Salta province, Argentina, 2002:

On the morning of Nov. 5, [the phones] were strangely silent.

“We thought it was really unusual,” said Major Ramón Galván, the airport chief. “We went to check the lines, and found out we had lost all external phone communications. All the area’s telephone cables had been stolen during the night.”

… During the last six months, as the country’s economic crisis has deepened, stealing telephone cables has become increasingly common, authorities say. Thieves are taking the cables because of their copper wires, which can be sold as scrap metal on the open market. Each phone cable carries between 50 and 2,000 pairs of wires. The thicker the cable, the more copper it contains.

About 2,765 kilometers (1,715 miles) of cables have been stolen over the last year, said Pablo Talamoni, a spokesman for Telecom. Much of the stolen copper is apparently being shipped abroad, although authorities aren’t sure who is making the shipments.

… Cable theft has always existed in Argentina, telephone company officials say, but in the past it was generally done as a prank. With the economic crisis now gripping the country, stealing cables has become a serious business, particularly in poor neighborhoods outside Buenos Aires, where the telephone companies have not invested in underground cabling.

Last week, after months of complaints from the telephone companies and other firms that have suffered as a result of the cable thefts, the Administración Federal de Ingresos Públicos, the Argentine equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service, began investigating 33 companies that were exporting copper to determine the source of the metal.

So far, investigators are saying very little about the investigation. In a report released to the public on Nov. 11, the AFIP disclosed that most of the companies being examined in the investigation are receiving their copper from the same sources. However, the report did not name those sources.

The revenue service report also noted that some companies have apparently supplied false information (wrong addresses, ghost offices) to the government to disguise the origin of the material. Other companies cannot account in a verifiable way for the manner in which they bought the copper, the report said.

[Ricardo Sametband: 11.20.02: Wired]