Soldiers and civilians have been killed in separate incidents in recent months involving ‘narco mines’ planted in western Mexico.
In one moment, a column of soldiers and military pickups creeps along a dirt road in western Mexico. In the next, a massive explosion sends debris and a body flying.
The ground where a soldier stood seconds earlier is a gaping hole, the aftermath of an improvised land mine planted by one of the region’s warring drug cartels.
That soldier was killed and four others were injured in the January explosion, which was captured in a grainy video that circulated on social media. Then last month, four more soldiers died and nine others were wounded when another explosive device detonated in the same region.
This week, three laborers were killed and two others injured by yet another mine, leaving a truck split in half and human remains scattered across a dusty road.
The series of blasts in the Tierra Caliente — an area along the border of Jalisco and Michoacán states that has long been a hot zone for cartel warfare — mark an alarming escalation of violence in Mexico as criminal groups arm themselves with ever-more sophisticated and deadly weaponry. The drug war in Mexico has come to resemble actual warfare.
For years the cartels have been engaged in an arms race, building powerful arsenals that now include grenade launchers, drones rigged with explosives and tank-like vehicles known as “monsters” that are equipped with machine gun turrets and steel armor.
But the widespread use of improvised land mines is new. Experts blame their rise in part on an influx into Mexico of mercenary fighters from Colombia, where explosives played a central role in a long-running war between leftist guerrilla groups and far-right paramilitaries.
The scourge of conflicts around the globe, abhorred for killing and maiming unsuspecting civilians and lingering hidden for decades, mines provide cartels with a tactical edge on the battlefield and widen the potential for collateral damage.
“You can kill more enemies from greater distance and limit direct confrontation,” said Tim Sloan, who headed the Mexico City office of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives until 2022. “Less members can inflict more bodily harm while in enemy territory.”
Some of the devices have tripwires sensitive enough to be set off by pedestrians — not just the heavy armored trucks used by the military or cartels. “If a person, cow, vehicle, steps onto the switch it will explode,” Sloan said.
Last year, four police officers and two civilians were killed after an anonymous caller sent a tip about a clandestine burial site outside Guadalajara. Hidden along the road were improvised explosive devices, seven of which were set off as a convoy of police vehicles passed.
Amid growing concern about the problem, the U.S. government has increased its support to Mexican law enforcement and the military, donating bomb suits and detection equipment and training Mexican officials how to investigate crime scenes where explosives have detonated.
Mexico’s armed forces deactivated 2,241 improvised explosive devices in 17 states between August 2021 and July 2023, according to public records. Most were in Michoacán.
In the Tierra Caliente, where a patchwork of criminal groups is fighting soldiers, the powerful Jalisco New Generation cartel and one another, the new technology has brought fresh terror.
“You live in fear every day — of land mines, of drones, of assassins,” said a rancher from the outskirts of El Aguaje, a contested town on the front lines of a war between the Jalisco cartel — known by its Spanish initials, CJNG — and an alliance of criminal groups called the United Cartels.
