Trini, an explosives-detecting dog, with his trainer and handler at a display of makeshift explosive artifacts recovered by the state police force bomb squad in Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico. Cartels are also deploying military-grade weapons and drones. Photo / Adriana Zehbrauskas, The New York Times
The explosions began before dawn, shaking the ground and rattling windows in the darkness. With them, residents said, came the telltale buzz of drones.
“We knew the devil was coming,” said Ana, a mother-of-six who grabbed her children and ran as gunmen moved in to do battle.
Weeks later, her town still bore scars.
Holes were blasted into roofs where drones had dropped bombs. Craters gaped where landmines had exploded. Spent .50-calibre shells glinted in the dirt.
The clash was not in a war zone of Ukraine or the Middle East, and the combatants did not belong to any army.
They were criminal groups, armed with military-grade weapons and fighting in Mexico’s western state of Michoacan.
Some of Mexico’s most formidable cartels are locked in a vicious arms race on multiple fronts.
On one side, they are battling the Mexican Government, which is under intense pressure from the United States to crack down on the drug trade.
They are also fighting one another for territory and resources, leaving a deadly toll among their members and the civilians caught in between.
The US Pentagon has begun using military force against certain drug cartels designated as terrorist groups.
The Trump Administration directive has infuriated Mexico’s leaders, who have rejected the idea of US forces on Mexican soil.
Despite their disagreements about what actions to take, officials and security analysts in both countries agree that cartels are amassing new levels of firepower, transforming some groups into full-fledged paramilitary forces.
Drug-smugglers and cartel gunmen no longer wield just handguns or automatic rifles, officials and experts say, but also Claymore land mines, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars built from gas-tank tubes and armoured trucks mounted with heavy machine guns.
They are burying improvised explosive devices to kill their rivals and modifying drones bought online to make attack drones, loaded with toxic chemicals and bombs.
“We cannot continue to just treat these guys as local street gangs,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in an interview with EWTN, a Catholic television network, last month.
“They have weaponry that looks like what terrorists, in some cases armies, have.”
Mexican officials say that most of the military-grade weapons that powerful groups have acquired originated in the US, and that up to 500,000 firearms are smuggled south each year.
The officials say that criminals also reverse-engineer weapons, sometimes 3D printing parts to build them.
Nowhere are the consequences of this varied and growing arsenal starker than in the rugged hills of Tierra Caliente in Michoacan, a swathe of fertile farmland and lush mountains that has become a strategic corridor for drug cultivation.
The battle for control there between rival groups – including the Knights Templar, La Familia Michoacana and the group with the most military power, the Jalisco New Generation cartel – has pushed the fight into a new, more brutal era.
Like other armed groups around the world, the cartels combine old and new weapons to deadly effect.
Drones circle overhead in Michoacan, while roads and footpaths used by soldiers and civilians alike are seeded with IEDs.
Over the past two years, the state has recorded more mine explosions than anywhere else in Mexico, a chilling marker of the drug war’s evolution, experts say.
Caught between the shifting front lines of gangs and security forces are dozens of farming villages, their lemon and avocado fields tucked deep in the hills.
Many have no phone service, effectively leaving them to fend for themselves. Ana, the mother in the attacked town, El Guayabo, gave only her first name for fear of retribution by criminals.
When fighting nears, most residents flee, sometimes for weeks or months. Some never return, leaving towns deserted.
In nearly two years, more than 2000 people have been displaced in Michoacan, rights groups say. Those who stay risk being trapped in the crossfire.
In the past five months alone, at least 10 civilians, including a 14-year-old boy, have been killed by hidden explosives while tending crops or walking to school, according to Julio Franco, an adviser with the Human Security Observatory, a group tracking violence.
Security analysts and Mexican officials say the cartels began to militarise in the mid-2000s, when Los Zetas, a group formed by former Army members, brought battlefield discipline, encrypted communications, and heavy weaponry to organised crime.
As Los Zetas acquired more of a military arsenal, so did its rivals, trying to compete.
Mexico’s security forces, too, responded with ever more sophisticated equipment and tactics. The US has also brought its own technology to bear, including by recently using drones that hunt for fentanyl labs.
In 2015, a sign of the transformation under way became evident when cartel gunmen in Jalisco state brought down a Mexican Army helicopter with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, killing six soldiers. It was the first time a criminal group had destroyed a military aircraft in Mexico.
By 2022, Mexican military intelligence reported that criminal groups were “routinely” deploying IEDs, drones, and new tactics.
“We are witnessing the latest phase of the war: a move towards paramilitary-style tactics and capabilities,” said Alexei Chavez, a security analyst who has advised the Mexican Army.
Just as drones, cheap and easy to modify, have proliferated in the battlefields of Ukraine, their use by cartels – for surveillance and precision bombing – has surged drastically in recent years, according to government officials, security experts and analysts.
Drones allow criminals “to attack rivals or security forces with far greater precision” than the crude bombs they once relied on, said Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on non-state armed groups at the Brookings Institution.
“With dronesthe cartels have gained the ability to strike deep into enemy territory – to hit targets that would have been unreachable before.”
To prepare for heightened pressure from the Trump Administration, criminal groups also started importing scanners to detect government drones and hiring more people with experience at using and tracking the aircraft, cartel operatives have said in recent interviews with the New York Times. As another step, the operatives said, they increased arms shipments from the US.
Facing these new threats, Mexico’s police have often found themselves badly outgunned.
“They’ve been a step ahead of us for years,” said Alfredo Ortega, Michoacan’s former state security chief, who stepped down last year.
“They have unlimited resources and access to weapons and technology our local forces simply don’t. They came at us with Barrett .50-calibre semiautomatic rifles, and our local police forces didn’t even have anything close to that.”
To counter the threat, Ortega in 2023 formed a specialised anti-bomb unit of police officers, many with military backgrounds, led by Captain Carlos Gomez, a former Army officer and expert in explosive ordnance disposal.
In one operation last year, Gomez stumbled on sprawling compounds that functioned as assembly plants, he said. Inside, workers had welded makeshift armour on to vehicles, fashioned homemade explosives, and built improvised mortars from gas-tank tubes, packing them with explosives.
His unit of 18 members is severely outmatched by the scale of the threat it faces, he said.
Even Mexico’s military lacks mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, known as MRAPs, like those developed by the US to shield troops from IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As improvised explosives became a hallmark of insurgencies, militaries around the world adopted the armoured vehicles to save lives. Mexico has not, Gomez said.
In July, Gomez and his men responded to a farmer’s call about a possible roadside bomb. After they arrived, they found an entire cartel complex nearby and recovered 258 IEDs, disarming each over 14 hours in the sweltering heat.
The next morning, their convoy was ambushed by gunmen, said Gomez, who had a bullet tear through his hand that left a long, swollen scar.
In the past two years alone, he said, his team has seized more than 2000 IEDs and homemade bombs meant to be used with drones or simple mortars.
Most are rudimentary contraptions. Casings are commonly made from plastic bottles, cut drainpipes and even fire extinguishers. The devices are fitted with steel, glass and plastic fins to stabilise the bombs in flight.
Inside, they pack homemade gunpowder and ammonium nitrate fuel oil, an explosive often used in mining and construction.
“These artifacts can deliver a blast almost the same as factory-made bombs,” Gomez said, pointing at a display of dozens of improvised bombs deactivated by his unit.
“And they’re always experimenting, always finding new ways to cause more harm.”
In one recent discovery in June, he said, his unit found a 40mm grenade modified for drone delivery, the first of its kind documented in Mexico.
Cartels are also increasingly making chemical bombs, authorities say, loading drones with compounds like aluminium phosphide, a toxic pesticide that can trigger hypoxia and circulatory failure, as well as other pesticides and poisons.
In April, a cartel dropped such bombs on three towns in southeastern Michoacán, where residents told local news outlets that they felt itching, burning skin, and, in some cases, a feeling of suffocation.
Ortega said the surge in drones and IEDs coincided with the arrival of Colombian nationals, former soldiers recruited to train cartel fighters.
In only seven months, state authorities have arrested 53 foreigners accused of having links to organised crime, among them 23 Colombians and 22 Venezuelans.
The Mexican Government has deployed thousands of troops to states like Michoacan.
President Claudia Sheinbaum said in March that any real strategy against organised crime should begin by cutting off access to “high-powered, military-use weapons”. She said that 70% of those in Mexico came from the US.
The Government has pursued two lawsuits against American gunmakers, accusing them of sending an “iron river” of weapons into cartel hands. The US Supreme Court unanimously rejected one of those suits, ruling that legislation shields gunmakers from liability in certain cases.
The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said in a statement that it works “closely with both domestic and international law enforcement partners to counter illegal firearms trafficking”.
The agency recently noted that cartels use a range of weapons, including the Barrett M82 .50-calibre semiautomatic rifle, a gun designed to pierce light vehicles and fortified positions. It is often used by snipers.
The cartels frequently flaunt their weapons, with gunmen posting videos and photographs online or in WhatsApp groups. In one recent image, a squad in military-style uniforms bearing the Jalisco cartel insignia cradled weapons including a Browning M2 .50-calibre heavy machine gun, a battlefield staple for the US Army and militaries worldwide.
The weapons leave a path of destruction after them.
Pablo Fajardo, a resident of El Guayabo, recently returned to find his two-bedroom home a charred ruin, holes in its roof from bomber drones.
“Fear and sadness, that’s all I feel,” he said.
“All that effort and work I put into building my little house, and it was destroyed in a matter of days.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Paulina Villegas
Photographs by: Adriana Zehbrauskas
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