Despite claims about various security enforcement operations throughout the country, Mexican authorities remain impotent in stopping extortion calls, with most of them being made by criminal organizations from inside prison facilities.
This week, Mexico’s top security official, Omar Garcia Harfuch, tried to claim that his men had carried out over 730 inspections at 275 prison facilities nationwide. However, the reality is that more than 56 percent of the reported extortion calls in Mexico come from 12 prison facilities. Two of those facilities are in the border state of Tamaulipas.
In Tamaulipas, most extortion calls originate from prisons in the border cities of Matamoros and Altamira, which are part of the Tampico metropolitan area. In Altamira, during a recent inspection, authorities discovered and seized a cell antenna, replacing another antenna in Matamoros that criminal organizations were using. It remains unclear how inmates were able to get the equipment.
(Credit: Tamaulipas Government)
Garcia Harfuch only spoke about the extortion calls that had been reported to the extortion hotline 089, which he claims is part of the national strategy against extortion. To date, there have been 83,800 extortion calls reported to federal authorities.
According to Harfuch, 75 percent of those calls were handled promptly by 089 operators, who were able to prevent the victims from paying the extortion. The police official claimed that 10 percent of the calls were, in fact, extortion cases where the victims did pay money to the callers; in those cases, the matter was turned over to local investigators for follow-up. However, in Mexico, most crimes, including extortion and extortion calls, go unreported due to the widespread infiltration of criminal organizations within Mexico’s security agencies. There is no known figure for unreported extortion calls; however, various security experts estimate that as many as 90 percent of extortion calls in Mexico go unreported.
Editor’s Note: Breitbart News Foundation traveled to Mexico City and the states of Tamaulipas, Coahuila, and Nuevo León to recruit citizen journalists willing to risk their lives and expose the cartels silencing their communities. The writers would face certain death at the hands of the various cartels that operate in those areas, including the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas, if a pseudonym were not used. Breitbart News Foundation’s Cartel Chronicles are published in both English and their original Spanish. This article was written by “J.A. Espinoza” from Tamaulipas.
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