Cartels’ Advanced Technology a Growing Threat to US

South Texas rancher Antonio Cespedes Saldiana, 74, was driving a pickup at a Mexican ranch when he ran an improvised explosive device (IED) to explode.

The power of the explosion flipped his truck to the side, killing the retiree and his friends inside. The wife of his friend, a third resident, has been hospitalized.

The incident occurred in January near the Mexican town of San Fernando in Tamaulipas, just south of the border from Brownsville, Texas.

According to his son, U.S. Army veteran Ramilo Cespedes, Sardierna, a US citizen, moved to the United States in the 1970s to pursue American dreams.

He told the Epoch Times that his father, who worked on both sides of the US-Mexican border, was a victim of a Mexican cartel terrorist attack.

A veteran of the Iraq-Afghan conflict, Cespedes is well-versed in IEDs. He was awarded a Purple Heart after being injured in an explosive device while on tour of missions.

He said the IEDs and drones are fairly new to the cartels using in the grass war with rival organizations.

“I said the way my father was killed was a terrorist tactic because I saw those tactics in Iraq,” Cespedes said.

According to Céspedes, the cartel has armored vehicles, Kevlar Vest, Night Vision Technology, and a 50-caliber sniper rifle, with Equepemento, which is as sophisticated as the Mexican army.

“Today, it’s like protecting a small army from another small army, and there’s a lot of collateral damage,” he said of the cartel.

“I think President Trump’s policies put a lot of pressure on Mexico. You can see them here at the border.”

The incident has highlighted the increasing sophistication of the cartel.

Over the past four years, around 11 million foreigners have illegally invaded the United States, most have crossed the borders of Mexico and the southern United States.

US President Donald Trump has campaigned to secure US borders, deport millions of illegal immigrants, and stop fentanyl pouring into the country.

In February, the US State Department designated the new generation of cartels and Ranueva Familiar Michoacana in Sinaloa, the Gulf, the United, Northeast, and Jalisco as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.

During his March 4 speech to Congress, Trump showed he was determined to directly face the threat the cartel poses to the United States.

“The cartels are starting a war in America. It’s time for the US to play a war in the cartel,” he said.

Super Cartel

When US Vice President JD Vance visited Eagle Pass, Texas on March 5, he highlighted the crime and national security risks presented by the powerful and wealthy Mexican cartel.

“We have shown record rises in immigration crimes, fentanyl deaths and flooding and flooding for people who should not be in our country,” Vance said.

“There are several ways that the cartel will become more sophisticated and better fighter jets, as (President) Joe Biden opens the borders in the US southern part and allows the cartel to turn it into a playground.”

Ammon Blair, an intelligence consultant and senior fellow at the Secure & Sovereign Texas Initiative at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said the cartel has military-grade weapons and equipment, including advanced surveillance technology.

Their technical capabilities have grown to include undetectable drones, military-grade encryption built into their own cellular networks, and access to Israeli Pegasus spy systems.

According to Blair, some cartels have shown signs they are working together to counter our pressure, creating a supercartel network in the hopes of surviving the next four years.

“What we’re seeing is the integration of cartels,” he said.

He cited examples of cooperation between Gulf Cartel factions such as Metro and Scorpion, but other groups continue to fight for the territory.

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond agreed.

“What we observed was coordination between cartels,” he said. “This is a dangerous business.”

Drummond told the Epoch Times that Oklahoma has become a hotbed for the cartel because it is close to the Texas border with Mexico and because Oklahoma legalized medical marijuana in 2018.

The presence of Texas’ fierce law enforcement has led the cartel to seek Oklahoma as a shelter, and he said it has taken root and put down parts of the Sinaloa cartel.

According to Drummond, around 37 cartels around the world, including China, and criminal groups from around the world are active in Oklahoma.

“It has become a fertile ground for Mexicans to work with Chinese syndicated crime organisations and work together in Oklahoma,” he said.

His state law enforcement has discovered “Kingpin” Chinese citizens working with Mexican cartels to distribute drugs.

He said law enforcement has intercepted information that showed that the Chinese ruling communist regime recruited poor Chinese people and sailed from Fujian Province, a coastal Chinese state known for mafia and immigrant corruption, to the Sinaloa coast of Mexico.

Members of the Sinaloa cartel moved Chinese citizens, carried fentanyl precursor chemicals, then crossed the southwest border to Oklahoma, where they were absorbed into a mafia-led criminal operation, he said.

Drummond said law enforcement agencies discover that Chinese citizens carrying out criminal operations in Oklahoma sometimes work to produce fentanyl, distribute black market marijuana and produce transport people.

In 2024, Chinese citizen Chen Wu was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of four Chinese citizens at Oklahomarijuana Farm.

The facility where the four Chinese worked was operated under licenses that were illegally used to grow marijuana for medical purposes.

Prosecutors said WU demanded a $300,000 investment in operation marijuana was returned just before shooting and killing four workers.

By designating the Mexican cartel as a terrorist group, Trump has given law enforcement more tools to dissolve criminal businesses, Drummond said.

For example, Oklahoma law enforcement has warned US immigrants and customs enforcement (ICE) of their existence, but he said that illegal immigrants working on illegal marijuana farms were not deported under the Biden administration.

With Trump in the White House, the Oklahoma Organized Crime Task Force can now work with the ice to remove illegal immigrants from crime.

In the past, there were 12,000 marijuana growing facilities operating in the state, but many are illegal, Drummond said. Now he estimates that the number has dropped to 2,800.

Some of the marijuana growth facilities are million-dollar crime Chinese companies, he said. He said some have hidden Chinese ties behind limited liability companies and SORCATION.

Oklahoma cartels are also designed by cartel engineers and use more sophisticated equipment, such as altered drones that are difficult to track.

“We observed all of that,” Drummond said.

Narco Drone

Drone invasions from Mexico into the US are becoming more common.

Blair, a former US patrol agent, said he remembered listening to drones overhead while working along the Texas border. The drones were clearly guided by cartels as they had not appeared in the non-military detection system used by the Texas Department of Public Safety at the time.

“You’ll be running, and you’ll have a drone just above your head and track every move you did,” he said.

The article cites Mexican Navy officials who said drug traffickers would “use real-time video to track the movements of border agents or authorities to establish illegal border intersections.”

Drones can avoid detection if the chip is removed or manufactured using a 3D printer, Blair said.

Not only can it be used as a drug “mule” to smuggle drugs into the country, it can also be armed with explosives and deployed for spies.

Drones are used to spy on “falcons” or drug smuggling operations to monitor locations. “Falcon” is a slang term for informants who are looking at people or activities in a particular field or reporting on them. According to the report, drones provide audiovisual data used in cartel decision-making.

However, drones are just one of the cartel weapons. The cartel has moved to the upper tier of spy tactics worthy of Hollywood movies.

Unlike most malware where users need to click on a link or download suspicious files, Pegasus can infiltrate devices without user actions. It is often referred to as a “zero click” attack.

Simply receive a phone message and you can compromise on your phone. Pegasus exploits vulnerabilities in popular apps such as Imessage, WhatsApp, and other to infiltrate phone data without users knowing.

Scott Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, based at the University of Toronto’s Mank Global Affairs Public Public Policy, told lawmakers that a Mexican journalist killed in a cartel hit was targeted using Pegasus.

Less than 20 years later, only relatively few states are able to engage in sophisticated, invisible hacking of mobile phones and computers on almost every scale.

That’s not the case anymore.

“We documented the target of Javier Valdes, a journalist who wrote about drug trafficking and crime in Mexico and was killed in the cartel killing,” Scott Railton said. “Both Valdez’s colleague and wife were infected (by Pegasus spyware) shortly after the hit.

“On the other hand, Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda Barrito’s phone number was chosen for the potential targeting of Pegasus by Mexican Pegasus clients a few weeks before the murder by cartel hitman.”

Electronic warfare

The technological wars that are being waged against rivals and governments include encrypted communications.

Mobile telecom systems use metadata that can be tracked exactly where the cartel wants to avoid.

There have been reports that the cartels have hired or invited engineers to gain a technical advantage, Blair said.

According to a report from the hacker site, cartel’s communications systems have “electronic warfare capabilities” that include sophisticated signal detection and analysis systems.

The report points out that one system discovered in 2022 in the state of Michoacan, Mexico, has become virtually impossible, using “great” techniques by outsiders.

The system generated temporary encryption keys based on multiple factors, including geographic location, time of day, and atmospheric conditions measured by integrated weather sensors.

Endgame

Christopher Holton, a senior analyst at the Center for Security Policy Think Tanks, told the Epoch Times that the US faces a rival to terrorists, such as the Middle East ISIS terrorist group.

The cartels have pioneered the use of drones as weapons by non-state actors. They were armed with hand-rena bullets and rocket-propelled hand-rena bullet warheads to attack their rivals, he said.

The US military also has advanced intelligence communications agencies, such as the MQ-9 Reaper drone and the Boeing P-8 Poseidon aircraft, but Holton said one disadvantage of the US military facing the Mexican cartel is that Mexico almost certainly needs to take part in the battle.

So he said he has not foreseen any US airstrikes or drone strikes targeting cartels.

The US military also has excellent capabilities to monitor and track cellular communications, he said.

Holton said that even if the Mexican government agrees to a US strike, the cartels are infiltrating all aspects of Mexican society, including the government.

He said the Mexican cartels will act as the “shadow government” behind the official cartels.

According to him, the most likely military scenario is a secret special operations campaign to defeat the cartel.

Holton said a war of suppression of rebellion with a small group of elite US forces could do as much damage as a company of soldiers with machine guns.

No matter what happens, the US needs endgame, he said.

“What does victory look like?” he asked.