Mexican cartel ingenouity

Ioan Grillo has a Time article about ingenuity in a bad cause:

As Mexican gangsters shot it out with troops in the border city of Reynosa this month, residents posted warnings on social media of where not to drive. Not only was the gunfire itself a problem, but cartel gunmen had covered some roads with perilous spikes that they call ponchallantas or “tire punchers”. The hazard can appear suddenly, as the cartels have customized vans with tubes that eject the spikes. If a car drives into them too fast, it can spin into a lethal crash. Gangsters also set grounded vehicles on fire, creating more debris in the way of security forces.
The tire punchers used in the 17 April 2015 firefight, in which soldiers arrested an alleged kingpin called José Tiburcio Hernández, are the latest example of the homemade battle technology developed by Mexico’s cartels. Gangsters have also built fighting vehicles with four inch-thick armor, sometimes referred to as “monsters” or “narco tanks.” And in October of 2014, police in the western state of Jalisco even busted a clandestine factory where traffickers assembled their own assault rifles.
The development of this narco technology south of the Rio Grande has grabbed the attention of security thinkers like Robert Bunker, an external researcher for the Army War College. He compares it to the homemade war tools used by insurgent forces round the world. “Each battle technology has been adapted to both the conflict environment and the ideological and illicit economic motivations of the irregular forces,” Bunker says. “Caltrops and spike traps have been a component of warfare going back to the ancient Greeks. In many ways, we can think of them as pre-modern landmines.”
While there is no declared war in Mexico, fighting between rival cartels and the security forces has claimed more than eighty thousand lives since 2007, according to a count by Mexico’s federal intelligence agency. Gangsters use traditional weapons, including Kalashnikovs, which are often smuggled from the United Sates. The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosive has traced over seventy thousand guns seized in Mexico to American gun sellers since 2009. Cartels also have rocket-propelled grenades, which may have been stolen from Central American military caches.
However, it is harder for them to buy actual military vehicles leading to them inventing their own. The Zetas cartel, which was led by former soldiers, first developed its own armored vehicles, converting regular trucks and building others from scratch. Their “monsters” resemble machines from the fantasy road wars of Mad Max, with gun turrets, battering rams and walls of armor.
The Mexican army has taken many of these makeshift tanks off the road, holding more than forty of them in its base in Reynosa. But some are still at large and causing havoc. Last year, a Zeta monster attacked a hotel in the border town of Ciudad Mier, where executives from the oil services multinational Weatherford were staying. (The executives were shaken but unscathed).

Rico says what if guys this smart were doing something actually useful...