Just like legitimate businesses, Mexico drug cartels put a premium on the use of technology, such as the Internet and cellular phones to run their massive operations.

But an indepth article on motherboard.vice.com notes that secret cartel communications networks are suspected of being built and maintained by professionals who have been kidnapped and enslaved by the crime syndicates.

As writer Brian Anderson notes:

It could have been any other morning. Felipe del Jesús Peréz García got dressed, said goodbye to his wife and kids, and drove off to work. It would be a two hour commute from their home in Monterrey, in Northeastern Mexico’s Nuevo León state, to Reynosa, in neighboring Tamaulipas state, where Felipe, an architect, would scout possible installation sites for cell phone towers for a telecommunications company before returning that evening. That was the last time anyone saw him. Felipe’s wife, Tanya, is haunted by his disappearance. “All this time I’ve spent searching for his whereabouts,” she told me. Felipe was 26, with clear hazel eyes and a wide mouth, when he disappeared on March 19, 2013, just under two years ago. It’s a story, or lack thereof, that’s common across Mexico. People vanish, and the vast majority of cases aren’t solved for years, if they’re ever closed at all. Tanya is just one of the bereaved in an expanding web of loved ones and friends left with more questions than answers, and a collective resolve to seek justice for los desaparecidos. They’re waiting for the phone to ring.

The story raises some chilling prospects and is well-sourced, noting that Wired and Animal Politico as well as other outlets have delved into the issue.

There is no telling at this point what really happened to Perez Garcia as well as countless others who have disappeared in the last several years in a Mexico that has massive lawless patches that are run by criminal gangs.

But the article speaks to the mystery, the lore and as much as the horror of what could have happened, the hope that many families have that their loved ones just may return.

So many people have been murdered, disappeared and otherwise entangled in the wars between Mexico drug cartels and their rivals as well as government security forces, that there is often no telling what has happened. The most infamous case remains the 43 students who were kidnapped in a group last year.



As for technology experts, there are also instances of IT wizards willingly joining forces with the cartels.

This Houston Chronicle report from back in 2009 notes that Jose Luis Del Toro Estrada pleaded guilty in Houston to drug trafficking and later told authorities about the technology secrets of the Gulf Cartel.

Court papers say he described a secret communications network of hand-held radios with a reach stretching from the Rio Grande to Guatemala. He also discussed booster transmitters mounted atop police stations and on massive steel radio towers and surveillance cameras hidden outside gangsters’ homes, stash houses and meeting places.

Reaching way back, among the longer technology-kidnapping mysteries in the border region is that of El Pasoan Saul Sanchez Jr. and his wife who went missing back in 1991.

As an 2013 El Paso Times article that looks back at the case notes “Sanchez was a U.S. Navy veteran who had invented a device that could be used to monitor cell-phone conversations.”

Diana Washington Valdez”s report notes: