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Meet the Zetas: the most notorious Mexican drug cartel ever to share a name with a college
sorority.
But don’t worry, it’s easy to tell the difference between the two: one is full of
conniving, ruthless, cutthroat sociopaths clawing their way to the top of a rotting
hierarchy, and the other is a drug cartel.
When you think of Mexican drug cartels, you probably think of gun shootouts or cocaine
snowmen or Netflix series’ that people keep telling you are good but you just don’t
have the time to get into.
You probably don’t think about communications infrastructure—but, you see, that’s why
you weren’t the most powerful drug cartel in Mexico in the mid 2010s.
Well that and because you’re a nerd, which I know because you’re watching this video.
The point is, while you were busy spamming my submissions form with brick video requests,
the Zetas were building a secret, private cell network that stretched across nearly
all of Mexico.
The system starts with low-level operatives working on the ground who are called halcones,
which Google Translate tells me is Serbian for halcones.
The halcones patrol the streets and suss out important information—the movements of soldiers,
location of Mexican police, recaps of Downton Abbey, and actions of rival cartels.
Halcones each carry walkie talkies or radio cell phones set to specific frequencies, which
are selected after analyzing the local radio spectrum and avoiding any radio frequency
being used regularly by people like cab drivers, police, or scrappy 80s tweens.
Once halcones have a message to convey, like “police are headed north” or “soliders
are asleep,” their walkie talkie frequency will be picked up by antennae the cartel has
constructed all across Mexico: in trees, on rooftops, on existing communications infrastructure,
or on whatever other tall pointy thing they can find.
The nearest antenna will both receive and transmit the message, but if it needs to travel
further than the immediate vicinity, it’ll be amplified by repeaters, many of which are
owned by communications companies like Nextel, but which Zetas managed to hijack and reprogram.
Basically, repeaters do for radio waves what this channel does for quirky Wikipedia entries:
it repeats them much more loudly and aggressively.
Specifically, the Zetas use duplex repeaters, which are able to both receive and transmit
messages by using different frequencies for each.
If you’ve ever tried using a cell phone before 2005, you’ll know that getting widespread
coverage isn’t easy, and that was certainly the case for the cartel, especially considering
that they didn’t have this guy to test the network.
While installing antennae and repeaters was relatively easy in cities, to make the network
truly cohesive, it had to stretch across miles of jungle in areas like Veracruz, and if there’s
one thing I know about the jungle, it’s that it doesn’t have a ton of AC outlets.
That meant that not only did cartel engineers have to build cell towers to get the antennae
and repeaters high enough—towers which, by the way, they painted green for camouflage,
as green famously cannot be seen by the naked human eye—but they also installed solar
panels to power the equipment, mainly because they can operate independently, but also because
even murderous criminals know not to support the fossil fuel industry.
While some of the local networks are overseen and managed by semi-autonomous regional command
centers, the entire system is linked together by a communications headquarters, which we
believe was located in a radio shop called V&V Communications located in McAllen, Texas.
It’s a logical spot: nondescript, near the border, running a semi-legitimate business,
and, according to Facebook, it has a five star rating and 108 likes, which is by far
the most likes I’ve ever seen on the Facebook page for a potential drug cartel communications
headquarters.
The command center uses commercial equipment from Motorola that can connect cartel members
in faraway local networks who need to communicate, as well as monitor thousands of the walkie-talkies
at once, changing their communication frequencies as necessary and deactivating them if a halcone
is captured or killed.
For security, the cartel runs messages using what’s called a digital inverter, which
distorts voices.
I’ll demonstrate now, while I tell you which YouTube creator I hate the most.
It’s *distorted voice.* Man, it was good to get that off my chest.
The system was also robust enough that if certain towers were knocked down, info could
be routed through others in the network.
Basically, it was about as good a cell network as you could get—and because the whole thing
was illegal, they didn’t waste any money on TV ads with multicolored maps or a spokeswomen
the internet develops a creepy obsession with.
The system was masterminded by a man named Jose Luis del Toro Estrada, who led something
of a cartel geek squad, mostly made up of kidnapped communications experts.
At last count, 36 engineers have been kidnapped, and there isn’t anything funny about that,
so instead here’s a picture of a giraffe and an elephant who are friends.
In the end, the Zeta’s network covered nearly 500 miles of the Texas border, and went another
500 miles into Mexico, before it was ultimately discovered by law enforcement because of course
it was, because that’s how we know about it.
I mean, you didn’t think a YouTube channel that mainly covers weird geography quirks
and legal loopholes using outdated memes had gone undercover and unearthed a major criminal
conspiracy, did you?
A single 2014 operation managed to unearth “167 antennas, 155 repeaters, 71 computers,
166 solar panels and batteries, 3,000 radios and Nextel push-to-talk phones, 525,600 minutes,
and of course, 500 Days of Summer.”
These days, the Zetas are much less powerful, but are still operating, which means it’s
unlikely their network has been completely crippled.
So if any Zetas are watching this video and are mad at me, I just want you to know my
name is Devin Stone, I look like this, and any complaints should be directed to the comment
section of my channel LegalEagle.
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