MEXICAN TERRORIST GANGS

In Mexico, armoring no longer cuts it Posted: 02 Jun 2011 08:42 AM PDT Armoring a vehicle to protect against attack in Mexico no longer is enough. That’s the upshot of an analysis of a recent ambush of a convoy of one criminal gang by another gang. The analysis comes from Stratfor, the Austin, Texas, intelligence consulting firm and it looks at the May 27 ambush of a Los Zetas convoy in Nayarit state on the Pacific Coast. The attack was the biggest and bloodiest of modern times, as far as I can tell, leaving 29 Zetas dead, and a few wounded. I looked at the photos of the ambush and was astonished at its magnitude. Vehicles riddled with bullets, bodies wearing bulletproof armor piled atop each other. But Stratfor analyst Scott Stewart’s trained eye saw more than I did in one photo. He noticed that the right wheel of an armored Ford Expedition had been blown completely off.  With no evidence of a crater in the road indicating that the damage had been caused by a mine or improvised explosive device (IED), it would appear that the vehicle was struck and disabled by a well-placed shot from something like a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) or M72 LAW rocket, both of which have been seen in cartel arsenals. The use of armored vehicles, Stewart writes, “can lead to a false sense of security.” Even if an armored car has those tires that can run when flat, it doesn’t do much good if a rocket has blown the entire wheel off. He goes on to write that having even a large number of bodyguards is not absolute protection anymore. The presumed people behind the ambush were part of a Sinaloa Cartel unit. To kill 29 Zetas, they probably numbered at least double that, if not more. Neither armoring nor robust security details are enough in Mexico.