How do los zetas communicate

El Coss refused, and war ensued. War in the North and Expansion After an initial setback in early , when Los Zetas defended their organization from an alliance of three drug trafficking organizations stitched together by the Gulf Cartel, the former bodyguards surged back into the criminal underworld, with well established bases in Nuevo Laredo, Fresnillo, Veracruz, and in Coban, Guatemala.

By late , the organization was in position to get back to business with its extortion and taxation, as well as drug trafficking. As Los Zetas grew independent of the Gulf Cartel, the organization was at a disadvantage because it did not have contacts in Colombia or other Andean drug source countries. Nuevo Laredo was a direct shot along I to one of the hottest drug markets in the United States: Chicago. Trevino began as early as with steady shipments of cocaine and marijuana through Laredo and Houston, pushing his network east along I and I, and north along I, extending as far north as Chicago, and east to Atlanta.

He first used teenage hit men, known as zetitas, then settled on Texas-based street gangs, as well as the Mara Salvatrucha, which had a national presence, to move product downstream, and enforce the return of funds back into Mexico. The nature of the trafficking business spurred the development of Los Zetas-connected wholesale points across the United States, amounting to as many as 37 cities in the midwest, northeastern and southeastern regions of the United States by , according to a leaked National Drug Intelligence Center situation report.

In a separate case, three alleged members of a Los Zetas hit-team attacked an undercover informant while he was delivering a truckload of marijuana outside of Houston in mid-November. It was an example of an unprecedented use of force and an indication of the ongoing feud between Los Zetas and their former masters in the Gulf Cartel, who investigators believe owned the load.

According to its blog:. That is why personal safety becomes a habit of life. We train our group on how to stay anonymous while on the Internet being that Organized Crime as well as the Government have specialized teams whose sole duty it is to try to locate members of groups like ours since they afraid that their corruption will be brought to the light of truth.

So that only that person is the target of government, political parties and organized crime. Moreover, it is apparent that the Mexican government has not increased its capacity to reform and strengthen law enforcement to a level that would preclude the formation of an extralegal group like Anonymous FreeAcuna.

If the police in Acuna or in the state of Coahuila were up to the task, Los Zetas would have been unable to strengthen their grip on the town. Without strong law enforcement institutions, individuals in insecure areas will at times take matters into their own hands. This sort of environment is ripe for the emergence of an Anonymous group. A group of students saw an injustice and then linked themselves to Anonymous. In one of its blog postings that identifies a ranch used by the cartel in Coahuila, there is the following preface,.

This split may still exist, but little can be done to instill discipline among the membership. It would appear that as long as liberating information leads to human liberation as defined by the collective , any group can brand itself as Anonymous affiliate.

Vigilantes, however, still often pay a price for their activities. They have a reflexive need to control information about them. Aside from attacking them physically or undermining their finances, striking at their anonymity is acutely painful for the cartel. Los Zetas may now choose to carry through on their threat to kill ten innocent people or it may choose to issue another similar threat in an effort to coerce the new Anonymous group to cease its operations.

A fear during the initial clash in was that Los Zetas would kill random people, place the symbol of Anonymous—Guy Fawkes masks—on the corpses and make it appear as though they had tracked down some members of the collective. No matter how Los Zetas respond, it will yet another demonstration of the weakness of the Mexican government; it is once again sidelined in this sort of conflict. However, given the latest split within Los Zetas, the publication of information about the activities of Los Zetas in the town of Acuna may leave it vulnerable to attacks by the opposing faction or rival cartels.

The danger is an increased level of violence as one side attempts to protect its assets and as the other side attempts to gain an advantage. This will also have the additional effect of degrading public safety in Mexico even further. The current iteration of the cyber war between Anonymous and Los Zetas raises serious issues that require additional exploration.

At that time, Anonymous launched Operation Paperstorm in the Mexican state of Veracruz where portions of the collective felt that local government authorities were actively cooperating and shielding Los Zetas while prosecuting people who posted kidnapping reports on Twitter. Initially, the operation began as a leaflet campaign, denouncing the state government for its collusion with Los Zetas. The Zetas criminal empire once had a presence that stretched across Mexico, with their stronghold stretching from Nuevo Laredo to Monterrey.

Their reach also expanded into Central America, especially Guatemala. However, now the group is limited to Mexico and occupies a patchwork of territory across the country. The Zetas' most critical areas remain Tamaulipas and the Gulf Coast. However, two things generally remain the same: their rivalry with their former parent organization the Gulf Cartel, and their rivalry with the Sinaloa Cartel.

Nevertheless, even this may be changing in the Zetas' current fragmented state where alliances and disputes are more localized. It is unclear how much of this network now remains. However, this does not mean the name will fade any time soon. Instead, they are likely to continue the process of fragmentation, and splinter cells like the Northeast Cartel will continue to operate with an increasingly local focus on their criminal activities. We encourage readers to copy and distribute our work for non-commercial purposes, with attribution to InSight Crime in the byline and links to the original at both the top and bottom of the article.

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Mexico saw the highest number of reported kidnappings in the first half of since at least , according to…. A car bomb was detonated via remote control in downtown Monterrey, Mexico, in an attack attributed to drug trafficking groups…. His arrest barely warranted mention in the local paper.

His house, a well-maintained white-brick rancher with an arbor of pink flowers over the front door, contained no cocaine or caches of AKs. He lacked an extensive rap sheet and in fact seemed to have no criminal record at all. On the outskirts of McAllen, he ran a small, nondescript shop that installed car alarms and sold two-way radios. In the weeks that followed, a different picture began to emerge. Del Toro Estrada was neither capo nor killer, but he played a critical role in The Company. Del Toro Estrada had not only set up secret camera networks to spy on Mexican officials and surveil drug stash houses, but he also built from the ground up an elaborate, covert communications network that covered much of the country.

This system enabled the cartel to smuggle narcotics by the ton into the U. Most remarkably, it had provided The Company with a Gorgon-like omniscience or, according to Pike, the ability to track everything related to its narcotics distribution: drug loads but also Mexican police, military, even U. That a cartel had begun employing communications experts was likely news to most of law enforcement. That it had pulled off a massive engineering project spanning most of Mexico—and done so largely in secret—was unparalleled in the annals of criminal enterprise.

The godfather of the Gulf Cartel was not a drug kingpin but a contrabandista named Juan Guerra who began smuggling bootleg whiskey into Texas during Prohibition. In the decades that followed, Guerra expanded into prostitution and gambling along the Rio Grande, building out a small but profitable criminal enterprise. Several years before, American drug agents had started to crack down on cocaine-supply lines from Colombia into Florida. Garcia Abrego led the cartel until , when he was arrested by Mexican police outside the city of Monterrey.

His successor was a jug-eared, mercurial former auto mechanic and aspiring gangster named Osiel Cardenas Guillen, a. The Friend Killer. In the late s, hoping to surround himself with an impenetrable security ring while also creating a lethal mercenary force, Cardenas Guillen formed a paramilitary unit composed largely of defectors from the Mexican police and military. Some, like Heriberto Lazcano Lazcano, a. The Executioner, were commandos from an elite American-trained airborne special-forces unit.

It was an epochal moment in cartel development. They built remote narco-camps to train new recruits in military tactics, weapons, and communications. They recruited other special-forces soldiers from Guatemala, known as Kaibiles, a name derived from an indigenous leader who bedeviled Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century. It revolutionized the whole landscape. Radio was the clear choice. Unlike cell phones, which are expensive, traceable, and easily tapped, radio equipment is cheap, easy to set up, and more secure.

Handheld walkie-talkies, antennas, and signal repeaters to boost transmissions are all available at a good radio shop or from a Motorola distributor. A radio network could provide communications in many of the remote areas in Mexico where the cartel operated.

A midlevel boss in Nuevo Laredo could monitor a semitruck carrying several tons of cocaine as it trundled across the border into Texas. Most crucially, Zetas gunmen could use the system to attack and seize plazas, or smuggling corridors, held by other drug gangs.