Mexico is co-hosting the tournament with the US and Canada between June 11 and July 19, and on Tuesday, soldiers at a military base in Mexico City demonstrated the anti-drone equipment they would use to protect the nation’s stadiums.
The prevention tactics are a response to the growing use of internet-bought drones by drug cartels to hit rivals and civilians in regions plagued by organised crime.
These areas are in fact far from the three World Cup venues: Mexico City in the centre of the country, Guadalajara in the west, and Monterrey in the north. They will host 13 of the tournament’s 104 matches.
“(Drone prevention) is going to be focused in the stadiums and where there are crowds, which could be the ‘Fan Fest’ events or any point where there are meetings of people,” army Captain Jose Alfredo Lara, a communications and electronics engineer, told AFP.
The soldiers will use two types of anti-drone equipment. One is a semi-mobile system that will establish a perimeter within which “no unauthorised drone will be allowed to fly.”
The other is a portable system that a soldier can adjust to aim towards wherever an unauthorised drone may be flying.
Once the military team locates a drone, it cuts off the pilot’s communication with the apparatus. “The device loses control and won’t be able to come close,” Lara explained.
Once stopped, and depending on its configuration, the device can retreat, try to exit the range of digital interception or totally lose control.
The captain said use of drones by organised crime groups has grown over the past five years, leading the Mexican military to take actions “to be able to mitigate these types of threats”.
The Sinaloa cartels, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), and the Familia Michoacana all have drones in their arsenal. According to analysts from Insight Crime, their usage is concentrated in the states of Michoacan in the west, Chihuahua in the north and Guanajuato in the centre of the country.
In October last year, installations of the state prosecutors of the state of Baja California, in the border city of Tijuana, were attacked by drones that dropped artisanal explosives.