The Drug Cartels' IT Guy | Hacker News Reader

The Drug Cartels' IT Guy

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126 pointsjgrahamc70 comments

That article is mostly a rehash of a 2011 NPR article.[1] More technical information is available in Popular Science (I know, bad source) [2]. Here's a video of some captured gear.[3]

From the video and descriptions, it looks like they're using walkie talkies with repeaters, like a police radio system. They used some minimal scrambling, just enough to prevent people with scanners from listening in. That's cheap, easily available gear.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2011/12/09/143442365/mexico-busts-drug-ca... [2] http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/radio-tecnico-how-z... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT9-dDxkbJc

I think the interesting question here is to what extent are the personnel responsible for building this comm infrastructure kidnapped/enslaved/coerced versus being there mostly voluntarily. There's some merit to the argument that it's much riskier and probably more expensive for the cartels to kidnap and hold these people than to pay them enough to work voluntarily. The main argument against that is how many people have disappeared with no contact with their families, and that the families aren't getting any money. But then, we don't know where these people are, what they're doing, and what degree, if any, of coercion is being applied.

The wild card is the Governments' unwillingness to even acknowledge the problem. That suggests that it embarrasses them. What's more embarrassing to the government, though? That the cartels might be powerful enough to kidnap people at will all over their country? Doesn't sound particularly newsworthy or worthy of suppression, considering what else is going on there. How about the extent to which upper-middle class educated people are willingly working with the cartels to build high-end infrastructure? I could see that being very embarrassing indeed. It makes it seem like the cartels are inching closer to being the legitimate government of major parts of the country. That sounds much more like something worth denying and suppressing. I have no idea if there's any truth to it, but the motives seem to line up in that direction.

In the case of the cartels there's varying degrees of "voluntarily." Mexican and Colombian cartels have long been able to coerce "voluntary" cooperation from people they need by posing them a choice: plata o plomo, "silver or lead." In other words, you can cooperate with the cartel and be rewarded with cash, or not cooperate and be "rewarded" with bullets. It's your choice! But it's not much of a choice, of course.

What's interesting here (to me, anyway) is the need to physically kidnap and hold the person, rather than just coercing the behavior the cartels want via the plata o plomo approach. The cartels certainly have enough plata to hire talent, if it's needed; and once hired, the threat of the plomo should keep them quiet, right? So what would the cartel gain by enslaving the person? I'm not sure.

> So what would the cartel gain by enslaving the person? I'm not sure.

My guess is that they are afraid that this person goes to speak, or gets contacted by the police and install a backdoor in the cartel's system. Maybe the heads of the cartels, not knowing how IT works, are super paranoid about it and want to keep their IT "personnel" at hand constantly.

Killed him after his work was done might be one option I bet that a Cartels HR dept is not soft and fluffy like Dogbert.

Or they thought he was a FED and killed him a Bit like the poor sod who was working as a freelancer in one of the former soviet states a few years ago - luckily I didn't have to deal with that case when I worked for BT but I do know the senior manger who was the contact with the FO during that time.

> plata o plomo, "silver or lead."

Cartels have stopped this. Now there is simply no reward. It is simply just lead. This is especially true with the ultra-violent Zetas cartel where you pay them and do their bidding so that they don't kill you.

The brutality of the Zetas knows no end. All this just a few hours drive from the US.

https://news.vice.com/article/how-a-mexican-cartel-demolishe...

But why are they so uncivilized? The main mission, supplying medicines in the face of oppressive government regulations, is a noble one, one that people can get behind. Just look how the alcohol gangsters of the 20s are idolized.

If they were focused on the core mission of delivering and only killing people as needed, they'd probably have a stack of resumes metres deep. I'm sure Silk Road had its pick of candidates if it needed to hire for a sysadmin position. And you can always remind people you'll kill their families if they snitch.

Is it just a shitty cultural thing? Or is there an actual plan behind being savages and basically making the entire world think they're just untamed animals?

There is logic to this, and the logic is "the more ruthless we appear, the lower the odds that we will be opposed."

If you don't have a monopoly on violence, then you have to compete

> If they were focused on the core mission of delivering and only killing people as needed.

What? The mission statement is a smoke-screen. As with so many hyper-violent people and groups, unrepentant savagery is the main objective, not a by-product.

So they're just a bunch of angry asshats, and drugs are just a convenient way to make money to keep chopping people up?

To ask why the Zetas are violent is to miss the point of the Zetas.

The main mission of the Zetas is not "supplying medicines". The main mission of the Zetas is to monetize violence. Drug regulations as currently structured accounts for about half their revenue; if they were legalized, that percentage would go down, as likely would their overall revenue, but they'd still be running protection rackets, human trafficking rings, and any other scheme they can devise to reliably earn a return on their investment in a gigantic paramiltary pyramid scheme.

The Zetas are not an overly-zealous pro-drug advocacy/action group. In fact, that's a deeply weird thing to think about them.

Also, I don't know who you hang around with, but I don't know a lot of people who idolize the Chicago Outfit.

Well that makes sense then, I suppose. Do you have any citations for only half their money being drugs?

As far as idolization, HBO runs a series called Boardwalk Empire where the Chicago Outfit and others are portrayed as heroes. Plus tons of Italian mob movies have very positive portrayals. Maybe I'm wrong here, but it seems a lot harder to do a positive portrayal of Mexicans that like cutting civilians' heads off.

There is a huge difference between "protagonist" and "hero". Shakespeare wasn't making a hero out of Macbeth.

>Is it just a shitty cultural thing?

There is some indication that it is a cultural thing.

http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21636052-drugs-and-ma...

There is indeed a long history in Latin America of organized armed forces raping, torturing, and killing hundreds (and thousands) of civilians.

Paramilitaries armed and trained by the U.S., and government militaries funded and advised by the U.S., sometimes after the U.S. organized the overthrow of civillian governments the U.S. didn't like.

Yep, there's a deep cultural issue there, that the U.S. created over the course of a century or so.

> The main mission, supplying medicines in the face of oppressive government regulations, is a noble one, one that people can get behind.

I think drug prohibition is stupid and wicked, but let's be honest: this is not about supplying medicine to patients but cocaine to users. That use should be lawful, but it's certainly no noble mission.

> Or is there an actual plan behind being savages and basically making the entire world think they're just untamed animals?

Every law is backed up by fear of violence. The cartels can't go to a legitimate court to enforce their contracts and settle their disputes, so they fall back on raw force. Over time, the sort of people who enjoy that sort of work do better than those who don't. There are evil people in the world who enjoy inflicting pain and suffering, and I daresay they do very well in such organisations.

Genghis Khan annihilated cities which didn't cooperate with him; the Turks raped and murdered for three decades when they conquered Constantinople; what the Russians did in Berlin isn't fit to be printed; what happened in Allende is really no different.

> medicine to patients but cocaine to users ... no noble mission

I wouldn't say it's ignoble, though you're right, their case would be far stronger if they were supplying a more varied product.

Your explanation of violence doesn't explain why other groups get by with less violence, and otherwise appear to be respectable members of society. Look at a Chicago Outfit's massacre[1] and the Zeta's[2].

I know, I'm abusing the word massacre, but in one case, notoriety is because of the killing of a few rival criminals. In the Zetas case, they just rape, torture, and murder hundreds of innocent civilians.

That seems very shortsighted and not beneficial to business. Unless it's a tactic to raise the barrier to entry by making the whole area just terrible to work in, overall.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Valentine%27s_Day_Massacr... 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_San_Fernando_massacre

> In the Zetas case, they just rape, torture, and murder hundreds of innocent civilians.

> That seems very shortsighted and not beneficial to business.

An organized crime group that engages in this kind of behavior may, within a reasonable approximation, be rationally focused on maximizing their own experienced utility [0], but even if they are, their utility function may not weight financial returns as highly as, say, yours does.

[0] I should emphasize that I am not at all taking the position that this is the case.

As violent as the Chicago Outfit were, they still had to be careful much of the time. The Zetas are far more brazen because they're allowed to be. They live in a lawless backcountry, not the heart of one of North America's biggest cities.

A better comparison for the Zetas would be groups like Boko Haram and ISIS.

> three decades

Whoops, days, not decades. Dunno how that got through.

For the Zetas (and many violent organized crime groups), delivering product is a significant source of revenue, but, AFAICT, its not the real core competency. The core competency is manipulation through application and threat of violence. Delivering a high-priced form of contraband is just a convenient way to monetize that competency.

Very interesting way of putting it. I'm quoting you with attribution of you don't mind.

If you have no access to the courts and no ability to enforce contracts because your business is illegal, you're left with only violence. But violence is a pain in the ass, so perhaps you're extraordinarily violent to a few people in the hope of scaring everyone else. People may also be sociopaths; such a business will strongly select for them.

If they were focused on the core mission of delivering and only killing people as needed, they'd probably have a stack of resumes metres deep.

Unfortunately it's not so simple. You start out as a Chemistry teacher who just wants to make money on the side giving people a quality product, and end up committing multiple murders.

EDIT: I just read what you actually wrote. only killing people as needed??? You're nuts.

I'm nuts? That's what governments are based on. It's no surprise that a group operating outside existing legal structures will find itself in need of lethal force. If you were running a little village and someone came to take all your food, essentially condemning your whole family, force may be the only response.

So it's quite understandable that a criminal organization might need to use force when someone threatens their safety. This happened for instance with the Silk Road, when someone blackmailed them. (Now, the SR shouldn't have allowed themselves into that position in the first place, but that aside). It's a "necessary" understandable case - if not taken care of, dozens or hundreds of people could be condemned.

Contrast with these cartels, which hijack passenger buses, then torture and rape for fun. There's no necessity there.

Do you not see the distinction?

That is its own necessity. They are at a place, in terms of their environment, character, moral mindset, and predilections, that torturing and raping for fun is preferable (controlling for other factors).

This kind of behavior has had a strong appeal throughout history to many of those with the strength to carry it out without any real risk to themselves. See Jack London's "The Sea Wolf" for a great portrayal of the conflict between this mindset and our own. It's player-killing in video games in the real world and the only effective way to respond is with greater force.

There's everything related to narcocultura, with music and images and what not that seem to worship drug lords power, that certainly seems to influence some people and wishing they could do/become that. From my personal anecdotal experience, that people are usually low-middle class and with no higher education.

I'm not sure if it's government embarrassment what makes them unwilling to acknowledge the problem. It is well known here that most of the time they work together. [0][1] (Two different governors)

[0] http://www.sinembargo.mx/03-07-2014/1046494 : title translation DEA links Tamaulipas former governor to Zetas

[1] http://www.fbi.gov/sanantonio/press-releases/2013/former-gov...

From my understanding, the Government's loyalty to the people vs to the cartels is not entirely clear.

I wonder if this is actually an attempt to extort the telecom companies? "Pay up or we will kill the people working for you."

The main argument against that is how many people have disappeared with no contact with their families, and that the families aren't getting any money.

Wouldn't those families who are getting money be keeping quiet? As for the people who disappeared without a trace, perhaps the cartels force them to train their members on the basics of their job before eliminating them?

> The wild card is the Governments' unwillingness to even acknowledge the problem.

I think you misunderstand that the government and the cartels are often the same people.

Not only IT professionals.

My family knew a young man who did contracting work on a small town. Very hard working. They took him, and no one has heard about him ever since. The rumor is that they use them to build the facilities they need. He left a young wife with small children. Really tragic.

At some point, you'd think we'd have the sense to legalize all these substances that the cartels trade in to cut crime and drain them of their money and power.

Too late. As the article says, they're into much more than drugs now. The problem is no longer drugs, it's cartels.

Well then clearly all we have to do is legalize everything else they do too!

Yeah, like Google is into much more than advertising now. Taking out drug money would be a massive crimp in their style. In fact, I'd be surprised if it wouldn't pretty much destroy their style, and suggestions to the contrary are just given by the government to continue the drug war.

Should we also legalize protection racket, human trafficking, kidnapping, contract killing?

If they're done between consenting adults, sure.

Surely you don't expect that the targets of these crimes ever consent to them?

I'd guess not. Which makes it quite a bit of a different category than unlicensed drug use.

No, of course not. But choosing to smoke a joint is a victimless crime, as is choosing to abuse cocaine or any other substance. Most of the problems with these substances are caused by the fact that they are illegal and are forced into black markets.

We could discuss the social harms of substance abuse all evening, but at the end of the day I'm not harming anyone when I take a puff in the comfort of my own home.

> But choosing to smoke a joint is a victimless crime,

Well, except for all the murder involved in growing and shipping it. But except for that, yeah. I guess if you live in a legal or medical state it's possible to get murder-free pot. But I haven't smoked pot for 25 years for this and a small handful of other reasons.

> except for all the murder involved in growing and shipping it

Those are artifacts of it being illegal, if it was legal those wouldn't be problems.

I'm not saying we shouldn't legalize drugs; we should, for this and other reasons.

But that's not going to kill the cartels, they have other interests. I don't even think it would affect their style all that much because it wouldn't happen suddenly, it will be state by state, with the Fed finally going along after it's de facto legal everywhere.

While that gradual process plays out, as it is in fact doing right now, the cartels will just shift their focus elsewhere. Gradually. I think what's more likely is that the Mexican oil industry, and other cartel interests, will long for the days of illegal drugs.

If the drugs have the widest popular consumer base, legalization might still be a potent weapon because it reduces the degree to which people who aren't deeply involved in the other things the cartel does are dependent on the cartel and subject to manipulation by them; my understanding is that ending alcohol prohibition in the US -- while it didn't, by any stretch, destroy the organized crime groups that were powered by it, did substantially weaken them for similar reasons.

My first thought about the enslavement is that the threat of killing their family would be a powerful disincentive to turn on the cartel. Either way this is tragic, I feel for all those affected by this.

I also don't agree with the sentiment that the intellect of these people would lead them to turn the tables on their captors. Are you really going to risk having your whole family eradicated? I think it would only take a couple surveillance pictures of all of their family members for them to cooperate even if they realize there is no way they will make it out alive.

Yes - Bunker's commentary (he's the War College professor) seems overly generalized and a bit weird. "Prima donna's"? How does he know know "hacker types" don't function well in captivity? Was there a study?

But there's not a single case, there's 100% leak prevention. You'd think at least one family would have fled and made it known. Nobody but dead men run opsec that tight, right?

Have any of the missing people ever been seen alive again? This article and the previous one on the topic posted here both seem to be saying no, the mortality rate is one hundred percent. If that's true, it suggests a personal rule for anyone living in or visiting that area: if the cartels come for you, fight to the death on the spot rather than let yourself be taken.

Assuming you only care about your own life. If the two alternatives are (1) be kidnapped, do some work, then murdered vs (2) fight to the death and have your family killed in retaliation, I could see how your suggested personal rule might be suboptimal for a lot of people living in that area.

True enough. Is that the actual state of affairs?

Yes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mexican-militiaman-and-h...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1375578/Drug-cartels...

These "be afraid of the outside world" articles are getting less and less subtle.

> It’s a story that’s common across Mexico. People vanish

Statements like that are so misleading.

More people are killed in NYC and Chicago than Mexico city, but you never see headlines about that.

While that might be true (at least per capita, I can't find any recent sources for the murder rate in Mexico City), Mexico does hold the distinction of having 10 of the top 20 cities in terms of murders per capital (US has 4), as well as an overall murder rate of 21.5/100,000 people vs the United States with 4.7, and almost twice as many in absolute numbers, despite a much lower population.

That said, Mexico is a beautiful and vibrant country that I have pretty strong personal ties to, and I'm not a huge fan of scaremongering either. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate

> These "be afraid of the outside world" articles are getting less and less subtle.

Afraid of the outside world? Ahem, how many journalists have disappeared in USA in the last years? And by any chance, was any of them hanged disemboweled on a bridge, or beheaded on a street?

There's a huge difference in crime between Mexico and USA, with the former having many arguably failed states; therefore disappearances have a very different context and characterization.

No, its not misleading. These dudes do NOT fuck around.

I live in Pueblo, Colorado. To be exact, I live in the East Side in whats known as a barrio/ghetto/hood. If you google Fearnowville Colorado you'll see my home. I also have a LOT of experience in hospitality and F&B and have had regular personal contact with a wide variety of immigrants. My homie Santos is an illegal from Neuvo Leon. Marianna grew up in Sonora. When I was 18 I went to prison for drug charges and made real friendships with mexican and american criminals of all stripes. I learned about ejidos, jesus malverde, mis animales, and I am intelligent. Now don't get me wrong, I'm clean and totally legit. I got kids and I don't roll with gangsters. I am respected by my peers and I earned that respect. So that's where I'm coming from. Now I gotta say you don't know much more about being a criminal than I do about Haskell. People DO disappear, and it happens a LOT. Here and there both. Here in my small southwestern town of 100,000 I can think of multiple black baggings.... once in the parking lot of a walmart, even. I know there's stats about Mexico DF that look good, but you believe the Mexican feds?

Personal anecdote: my wifes grandpa was a man named Jan Bonte. He was born in .dk, his dad was killed by nazis and he was placed in a camp. He immigrated after the war, first to .nl where he met and married his wife, and then to the US. They had a family in Colorado and after a late-life divorce he moved to Kino in the Sonoran desert for winters and came back to Colorado for summers. Because he routinely crossed the border he was ordered to mule something, and he declined. After a month of no contact we received news he died. We went to clean his remains from his house, which was gruesome after spending October in the sonoran heat after being chopped up by an axe.

Day 1 a duece n half came up with a gaggle of Mexican troops. Green uniforms, M-16s, idk if they were cops or 'cops' or what, but they gave us 3 days to gtfo.

Day 2, we picked up his ashes and had a small ceremony. He had local friends, who told us what happened and who did it.

Day 3, we were on the road

I put so many personal details because seriously: dox it if you'd like. You'll see Jan isn't counted among the victims of the drug war but it doesn't matter. The important thing is "this is how it is" and to hope it never happens to me or mine. Aqui hubo una mano negra

I don't have a point at all, I just feel I see/know an entirely different world from the average HN poster. You see alarmists clutching pearls and spreading tales - part of a bigger trend to spread fear and exagerate dangers. I see people I know and love suffer....and hope that black hand doesn't visit me.

So much truth to this. Hang out with enough Mexican immigrants in the US and you realize the danger there is real for civilians in MX and not much of an exaggeration. Members of my wife's family have been drugged and robbed. Last month a friend told me her nephew was kidnapped and they were gathering ransom money for his release stateside (he is safe now). Not that these were cartel related, but the situation in Mexico is much worse and real than say, the scare stories about "bad" neighborhoods in NYC.

Mexico City isn't where the problem is (well, the killing problem, it's ground zero for federal govt corruption).

In regards to finding the narco radio stations, wouldn't it be trivial to triangulate their location and destroy them?

I thought this too, since as far back as the 1940's the Nazis could put the necessary radio triangulating hardware in a van.

But then I realized that the people tasked with doing the finding are on the payroll of the Cartels, and will therefore go to great lengths to never find any transmitters.

I don't think you have to be on the payroll of the cartel to want to never find the cartel.

yeah, not wanting to die is probably enough incentive for whoever replaced the last guy who found a cartel.

Couldn't an AWACS plane to find + some drones to execute be worked from sufficient distance as to remove cartel influence?

When the cartels have state-level resources, at one point do we stop treating them like criminals and start treating them like enemy states?

so your'e a Telco guy going into bandit country why the fuck wasn't he escorted by a couple of bricks (fire teams).

From what I know of telecoms during the troubles that is how it worked in the border areas between Eire and NI in no way did one engineer (lineman) drive in his van to a site in the more dangerous parts of the contry

There was a guy here who provisioned 'secure phones' to a bunch of gangsters and they shot him when they turned out to be not as secure as advertised.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8568394

Robert Bunker's opinion is the only thing that makes sense in that article.

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