The Mexican military has been trying and failing for months to bring down a jerry-rigged radio system that the brutal Zetas cartel uses to run both its drug business and its related killing sprees. Michael Weissenstein with the Associated Press describes the order of operations:

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. 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.

Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at aestes at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire.
Adam Clark Estes