encrypted mobile phone network that spanned four border states in northern Mexico.

The Mexican Defence department said that the network had been used by drug runners to communicate among themselves and to track military movements. The Zetas, who are fighting a ruthless turf war against their former bosses in the Gulf Cartel, are big players in all four states covered by the covert network (Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila and San Luis Potosi).

Last summer the Mexican navy dismantled a communications network linked to the Zetas in the Gulf state of Veracruz, AP reports. ®

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Anonymous Coward

Won't work

Attacking the cartels' bank accounts in Mexico is a non-starter: the money isn't in Mexico. The cartels laundered hundreds of billions of dollars through the American bank Wachovia, which received a total of $160 million in fines. Not much of a discouragement when they made billions in wire transfer fees.

I'm currently living in Bolivia where cocaine is very available and very cheap yet, contrary to popular belief, this hasn't resulted in a country populated with drug-addled zombies.

Mexico is tearing itself apart fighting the USA's war on drugs. Mexico (indeed the whole of Latin America) should legalise drugs and be done with it.

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Missing in the above dark humor (something that comes about as a result of living in a society where gangs become a parallel government, today resulting of course in a new kind of civil war, where the government itself could fall) is the fact that the government did good on this raid.....we just need to see a lot more of these.....especially raids on the arm caches of the gangs.....and their banks. We need to see more of their Mexican assets seized and taken over by the government, their bank accounts in particular.

4
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Exceed data limits and...

...you get capped.

3
0

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