Special Report: Drug cartel ‘narco-antennas’ make life dangerous for Mexico’s cell tower repairmen

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-telecoms-cartels-specialreport/special-report-drug-cartel-narco-antennas-make-life-dangerous-for-mexicos-cell-tower-repairmen-idUSKCN24G1DN

Julia Love
July 15, 2020 / 7:07 AM

•••••

The contractor had disrupted a small link in a vast criminal network that spans much of Mexico. In addition to high-end encrypted cell phones and popular messaging apps, traffickers still rely heavily on two-way radios like the ones police and firefighters use to coordinate their teams on the ground, six law enforcement experts on both sides of the border told Reuters.

Traffickers often erect their own radio antennas in rural areas. They also install so-called parasite antennas on existing cell towers, layering their criminal communications network on top of the official one. By piggybacking on telecom companies’ infrastructure, cartels save money and evade detection since their own towers are more easily spotted and torn down, law enforcement experts said.

The practice has been widely acknowledged by telecom companies and Mexican officials for years. The problem persists because the government has made inconsistent efforts to take it on, and because companies have little recourse to stop it, experts on law enforcement and Mexican society said.

“There is a sense of powerlessness” in Mexico, said Duncan Wood, director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute in Washington. He said companies feel they “cannot respond to issues like this because (they) are afraid of the consequences from groups that essentially enjoy impunity.”

•••••

Cartels and other criminal groups sometimes demand telecom workers pay “security payments” or “quotas” in order to perform maintenance on towers and other tasks, according to five contract laborers who have worked on projects involving America Movil SAB de CV (AMXL.MX), Slim’s telecommunications firm, as well as American Tower and AT&T.

These people said the best strategy is to be polite, stay calm and pay up immediately. Those costs get passed along to their employers; laborers for subcontractors said their firms often charge the big telecom companies higher rates for working in dicey areas.

•••••

Narco-antennas are just one aspect of telecom companies’ headaches in Mexico. Criminals raid their infrastructure for batteries and copper cables to resell on the black market, executives in the sector told Reuters.

Stories like this are unfolding in industries across Mexico as criminal groups branch out far beyond drugs. Cartels have siphoned millions of dollars’ worth of fuel from Mexican state oil company Petróleos Mexicanos or Pemex in recent years; they steal cargo and pilfer lumber. The tentacles of organized crime extend even into Mexico’s avocado growing regions, where gangs extort farmers and hijack loads of the green fruit.

•••••

When it comes to communicating in real-time with large groups, radio is tough to beat. These networks are often encrypted and, unlike cellular networks, the location of someone using a radio can’t easily be pinpointed, said Paul Craine, a former director of the DEA’s operations in Mexico and Central America.

A vast web of antennas is necessary to power those networks, and Mexico’s thousands of cellular towers, many tucked away in rural areas, provide ready-made places to install them. Craine said he consistently observed cartels latching onto cellular towers while working in Mexico from 2012 to 2018.

•••••

“Suddenly you find devices that are not yours, they belong to organized crime,” Szekely told Reforma. “And there are places where they do not even let you in to maintain your own facilities.”

•••••

Two people who work for an AT&T subcontractor said there are a number of towers where they routinely pay 500 to 1,000 pesos ($22.34 to $44.67) any day they want to perform maintenance. One of the people estimated the number of towers at 11.

•••••

Cartels have kidnapped technicians doing maintenance on cellular towers to make them fix their networks, people working in the sector said. The technicians usually are released after a few days, if not sooner. Still, those who spoke with Reuters said they live in fear of being forced by traffickers to do such work, lest they be killed for knowing too much, or become targets of authorities or rival criminal groups for being complicit. Whenever possible, they said, they downplay their expertise.

•••••