Mexico detains 80, seizes drug gang communications

VERACRUZ—Mexican troops detained 80 suspected members of the Zetas drug gang, including six police officers, in eastern Veracruz and broke up their network of encrypted communications, the military said Thursday.

The raid meant that the Zetas had lost their lines of communication and control over the organization, said Jose Luis Vergara, spokesman for the navy, told a news conference at the Veracruz airbase.

The navy displayed seized weapons and high-tech communications equipment which they said allowed the heads of the Zetas to communicate with their hitmen, police who were protecting them and drug traffickers.

The equipment included ultra-high frequency (UHF) radios, computers and digital equipment for transmitting encrypted radio messages and “planning the operations of cells of killers,” Vergara said.

The major offensive, said Vergara, means “the loss of command and tactical control operations of the Zetas” using secure digital networks.

The drug cartel, which is among those blamed for the surge in violence in recent years, used these networks “to plan operations among networks of killers,” the official said.

The six detained police had provided protection to the network, he said.

The Zetas were formed by deserters from Mexican special forces who were hired as hitmen for the Gulf cartel in the 1990s. They have recently broken off to become one of Mexico’s most feared crime groups.

They are blamed in kidnappings, extortion and murders in Mexico and beyond, including the massacre of 72 Latin American migrants in August 2010 in northeast Mexico, the beheadings of 27 farmworkers in Guatemala last May, and the murder of a US federal agent in Mexico in February.

Five suspected members of the Zetas have been detained in a probe into an arson attack on a Monterrey casino that killed 52 people last month.

Among those arrested in the most recent sweep were five suspected Zetas sought in the abduction and killing of four Mexican naval servicemen in the Veracruz region, as well as suspects in the kidnapping of Veracruz port administrator Francisco Serrano Aramoni, missing since July 1.