Mexico to start crime-busting cell phone register

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Mexico's Senate approved a bill on Thursday that will set up a national register of mobile phone users in a bid to clamp down on criminals using cell phones to extort money or negotiate kidnap ransoms.

The bill, which still needs to go through the lower house of Congress and has been criticized by at least one of Mexico's main cell phone operators, was passed practically unanimously.

Mexico is riddled with organized crime, ranging from express-kidnappings for cash in pirate taxis to drug cartel shootouts, and an apparent surge in kidnappings for ransom recently sparked a big protest march in the capital.

Most of Mexico's 80 million mobile phones are prepaid handsets with a given number of minutes of use that can be bought in stores without any identification. The phones can be topped up with more minutes via vendors on street corners.

The bill's sponsors said there are around 700 criminal bands, some of them operating from prison cells, that use cell phones to extract extortion and kidnap ransom payments.

Bill sponsor Sen. Mario Lopez said mobile operators will be required to store all cell phone information -- call logs, text and voice messages -- for one year for all users.

The registered information will remain in private hands, Lopez said, and would only be made available via judicial authorization to track down criminals.

Critics of the bill have said that if the register fell into the wrong hands it could be used for even more crimes

"We have to be very careful with this information," admitted Lopez, of the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party.

"The phone that gets lost, the phone that is loaned out or resold, users must report that immediately to service providers so that it is blocked, because if a crime is committed the user will be responsible," Lopez said.

Existing post-paid mobile phones, where the bills are sent to homes and offices, are rarely used by criminal gangs because the owners can easily be tracked down. But the names of post-paid users will still be placed on the national register.

Former finance minister Francisco Gil Diaz, the head of local unit of Spain's Telefonica, has criticized the bill, saying he doubted it would work to clamp down on crime and just handed more bureaucracy to cell phone operators.

Telefonica Mexico is the country's second-largest mobile phone operator behind America Movil, the largest cell phone player in Latin America and controlled by billionaire Carlos Slim.

Slim has not made his stance on the bill public. (Additional reporting by Miguel Angel Gutierrez)