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Drugs

Sniffing Out Mexico's Cocaine Pilots

Inside America's $100 million sensor grab to pick off narco planes.

If there’s one constant to Mexico’s ongoing narco saga, it’s that the cartels stop at nothing to get America high. Their arsenal of border-skipping smuggle tech – million-dollar narco subs, cans of coke-stuffed jalapeños, weed catapults, dune buggies, elaborate, climate-controlled tunnels, and on and on – would almost seem hilariously inventive if they didn’t also come saddled with the blood of untold thousands of innocent civilians caught up in an entrenched battle to which they have little to no sway. And now, the stakes are quite literally just getting higher: Cartels are manning ultralight aircraft with increasing aplomb in bids to move goods under existing air-traffic radar.

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It’s a stealth bit of smuggle-craft that comes with great risks. It always has – ultralight drug planes aren’t entirely new, in large part because border patrol agents have historically been “trained to look down and at the fence”. So it’s only now that enough hard numbers (if those are real things in the narco wars) have been crunched that cross-border drug enforcement is realizing that making any sort of dent in the northbound flow of product is more and more imperative on looking up. In 2011 alone, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol sniffed out some 223 flights. That’s a two-fold bump over 2009 – enough, apparently, to goad CBP into awarding New York-based defense firm SRCTec a cool $100 million-contract to develop a trove of “new sensors” capable of detecting ultralights.

Read the rest at Motherboard.