cartel is waging war on official security forces with tactics used by Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Land mines and drones are now part of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel's (CJNG) arsenal as the deadly group continues to shed blood in Michoacán.Their recent attacks have been compared to those suffered by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two decades.
Fortunately however the CJNG are yet to match the power of explosives used by terrorist organisations Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.Last Saturday a landmine explosion damaged an armoured military vehicle, leaving 10 soldiers injured, the newspaper Milenio reports.That was just one of several handmade mines that the cartel has been making by filling pipes with gunpowder, two-millimeter-thick pieces of metal, batteries, a detonator and other items.
The CJNG then hide them under rubble ready to blow up on contact which is what happened last weekend and would have killed the group of 10 soldiers had their Sand Cat vehicle not been armoured.
The army is now tasked with unearthing landmines before more lives are brutally taken. On Wednesday alone, 12 landmines were defused in the municipality of Tepalcatepec, where the CJNG locked conflict with the rival gang Cárteles Unidos.National Autonomous University of Mexico's Daniel Castillo Santander told Milenio: "Let’s remember what happened to the United States army, the greatest military power; when it went into Iraq, when they said ‘we’ve won the war, we don’t have any visible enemy,’ the insurgents started to adapt, to generate new tactics and they made these mines.
Read more on dailystar.co.uk