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The city on the border with Arizona has suffered years of
violence between drug cartels fighting for control of the border
crossing, where they can smuggle drugs.
Prosecutors in northern Sonora state said the cameras had been
placed there by “falcons,” the name commonly used in Mexico for
drug cartel lookouts seeking to keep tabs on the movements of
soldiers and police.
Army troops removed the devices, and photos suggested they were
common porch-style cameras wrapped in duct tape. They were found
in three different neighborhoods, and some were even found
attached to palm trees.
San Luis Rio Colorado, located across from Yuma, Arizona, is
best known as a border town where Americans go for inexpensive
prescriptions and dental work. But it has increasingly been hit
by drug cartel violence.
It is not the first border city where cartels have installed
their own surveillance networks.
In 2015, a drug cartel in the northern state of Tamaulipas used
at least 39 surveillance cameras to monitor the comings and
goings of authorities in the city of Reynosa across the border
from McAllen, Texas.
The cameras were powered by electric lines above the city
streets and accessed the internet through phone cables along the
same poles, and included modems and were capable of operating
wirelessly or through commercial providers’ lines.
Several of the cameras were trained on an army base, while
others captured movement outside a marine post, offices of the
attorney general and state police as well as shopping centers,
major thoroughfares and some neighborhoods.
Over the course of 2015, authorities also discovered 55 radio
communication antennas between the nearby border cities of
Matamoros and Miguel Aleman.
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