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Surveillance cameras placed on palm trees by drug cartel “falcons” in city on border with Arizona, Mexico authorities say
Mexican authorities said they have detected and seized 24 drug cartel surveillance cameras fixed to telephone poles, light posts and even palm tree in the border city of San Luis Rio Colorado.
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 Friday 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 posted by prosecutors on social media suggested they were common porch-style cameras wrapped in duct tape. They were found in three different neighborhoods, located “on electric power poles, public lighting, telephones and even in palm trees,” prosecutors said.
Sonora State Prosecutor’s Office
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.
Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department said it sanctioned two Mexican businesses — an ice cream chain and a local pharmacy — for allegedly using proceeds of fentanyl trafficking to finance their operations tied to the Sinaloa cartel.
The sanctions were announced as rival cartel factions have been in a deadly conflict with each other and authorities following the surprise arrest on U.S. soil of Sinaloa Cartel co-founder Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in late July, which is believed to have unleashed an internal power struggle within the group.
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Iranian authorities on Monday executed two men in public over the killing of a police officer during an armed robbery in central Iran, according to the judiciary.
“The death sentence of two armed robbers was carried out this morning in the city of Khomein” in the central Markazi province, the judiciary’s Mizan Online reported, citing the local prosecutor.
According to the report, the sentence was carried out in public on Monday morning.
Iran, which performs death sentences by hanging, rarely executes convicts in public.
The two convicts shot dead a police officer almost four years ago while attempting to flee after clashes with law enforcement, Mizan reported.
Iran carries out the highest number of executions annually after China, according to rights groups including Amnesty International. The number of executions was 2023 is the highest recorded since 2015 and marked a 48% increase from 2022 and a 172% increase from 2021, Amnesty said.
According to Human Rights Watch, Iran executed at least 87 people last month, including 29 in one day.
“The Iranian authorities are carrying out an egregious execution spree while trumpeting their recent presidential elections as evidence of genuine change,” said Nahid Naghshbandi, acting Iran researcher at Human Rights Watch.
The Islamic republic uses capital punishment for major crimes including murder and drug trafficking, as well as rape and sexual assault cases.
AT&T is lowering curtain on its foray into the entertainment business, selling its majority stake in satellite TV provider DirecTV to private equity firm TPG Partners for $7.6 billion.
The deal, announced Monday, comes more than a decade after AT&T agreed to buy DirecTV for $48.5 billion, an acquisition that was designed to give the telecom giant a larger base of video subscribers and help it compete against rivals.
But since then, the subscription TV business has been hit by defections from “cord cutters,” or customers who have canceled their cable or satellite TV subscriptions in favor of streaming services such as Netflix. In 2021, following the loss of millions of customers, AT&T sold a 30% stake of the business to TPG in a deal valued at $16.2 billion.
“This sale allows AT&T to continue to focus on being the leading wireless 5G and fiber connectivity company in America,” AT&T said in a statement on Monday.
AT&T’s sale of its remaining 70% stake in DirecTV is expected to close in the second half of 2025.
Separately, DirecTV said it is acquiring satellite-TV provider Dish from EchoStar, a deal that also includes Sling TV, for $1 plus the assumption of roughly $9.8 billion in debt.
Shares of AT&T rose slightly before the market opened on Monday.
