Mexican cartels may have new US firepower

The man sat on a worn-out office chair in the backroom of a market in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, amid vegetable trimmings and a stack of milk crates. He wore a ski mask.

He asked to be referred by a nickname, “El Flaco” – the skinny guy – so authorities could not identify him. He works as a mercenary, he said, and had come to discuss a closely guarded secret of Mexico’s most powerful cartels: The FGM 148 Javelin infrared-guided, missile launcher.

El Flaco maintains he has been trained and now trains others to perform special operations using shoulderfired weapons, including the Javelin.

David Saucedo, a security consultant, confirmed the Javelin is being used by cartels and suggested they could be revealing this information as a show of force to Mexico’s incoming president, who is to take power later this year.

“It’s to show the government, perhaps this one or the incoming one, that they have the ability to launch attacks of this kind with the weaponry they have,” Saucedo said.

If El Flaco is telling the truth, Javelins would be among the most extreme examples of the escalation in the arms race between cartels and Mexican military. Cartels’ arsenals now include beltfed Gatling guns, drone bombs and land mines.

The U.S.-made Javelin is the most sophisticated shoulder-fired missile launcher in the world, with a range of a mile and a half.

U.S. officials roundly denied that cartels have Javelins as did a high-level Mexican security official, but despite close scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Defense, there are holes in the U.S. tracking system. During the Iraq War in 2003, for instance, the department lost track of 35 Javelins provided to Iraqi allied forces.

Back in Mexico, a federal Secretary of Security official, who agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, said authorities confiscated two Javelins from a faction of the New Generation Jalisco Cartel.

And a similar weapon may have already been secretly used against highprofile Mexican government officials.

The police chief of the state of Aguascalientes, Porfirio Sánchez Mendoza, was flying across the capital city in his government helicopter in 2022, when the machine suddenly spiraled out of control.

An online video shows the chopper nose-dive into a vacant lot and explode in a ball of flames. Four people were on board with the secretary. All of them died.

The crash was one in a string of similar accidents in Mexico in recent years. Like many, it was attributed to mechanical failures.

But the internal forensics report tells another story, according to Saucedo, who has reviewed the internal documents and has done security consulting for Mexican political candidates.

Saucedo spoke to the forensics official on the case, who did an analysis of the shrapnel, and said there was only one type of projectile that matched the results.

“He said the only missile with these types of characteristics is the Javelin,” Saucedo said.

El Flaco, the mercenary, also said the chopper was taken down by a Javelin and that he knows the assailant who fired it.

“I trained him,” he said.

The Secretary of Security official confirmed the helicopter was downed by an explosive projectile, but could not confirm the weapon.

El Flaco said cartels began buying guided missile launchers in part because rival criminal gangs were building tank-like attack vehicles whose armor can no longer be pierced even by the high-powered, .50-caliber Barrett rifle. He said threats by some U.S. politicians, including former President Donald Trump, to bomb Mexican cartels also played a role.

It also was becoming clear to cartel leaders, he said, that the Mexican military was prepared to escalate its raids in the cartel stronghold city of Culiacán, including when they arrested Ovidio Guzmán, son of El Chapo Guzmán.

In response, cartel leaders began to look for even bigger weaponry to counter the attacks.

“If the military gets a new, big weapon, the cartel will always want something even bigger,” El Flaco said.

The Sinaloa Cartel has sought to purchase surface-to-air missiles and rocket launchers in the past, including in 2009 when three cartel members negotiated prices with people who turned out to be undercover agents with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Federal agents arrested all three individuals.

Mexican authorities seized a heatguided FIM-92 Stinger missile, which can bring down a commercial airliner.

In a news release at the time, Thomas Brandon with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said it was clear that “criminal organizations and drug cartels based in Mexico continue to look toward the United States as a source of supply for firearms and in this case military grade weapons.”

Since 2018, the Mexican government has reported seizing a dozen rocket launchers and 56 grenade launchers from cartels.

Fernando José Ventura, a former Jalisco Cartel member who fled the criminal organization earlier this year, described to local news outlets – and to USA TODAY – how he watched 200 drone bombs dropped on one community over a 24-hour period.

“They bombed nonstop for an entire day,” Ventura said.

The Mexican military has deactivated more than 2,800 land mines since 2018, public records show, more than half of them in the past two years. Earlier this year, authorities in the western state of Michoacán also seized 117 homemade drone bombs from a factory owned by the Jalisco Cartel.

The increase in cartel firepower comes as some U.S. elected officials have sought to declare Mexican cartels terrorist organizations and have repeatedly suggested the U.S. should send the military to kill cartel leaders on their own turf.

Republican U.S. Reps. Dan Crenshaw of Texas and Mike Waltz of Florida introduced legislation to that effect in Congress in 2022. And, in 2020, President Donald Trump floated the idea of bombing cartel-run fentanyl laboratories, according to a book by Mark Esper, his defense secretary at the time.

More recently, Trump has said that if he is reelected, he will send Special Forces to kill drug lords in Mexico.

Speaking through his ski mask, El Flaco wanted to make one thing clear: The cartel is well aware of those threats and will not hesitate to fight back.

That includes using a Javelin, if necessary. His bosses, he said, “would not think twice to use it against (U.S. forces), if they dare enter the country.”