“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 land mines had exploded. Spent .50-caliber shells glinted in the dirt.
The clash was not in 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 just a few hundred miles from the U.S. border, in Mexico’s western state of Michoacán.
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. But they are also fighting one another for territory and resources, leaving a deadly toll among their members and the civilians caught in between.
Now, President Trump has ordered the Pentagon to begin using military force against certain drug cartels designated as terrorist groups. The directive has infuriated Mexico’s leaders, who have rejected the idea of U.S. forces on Mexican soil. But 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 armored 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,” 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 United States, and that up to half a million firearms are smuggled south each year. The officials say that criminals also reverse-engineer weapons, sometimes 3-D 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 Michoacán, a swath 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.
A War Transformed
Like other armed groups around the world, the cartels combine old and new weapons to deadly effect. Drones circle overhead in Michoacán, while roads and footpaths used by soldiers and civilians alike are seeded with I.E.D.s.
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 at all, leaving towns deserted. In nearly two years, more than 2,000 people have been displaced in Michoacán, 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 militarize in the mid-2000s, when Los Zetas, a group formed by former army members, brought battlefield discipline, encrypted communications and heavy weaponry to organized 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 United States 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 underway 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 I.E.D.s, drones and new tactics.
“We are witnessing the latest phase of the war: a move toward paramilitary-style tactics and capabilities,” said Alexei Chávez, a security analyst who has advised the Mexican Army.
Just as drones, cheap and easy to modify, have proliferated in the fields 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 nonstate armed groups at the Brookings Institution. “With drones,” she said, “the 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 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 United States.
18 Officers. Thousands of Bombs.
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, Michoacán’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-caliber semiautomatic rifles, and our local police forces didn’t even have anything close to that.”
To counter the threat, Mr. Ortega in 2023 formed a specialized anti-bomb unit of police officers, many with military backgrounds, led by Capt. Mario Gómez, a former army officer and expert in explosive ordnance disposal.
In one operation last year, Captain Gómez stumbled on sprawling compounds that functioned as assembly plants, he said. Inside, workers had welded makeshift armor onto 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 United States to shield troops from I.E.D.s in Iraq and Afghanistan. As improvised explosives became a hallmark of insurgencies, militaries around the world adopted the armored vehicles to save lives. Mexico has not, Captain Gómez said.
In July, Captain Gómez 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 improvised explosive devices, disarming each over 14 hours in the sweltering heat.
The next morning, their convoy was ambushed by gunmen, said Captain Gómez, 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 2,000 I.E.D.s 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 stabilize 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,” Captain Gómez 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 40-millimeter grenade modified for drone delivery, the first of its kind documented in Mexico.
Cartels are also increasingly making chemical bombs, the authorities say, loading drones with compounds like aluminum 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.
Mr. Ortega said the surge in drones and I.E.D.s coincided with the arrival of Colombian nationals, former soldiers recruited to train cartel fighters. In only seven months, the state authorities have arrested 53 foreigners accused of having links to organized crime, among them 23 Colombians and 22 Venezuelans.
The Mexican government, under pressure from Mr. Trump, has pursued an aggressive crackdown, deploying thousands of troops to states like Michoacán. But officials have also blamed the United States for fueling the violence by manufacturing the guns that wind up in cartel hands.
President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said in March that any real strategy against organized crime should begin by cutting off access to “high-powered, military-use weapons.” She said that 70 percent of those in Mexico came from the United States.
The government has pursued two lawsuits against American gunmakers, accusing them of sending an “iron river” of weapons into cartel hands. The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected one of those suits, ruling that legislation shields gun makers from liability in certain cases.
The U.S. 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-caliber semiautomatic rifle, a gun designed to pierce light vehicles and fortified positions. It is often used by snipers.
The cartels themselves 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-caliber heavy machine gun, a battlefield staple for the U.S. Army and militaries worldwide.
The weapons leave a path of destruction in their wake.
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.”” [1]
1. With Drones and I.E.D.s, Mexico’s Cartels Adopt Arms of Modern War. Villegas, Paulina; Zehbrauskas, Adriana. New York Times (Online) New York Times Company. Sep 1, 2025.
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