NY Daily News reports that when convoys of soldiers or federal police move through the scrubland of northern Mexico, the Zetas drug cartel knows they are coming.<\/p>\n
How?<\/p>\n
The alert goes out from a taxi driver or a street vendor, equipped with a high-end handheld radio and paid to work as a lookout known as a “halcon,” or hawk.The radio signal travels deep into the arid countryside, hours by foot from the nearest road. There, the 8-foot-tall 2-meter-tall dark-green branches of the rockrose bush conceal a radio tower painted to match.<\/p>\n
A cable buried in the dirt draws power from a solar panel. A signal-boosting repeater relays the message along a network of powerful antennas and other repeaters that stretch hundreds of miles kilometers across Mexico, a shadow communications system allowing the cartel to coordinate drug deliveries, kidnapping, extortion and other crimes with the immediacy and precision of a modern military or law-enforcement agency.<\/p>\n
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