Mexican Cell Phone Smuggling: Pressure Mounts on Government to Crack Down on Prisons
Technology exists to track calls from prisons in Mexico, but a plethora of reasons surround why the government has failed to block these calls and prevent the extortion of the country's residents.
One of the most commonly cited issues is the interference with cellphone service of neighbors of the prisons, according to an opinion article in El Universal.
Other issues include its lack of reliability, the ease of bribing a technician and hacking into the system.
"It is very important to find out whether the signal jammers are operating correctly from inside the prison complexes," said Renato Sales, who was recently named national anti-kidnapping coordinator in March, according to El Pais.
But jamming the signals near the prisons has had an unintended consequence: Neighbors and nearby businesses are affected, especially in more urban areas, according to El Universal.
Government officials recognize that cellphones are being smuggled into the prisons, even to prisoners in solitary confinement, and there has been no way of ensuring prison guards do not succumb to inmate threats or to bribery, according to El Pais.
Bloomberg reported in 2012 that phones that were smuggled into prisons had been used to swindle residents out of money.
"We are facing serious problems in dealing with corruption," said Isabel Miranda de Wallace, who helped catch the kidnappers and murderers of her son and heads an organization called Stop Kidnapping..
As a result, Mexican think-tank Citizens' Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice will attend the next meeting of the National Security Council in order to propose a bill that would track and shut down phones used in connection with criminal activity, according to El Universal.
The proposal is for cell phone companies to work with the federal government to track the phones and have the authority to use the information tracked, as well as shut down the phones if they are used for criminal activities.
It would not require a new legal framework but simply work off a system from 2012, which allows requests for information from cell phone companies by the government.
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