Mexico's Vigilantes Are Building Scrappy DIY Tanks to Fight Narcos Ioan Grillo - GlobalPost
go to original October 1, 2014

Francisco Espinosa, a Mexican cattle rancher turned vigilante, with one of his force's latest toys. (Ioan Grillo/GlobalPost)

TEPALCATEPEC, Mexico — Back in 1981, the cult movie “Mad Max II: The Road Warrior” turned Australia into a post-apocalyptic wasteland where bandits fought in beefed-up trucks with huge battering rams and gun turrets. Fast-forward three decades to Mexico’s drug war, and vigilantes and gangsters have made such techno-barbaric road wars a reality.

The difference is that their real-life homemade tanks have much thicker armor and look even more nuts.

The first improvised fighting vehicles were made by the notoriously bloodthirsty Zetas cartel, headed by former soldiers who defected to the drug gangs. Combating marines, federal police, and other cartels, they created customized trucks known as “monstros,” or monsters, that could withstand machine-gun fire and grenades. Security forces hit hard against the Zetas and now have more than 40 of these monsters held at an army base in Reynosa, south of Texas. Others still lurk on dirt roads, with one used to attack a hotel in the border town of Ciudad Mier in April.

Farther southwest in Michoacan state, vigilantes fighting the Knights Templar cartel this year followed the lead to build their own trucks for battle. “We were going into heavy gunfire and we needed protection. So we made these monsters of our own, based on the vehicles that the Zetas had built,” says Francisco Espinosa, a 26-year-old cattle rancher who fought among the vigilantes.

Read the full story here on GlobalPost

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