| Summary/Abstract |
Shortly after his 2009 inauguration, U.S. President Barack Obama renewed the U.S. commitment to Plan Mérida, a $1.7 billion assistance program to Mexico, with a heavy emphasis on militarized policing modeled after Plan Colombia. With drones guiding military-police raids, the United States supplied Mexican law enforcement agencies with electronic signals technology, ground sensors, voice recognition gear, night-vision goggles, cell-phone tracking devices, data analysis tools, computer hacking kits, and airborne cameras that could read license plates from miles away.1 This aid was in addition to surveillance aircraft satellites, ion scanners, ballistic identification systems, and over a dozen Sikorsky Black Hawk helicopters that were deployed in a 2010 operation that supposedly killed drug kingpin Nazario Moreno Gonzalez (AKA “El Chayo”), though Nazario was reported to have been killed again in March 2014.
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