Slog
News & ArtsTuesday, January 17, 2012
Drugs Cartels Build Homemade Tanks
Posted by Brendan Kiley on Tue, Jan 17, 2012 at 9:09 AM
Look at this monster of a motor vehicle. Impressive.
Here's the story behind the "rhino trucks," the first of which was found after a skirmish between the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel (who first employed the Zetas as a paramilitary wing before the Zetas realized they could out-gun and out-mayhem their bosses):
Built on three-axle truck beds, they had room for 20 armed men, one official said. They were covered with inch-thick steel, which could withstand 50-caliber fire, and each had been equipped with insulation.
Sanho Tree, a drug policy expert at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington-based research group, said the vehicles reminded him of the Monitor and the Merrimack, two American warships that fought the first naval battle between ironclad ships during the Civil War.
“This is first-generation technology, like the Monitor and Merrimack,” he said. And because the drug business is so Darwinian, he added, with submarines replacing smuggling boats, and light, quiet aircraft replacing heavy, loud ones, the trucks will quite likely mutate to include “shielding for tires, their Achilles’ heel, blast pads in the flooring, up-armoring, et cetera.”
Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
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And since it lacks any sort of integrated heavy firepower, it's more like a DIY APC than a tank. Still a lot tougher than a technical, though.
It's hip to be snide and condescending about everything in the world. Except, in this case you are being snide and condescending about a civil war caused by us that causes real death, torture, and misery all over mexico every year. Impressive, indeed. If you can't show some respect, at least acknowledge the fact that this isn't a video game.
PS
Way to milk something from June. Only six months old!
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