Mexican Cartels Build Mad Max Narco Tanks

Hugh Pickens writes "Not content with building their own submarines, using bazookas, rocket-propelled grenades or land mines, drug cartels are now building armored assault vehicles, complete with gun turrets, inch-thick armor plates, firing ports and bulletproof glass. The monsters look like a cross between a handmade assault vehicle used by a Somali warlord and something out of a post-apocalyptic Mad Max movie, and have already appeared in several confrontations with Mexican authorities. A look inside a captured 'monster' truck (YouTube video) reveals that in addition to swiveling turrets to shoot in any direction, they have hatches and peepholes for snipers, their spacious interiors can fit as many as 20 armed men, and they are coated with polyurethane for insulation and to reduce noise. Still Patrick Corcoran writes that the armored vehicles are not a game changer. 'While the "narco-tanks," as the vehicles are often called, make for great blog fodder and provide entertaining videos, seeing their rise as a significant escalation in Mexico's drug war would be wrongheaded,' writes Corcoran. 'In the end, the "tanks" are a sexy narrative, but these mistaken notions about the criminals' "military might" not only inflate the power of Mexico's groups far beyond any reasonable assessment, they also obscure the problem, and its potential solutions.'"

Comments

solutions...

[Azghoul]

"its potential solutions."

What, you mean like ending the hideous and utterly failed drug 'war'?

Re:solutions...

[Hazel Bergeron]

It hasn't failed at all. It's providing a tidy profit for all those who intended to gain from it.

Re:solutions...

[hairyfeet]

What failure? Private prisons funnel tons of dollars straight from the tax payers to the multinational cartels, a single drug bust can ensure you have a large underclass ready for exploitation for everything from booze and smokes to lotto tickets and check cashing places, it helps to keep the population under control while giving a nice excuse to make the police more and more like a military operating on home soil, while also helping to get rid of those pesky little things like the fourth amendment...oh...were you actually thinking it was about stopping drugs? Silly peasant it is about profits for the megacorps, just like everything else.

After all if it was about "The People" then pot would be legal, we wouldn't be fighting three wars while funneling ever more money to Wall Street and the MIC, nobody would touch Medicaid and Medicare, the military would be less than half the size and not building new aircraft carriers and superweapons like we had a war planned with the Ruskies for next Tuesday, but where is the room for massive profits and corruption in that? That is why your "vote" is a choice between "Rich corporate ass kisser in a blue suit" or "Rich corporate ass kisser in a slightly darker blue suit". Any choice that might actually listen to the people would cut into profits! Mustn't have that now, can we?

BTW how's that "Hope and Change" thing working out? Turned out to be nothing but Dubya dipped in chocolate huh? I'm afraid the late Bill Hicks nailed it more than 20 years ago. How sad is it the man has been gone for two decades and if anything his words are even more true now?

bullshit.

[unity100]

the person who wrote the article apparently doesnt know shit about military technology and history.

an armored personnel carrier is an armored personnel carrier. the fact that these are produced, and used means that the party using them has the means to produce them and use them. this shows an escalation of the situation.

Re:bullshit.

[ThunderBird89]

Except that this is not an APC. It's a truck with shit bolted and welded on, not much more than a glorified technical. It's just like Marvin Heemeyer's armored bulldozer, only constructed not for defense, but offense, and are only proof against small arms, as the officer said, not heavy weapons or anti-materiel/anti-tank rifles.

The fact that the drug lords are deploying these means they're desperate: smuggling operations fail, so the only way for them to make money is to try and bust through the border. It's certainly an escalation, but not a very dangerous one if handled correctly.
These things, judging by the looks of them, are not cheap to make, despite being improvised. If the military makes one big push now, ramps up Predator patrols, deploys Barret M82-s/XM109-s (if they're completed, the 25mm HE round should certainly prove adequate to defeat the weaker portions of the armor while remaining man-portable) and other heavy weapons, possibly even tank patrols along the border and MLRS units stationed at regular intervals, they might bankrupt the drug lords, or at least convince them that trying to assault the US border will keep costing more than it makes for them if they keep losing technicals at the same rate.
However, if they don't man up and replace jeep patrols with something that packs more punch, these things are going d what they were made to do, and will befeat the border guards, returning the revenue to the drug cartels.

Problem?

[DrBoumBoum]

they also obscure the problem, and its potential solutions.

The problem is prohibition and the solution is to stop it. Difficult to grasp?