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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 haphazard stack of milk crates. He wore a blue shirt, worn jeans – and 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 to perform special operations using shoulder-fired weapons, including the Javelin. He said he now trains others to use it as well.
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. “It’s their secret weapon, but they can use it if necessary. That’s my impression.”
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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 belt-fed gatling guns, drone bombs and land mines, all with potential to provoke elected U.S. officials who have advocated invading Mexico.
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. Its main purpose is to destroy military tanks, but it also has the capacity to take down low-flying helicopters, according to the owner’s manual.
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. ISIS was found to have a Javelin in Syria, Kurdish fighters there also obtained a Javelin and the weapon was found at a Libyan warlord base.
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 high-profile Mexican government officials.
Helicopter crash may not have been what it seemed
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. Saucedo – who has done security consulting for Mexican political candidates including for governor and senate – said the report details how an explosive projectile pierced the helicopter’s door, he said, and debris scattered in a circle inconsistent with a mechanical failure.
The forensics point to a munition similar to a Javelin, he said, adding that, “part of the helicopter detached due to the impact.”
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 make of the weapon.
Cartel arms race has amped up in recent years
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 Barret rifle. He said threats by some U.S. politicians, including 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 attacks in the cartel stronghold city of Culiacán, including when they arrested Ovidio Guzmán, son of El Chapo Guzmán. To carry out these high-profile raids, the military began more frequently using belt-fed, Gatling miniguns – which can fire more than 4,000 rounds a minute – from helicopter gunships.
In response, cartel leaders began to look for even bigger weaponry to counter the attacks.
“If the military gets a new, big weapon,” El Flaco said at the Sinaloa market. “The cartel will always want something even bigger.”
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.
Mexican authorities seized a heat-guided FIM-92 Stinger missile, which can bring down a commercial airliner. They also tried to buy a Dragon Fire anti-tank missile launcher, the predecessor to the Javelin, and two shoulder-fired AT4, light anti-tank rocket launchers. Federal agents arrested all three individuals.
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 towards the United States as a source of supply for firearms and in this case military grade weapons such as grenades, machine guns, and Man-Portable Air Defense.”
Seven years later, Mexican authorities seized a FIM-43 Redeye infrared-guided missile launcher – which can down a fighter jet – from a cartel member in the northern state of Chihuahua. Since 2018, the Mexican government has reported seizing a dozen rocket launchers and 56 grenade launchers from cartels.
Criminal groups are not only increasing their firepower to fight the military, but also to target communities in southern states such as Michoacán and Guerrero to increase their territory by taking over land from farmers and rival 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 M134 minigun has begun appearing on crime scenes across the country as well – a weapon with six barrels that can destroy a small car in minutes. Leaked Mexican military documents, shared with news outlets by the transparency organization DDO Secrets, show the defense ministry seized its first minigun in 2018.
ATF Director Steven Dettelbach confirmed, at a forum last June, that cartels now have miniguns.
“Weapons like this present an extreme danger when they land in the hands of criminals,” Dettelbach said. “They’re seeking a level of weaponry that outguns Mexican law enforcement.”
Threats from U.S. officials known to crime bosses
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 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.
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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 in the back of the Sinaloa market, El Flaco was barely audible above the din of marketers outside and cars rumbling by. But he 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.”
“That would create a terrible war,” El Flaco said. “We don’t let Mexican forces stop us, much less a foreign force.”
