Understanding Intel Is Always Important

Don’t, and you can stumble over the reaper fast:

Location scout for Neflix’s ‘Narcos’ is fatally shot while doing advance work in Mexico for the fourth season… A location scout for the Netflix series Narcos has been fatally shot in Mexico while working on the show’s fourth season.

Carlos Muñoz Portal, 37, was found dead on Monday in a violent region in central Mexico, his body riddled with bullets inside his car after an apparent chase over back country roads.

Local authorities told El Pais that they had no suspects in the case due to the lack of witnesses.

A friend of the deceased told the Spanish-language newspaper that Muñoz was out taking photographs when he was shot, and speculated that an unfamiliar man with a camera may have spooked locals in the crime-ridden area.

Everybody is running intel and surveillance these days. This guy was told, “Go to Mexico and find us sites which look like it could be used by Drug Cartels.” The studio probably hired a Mexican local, too, because you wouldn’t want to be a gringo driving around those areas.

So this Mexican local begins by thinking, “Where would I hide a drug lab?” There’s chemical manufacture facilities. There’s dry cleaners, like in Breaking Bad. Gun Ranges have exhaust for lead removal from primer effluent. Body shops blow out paint fumes, ceramic manufacture features furnace exhaust, and on and on.

So this guy goes and finds sites that are super authentic – probably so authentic that one was actually being used by drug cartels. He rolls up, mister innocent filmographer, pops out of his car, and starts snapping pictures with his Cannon camera with its telephoto zoom lens. He was doing such a good job.

Somewhere in a basement, cartel counter-surveillance was putting down their burritos and gathering around monitors plugged into the hidden cameras they have arrayed around their sites to look for Narco-policia surveillance. Some of them just stared wide-eyed and mouths agape, while others were getting on phones to update bosses with what they were seeing – namely this cherry taking photos of the brand new meth lab they just hid in the basement of a Mexican food place that uses old wood fired ovens.

Because he wants to show his bosses how authentic the site is, the filmographer is photographing their exhaust and air filtration, because it looks like it could easily double for a system used in drug manufacture. He shoots the power lines going in, because this place has a lot more electrical going in for some strange reason, which means they won’t have to run extra dummy wires in for their external shots. He shows the nice loading dock in the back. It even has a nice café opposite it on the street, where the surveillance in their show could sit and pretend to be drinking coffee and reading newspapers as they run surveillance/security for the lab. There are even people there drinking coffee and reading newspapers now, looking at him. They could almost just film now, and not even hire extras.

All the while, he is never looking for the signs that somebody may be watching him, or the place he may be in is dangerous. Next thing he knows he is being pulled from his car and executed by the side of the road as his camera is seized and destroyed.

If he had been surveillance-aware, he might have noticed people looking at him just a little too long as he approached the site. If he had viewed the world as a dangerous place, he would have been paranoid while traveling in the belly of the beast. He might have lived to tell the tale.

This could just have easily been a tourist taking photos at the restaurant, a reporter doing a story on it, or just someone looking a little too long at the wrong things by chance.

It reminds me of an old true-crime TV show about a chop-shop being run in New York City, if I am not mistaken. NYPD got a tip about it, a couple of detectives rolled by to take a look, and the next day when they came back, the warehouse was empty. The guy running it was ex-Chinese PLA intelligence, and he had hidden cameras all around his facility, and he had teams monitoring them closely. After one surveillance pass, the detectives were made, and he was back in China with all his ill-gotten booty.

It is getting to the point in this decline that you can’t go out to pick up your newspaper in the morning without a high degree of paranoia. Get used to it, because when there are roaming gangs of savages, and the cartels move north into the power vacuum when the US federal government falls in the economic collapse, that paranoia will be the difference between those who survive and those who do not.

And bear in mind, the same lack of amygdala which has allowed Mexico to become a place where this type of thing happens regularly is rapidly coming here. This could easily be parts of America in twenty years, only we will have a load of radical Islamic fundamentalists on top of it all to spice things up.

Spread r/K Theory, because in the Apocalypse, you can never let your guard down just because you don’t see anyone coming