Mexican authorities said they found and seized 24 drug cartel surveillance cameras mounted on telephone poles, light posts, and even palm trees in the border community of San Luis Rio Colorado.
The city on Arizona’s border has been plagued by violence for years as drug cartels battle for control of the border crossing, where they can smuggle drugs.
Prosecutors in northern Sonora state claimed Friday that the cameras were installed there by “falcons,” a term widely used in Mexico to describe drug cartel lookouts attempting to monitor the activities of soldiers and police.
Army personnel retrieved the devices, and photographs shared by prosecutors on social media revealed they were ordinary porch-style cameras wrapped in duct tape. They were discovered in three different neighborhoods, “on electric power poles, public lighting, telephones, and even in palm trees,” prosecutors claimed.
San Luis Rio Colorado, located across from Yuma, Arizona, is well known as a border town where Americans travel for low-cost medicines and dental work. However, it has been increasingly affected by drug cartel violence.
This is not the first border city where cartels have set up their monitoring networks.
In 2015, a drug gang in the northern state of Tamaulipas employed at least 39 surveillance cameras to monitor the movements of officials in Reynosa, Texas, across the border from McAllen.
The cameras were powered by electric lines above the city streets and connected to the internet via phone cables running along the same poles. They also had modems and could operate wirelessly or through commercial carriers’ lines.
Several of the cameras were trained on an army installation, while others recorded movement outside a marine post, attorney general’s and state police offices, shopping malls, key thoroughfares, and neighborhoods.
Throughout 2015, officials identified 55 radio communication antennae between the close border cities of Matamoros and Miguel Aleman.
Last Monday, the US Treasury Department announced sanctions against two Mexican firms — an ice cream company and a local pharmacy — for allegedly utilizing fentanyl trafficking revenues to fund Sinaloa cartel operations.
The sanctions were announced as rival cartel factions have been in a deadly conflict with each other and authorities since the surprise arrest of Sinaloa Cartel co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada on US soil in late July, which is thought to have triggered an internal power struggle within the group.