A cellular tower in the municipality of Guadalupe, Mexico July 6, 2020. Reuters
Business Insider/Reuters: 'Narco-antennas' keep appearing in Mexico, another sign cartels are reaching far beyond drugs
* Technicians and contractors working on Mexico's communications antennas often find unofficial hardware installed on them: "narco antennas" used for communications by organized-crime groups.
* The proliferation of the antennas reflects both those groups' expansion into new kinds of criminal rackets as well as their influence with, or intimidation of, legitimate businesses.
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - The young technician shut off the electricity at a cellular tower in rural Mexico to begin some routine maintenance.
Within 10 minutes, he had company: three armed men dressed in fatigues emblazoned with the logo of a major drug cartel.
The traffickers had a particular interest in that tower, owned by Boston-based American Tower Corp, which rents space to carriers on its thousands of cellular sites in Mexico. The cartel had installed its own antennas on the structure to support their two-way radios, but the contractor had unwittingly blacked out the shadowy network.
The visitors let him off with a warning.
"I was so nervous ... seeing them armed in front of you, you don't know how to react," the worker told Reuters, recalling the 2018 encounter. "Little by little, you learn how to coexist with them, how to address them, how to make them see that you don't represent a threat."
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.
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WNU Editor: The Mexican government knows that this is happening. But have made the decision to turn a blind eye to it.
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