The Mexican Army said that drug cartels are using more bombs or improvised explosive devices (IEDs) as victims of cartel bombing are up from 16 in 2022.
According to Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval on Tuesday, 42 soldiers, police officers, and suspects have been wounded by IEDs so far in 2023.
Drone-carried bombs, which were unheard of in Mexico before 2020, were particularly on the rise. 260 such incidents have been reported so far this year. However, even that number may be an underestimate because bomb-dropping drone strikes are reportedly a daily occurrence in some parts of the western state of Michoacan.
In total, 556 IEDs of all types, including roadside, drone-carried, and car bombs, were found in 2023. The army stated in a news release that 2,803 have been discovered since the present administration took office in December 2018.
“The Armed Forces have teams that assist the authorities [and] civilians for the deactivation and destruction of these devices used by members of organized crime,” officials said in a press release.
1,411 explosive devices, or more than half of all those discovered under the current administration, were discovered in Michoacan, where the Jalisco cartel has been engaged in a bloody turf war with a coalition of local gangs. Most of the rest of the bombs were found in the states of Guanajuato and Jalisco.
This comes after authorities said that a drug cartel bomb strike in the southern state of Jalisco used a false tip of a mass grave to draw police into a trap, killing four police officers and two civilians.
The incident occurred recently when a volunteer searcher received information from an anonymous caller regarding what was allegedly a burial site next to a road in Tlajomulco, Jalisco. IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, were buried by the cartel under the road, and they were later set off as a police vehicle passed. The IEDs were so powerful that they left holes in the road, injured 14 people, and damaged four vehicles.
As a safety precaution, police involvement in anonymous tip searches was temporarily suspended.
The U.S. has been seeing massive migrant numbers since President Joe Biden announced last year that he would be lifting “Title 42,” a controversial border policy implemented by former President Donald Trump back in March 2020 that allowed the border agency to turn migrants away.
