Mexican cartels now using ‘tanks’

For the drug cartel boss who has everything, the latest piece of military hardware is the “narco tank.” Today’s competitive crime mafias in Mexico are no longer satisfied with bazookas, rocket-propelled grenades or land mines. The Mexican military has discovered that gangsters south of Texas are building armored assault vehicles, with gun turrets, inch-thick armor plates, firing ports and bulletproof glass. The Mexican media and military call the assault vehicles “monstruos,” monster trucks. In Mexico, their appearance on the Internet has gone viral. On the front page of Reforma, a national daily newspaper, a photograph Monday of a monster truck was accompanied by the headline: “And this doesn’t look like a war?” The Mexican army announced Sunday night that a military convoy on routine patrol raided a warehouse in Camargo, Tamaulipas, across the border from Rio Grande City, Tex., and seized two dump trucks that had been rigged with steel plates to protect gunmen. 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. Complete with battering rams...more