And it’s not just arms, it’s military training and procedures. The cartel mentioned most often in the article (the Zetas) literally WERE the army - they were special forces and commandos that decided to become the muscle for the Gulf Cartel because it paid more.
Then the Gulf Cartel learned the problems of relying on mercenaries when the Zetas turned on them as well, becoming one of the most dominant cartels in the world.
Anyway, to answer your question: the cartels have tanks, helicopters, ships, submarines, mortars, grenades and missiles.
A bunch of highly trained ex-commandos with billions in budget and hundreds of thousands of “troops” (in aggregate) that doesn’t much care about hurting civilians can do a lot of damage.
> There was a general shifting of position and a group clearing of throats.
> 'What about mercenaries?' said Boggis.
> 'The problem with mercenaries,' said the Patrician, 'is that they need to be paid to start fighting. And, unless you are very lucky, you end up paying them even more to stop -'
I had the impression that cartels, north of the border, prefer mail bombs to bullets. Yet the narco tanks that image search gives me are uniformly flat-bottomed, suggesting that IEDs are not common south of the border.
A few years ago there was a live news broadcast on Mexican TV of a running downtown street battle between the cops/feds/army and one of the cartels. I think it was in Juarez. We watched in real time as the state forces retreated, outmanned and outgunned.
It's so different to the reality that most of us inhabit that it's hard to imagine.
It might have been Sinaloa, where the police captured one of the sons of "El chapo".
There was actually something fishy about that event, and some even think it was a setup of the local government against the federal government.
No doubt there was extreme fishiness involved. One common trait of most corrupt societies is the concentration of power at the top of the pyramid, and how the same few names and families keep popping up all over the landscape.
The current Mexican cartels are offshoots of the military / federal police. A large part of their military / police organization is taking bribes, if not outright working for cartels. It's tragic. They are well armed and more importantly, know how to use them.
> In May 2010 an NPR report collected allegations from dozens of sources, including U.S. and Mexican media, Mexican police officials, politicians, academics, and others, that Sinaloa Cartel had infiltrated and corrupted the Mexican federal government and the Mexican military by bribery and other means. According to a report by the U.S. Army Intelligence section in Leavenworth, over a 6-year period, of the 250,000 soldiers in the Mexican Army, 150,000 deserted and went into the drug industry.
