There has long been strategic concern in the United States about China’s technological expansion in Mexico. Since the last six-year term, Washington has pressured Mexico to cancel Chinese 5G telecommunications technology, but President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has refused. In recent months, however, concerns have shifted and expanded. Mexico, due to the growing use of Chinese drones by drug cartels, and the United States due to Chinese spy drones that fly over Mexican territory.
The domestic concern is due to the firepower of criminal groups that increased with the use of Chinese drones, DJI, the largest factory in China that produces the brand, and which they prefer and can be purchased in Mexican department stores for about 2 One thousand dollars. These drones, adapted with devices to drop bombs, were unknown in Mexico until just over three years ago, when the Jalisco New Generation Cartel He began to use them with great effectiveness. It made it easier for them to attack from the air and kill their enemies, security forces and civilian population, minimizing their costs.
He Jalisco New Generation Cartel has its drone arsenal in Apatzingán, Michoacán, the main battlefield against United Cartels. The use of this modified equipment for war purposes has been copied by another criminal organization, The Michoacan Family, which operates in the State of Mexico and Guerrero, and which has been expanding to other states in the last two years. Eventually other cartels can be expected to increase their firepower with this technology.
In the case of the drones used by criminal gangs, the Mexican authorities spoke with their counterparts in China to obtain their cooperation to neutralize them, since the drones manufactured by their companies have a fingerprint, a universally applicable code, so In China they know perfectly well where each one of them is. Xi Jinping’s government agreed to the request and is providing information about the location of the drones.
This cooperation has been fluid, but there is another strategic issue directly related to China, where things will be totally different, as it crosses the terrain of geopolitics and the confrontation between China and the United States, as in the case of 5G technology, which It has to do with Chinese drones that pass through Mexican territory to carry out espionage activities in North America. In recent weeks, the government of President Joe Biden began to exert strong pressure on Mexico to update the regulations on its airspace, with the argument of stopping spy flights that cross Mexican territory and seek to collect information about the United States.
The Americans have detected that Chinese spy drones fly over Mexican airspace, and complain about the lack of updating in current regulations. Mexican laws establish that any plane from another country that wants to enter the airspace has to request permission to do so, especially when it carries weapons – which could be the case of equipment that photographs the earth’s surface or intercepts communications – which must be detailed. and specify their objective, which were adapted to the needs generated by new technologies that could be applied to civil aviation, a concern raised by the International Civil Aviation Organization, ICAO, since the 1980s, and later in 2005, when published a document on global air traffic management which establishes global strategies for the organization and management of airspace.
The discussion in international forums has not concluded in an international treaty, which is why national laws are not binding. In Mexico, actions have been taken to regulate airspace, but focused on the use of technologies by organized crime, as is the background of the Mexican Airspace Protection Law, in force since March 1 of last year, which establishes the guidelines for the coordination and collaboration of the Armed Forces with civil authorities to stop unauthorized flights that, it points out, transport undocumented cargo, which includes money, weapons and drugs, which represent a risk to national security.
This law does not talk about drones, and the regulations were established by the Ministry of Communications and Transportation in 2016. Drones are commercially regulated only for recreational and commercial use and without the need for authorization as long as they do not fly at or above 122 meters high. 450 meters away, and although it is suggested that a special permit is required for longer range drones, the provisions are not clear. The law, in any case, is limited in scope and reductionist, in the opinion of US officials, who want Mexico to regulate all of its national airspace which, according to international law, includes 22 kilometers of its entire territory above sea level. sea.
Commercial airplanes fly up to cruising speed at around 10,000 meters (33,000 feet), and only one airplane, the now-discontinued supersonic Concorde, flew twice as high. Some spy drones, which do not have pressurization problems because they are unmanned, can fly up to 30 thousand meters high, in an airspace considered exterior. The United States, which claims rights that it does not have to act in outer space, is putting pressure on Mexico for Chinese drones that it has registered are flying within its national airspace, and which is what it wants to regulate.
The United States requests have already been made to senior Mexican officials, but so far no response is known. Nor is it known what the position of López Obrador is, who has resisted previous US demands, as in the case of the 5G network, favoring the expansion of Chinese technologies that are considered in Washington as espionage systems, as is the case of Chinese drones over Mexican territory.
