The Truth About Cartel Rockets and Ukraine

Alleged video of the Gulf Cartel with an AT4 anti-tank weapon set off unproven claims it was from US supplies to Ukraine. The Russian embassy encouraged them.

The latest video emerging from the narco-sphere shows the gunman pacing up a road in blue jeans and a light-pink shirt. A Kalashnikov is strewn on his left hip but on his right side he’s carrying what appears to be a meter-long anti-tank weapon. His backpack boasts a martial logo with an eagle, scorpion and phoenix and the words in Spanish for “bravery,” “immortal force” and “transformation.” In the center are the initials CDG, short for Cartel del Golfo - the paramilitary mafia with headquarters in Matamoros, over the river from Brownsville, Texas.

Cartels churn out various genres of videos they put on social media. Some paint them as the good guys handing out presents on children’s day. In others, masked capos read out messages aimed at the government or rivals. The painfully common splatter videos reveal killers torturing and beheading their victims. And films like this show off their hardware and troops. In their narrative warfare, they aim to makes their faction look stronger in the battle to traffic drugs, control human smuggling and run other rackets.

Mexican and foreign media outlets have long wrestled with how to cover the narco propaganda. There are tough questions on whether you should amplify their messages or show their brutality and potential comeback from gangsters. But the latest video managed to provoke a whole new level of fall out, zapping round the internet along with bogus statements to get entangled in the argument over the war six thousand miles away in Ukraine.

Encouraged by a statement from the Russian embassy in Mexico, social media accounts made the unsubstantiated claim that weapons Washington supplies to Kyiv are being diverted to cartels. This explosive assertion linked two of the biggest issues driving the U.S. populist right: the Russo-Ukrainian War and the southern border.

The video first circulated on social media before Milenio, one of Mexico’s most prominent TV networks, picked it up. Milenio has done stellar work on the drug war and suffered threats and attacks but it made a key mistake. It identified the weapon as a Javelin, stressing how these are used in Ukraine. The FGM-148 Javelin is an advanced rocket launcher worth about $176,000 a piece that is almost unseen in Latin America but Ukrainians have been using them to take out Russian tanks.

In reality, the weapon looks like an AT4, an older and much cheaper anti-material weapon that is used by military forces around the world including several South American armies. Michael Burgoyne, a retired U.S. colonel who served as Army Attache in Mexico, as well as deploying in Iraq and Afghanistan, explained to me the limits of the AT4. “It’s not super capable so it’s good for light armor,” he said. “It’s direct attack, it’s not like a Javelin which does top attack, that has been so effective in Ukraine.”

The Russian embassy followed the TV report by tweeting out a statement. It identified the weapon as an AT4 and raised the question of whether it had been diverted from Ukraine. “While the West continues supplying arms without thinking to the Kyiv regime and making a lot of money with this business, we are probably seeing the consequences in Mexico.”

The Citizen Free Press, a right wing outlet with a popular Twitter account, followed with the most outlandish claim. It linked to a Milenio TV report, and said that “dozens of U.S. AT-4 weapons systems, which were originally shipped to Ukraine, have been purchased by the Cartel Golfo in Mexico.” This was wrong on two points. First, Milenio did not claim there were dozens of the AT4’s and most importantly it did not say the Gulf Cartel had got them from Ukraine.

After criticism, Twitter slapped a community note on it saying it “misrepresents the information.” But still, the tweet had more than 2 million views within 15 hours and comments such as, “The Mexican cartels are 100% proxies of the evil regime in Washington DC.”

So what do we really know about the latest video and the heavy weapons going to cartels? The first problem is that we haven’t verified the source or details of the image. We can’t be certain when it was taken or if it was altered. We also can’t be sure if it is a live unused weapon; army vet and author Ryan McBeth says the yellow band shows it is an inert training device. This could mean though that the cartel are training with AT4’s.

Even presuming the Gulf Cartel have a live AT4, however, this would not be shocking. Mexican cartels have wielded this level armaments for at least a decade. Mexican troops seized various RPG-7s, a Soviet made rocket launcher, including from a bust in 2012. In the 2013 video below, I went into the so-called Narco Museum of items the Mexican army has captured from gangsters, and found an American M-72 LAW (light anti tank weapon).

A significant source of such weapons is from corrupt soldiers or loosely guarded arsenals across Latin America. In 2010, thieves stole 22 RPG-7s from a base in Honduras. El Salvador has vast stockpiles of grenades left over from its civil war in the 1980s and many make their way onto the blackmarket. A Brazilian gangster known as Seaside Freddy acquired weapons from soldiers in Suriname, Bolivia and Paraguay and traded them with Colombian guerillas for cocaine. Mexico’s defense department also reported more than 15,000 guns went missing from police forces here between 2006 and 2018.

The United States retail market is the biggest source for firearms for Mexican gangsters, including rifles that fire 50 caliber bullets that slice through police vehicles. There are also reports of theft of weapons from the U.S. army at home. However, Burgoyne says security for bigger arms such as anti-tank systems is very high. “The systems we have for maintaining control of our munitions and our weapons systems is really tight. It’s extremely rare than any type of weapons systems is going to walk out.”

Swedish company SAAB has been making the AT4 since the 1980s and one source claims more than a million have been delivered. Several forces in the continent wield them, including the Colombian and Brazilian armies. Back in 2009, the Colombian armed forces also seized several AT4s from guerrillas of the cocaine-communist FARC.

Still, the fact that cartels have had such weapons for several years is still alarming and has fueled the bloodshed that has devestated the country and empowers traffickers of the perilous fentanyl. Burgoyne says rival cartels continue to escalate to outgun each other.

“What we are continuing to see in Mexico is the use of heavier weapons because you have armored vehicles,” he says. “You have monstruos, you have people running around in armored SUV’s. So you get this arms race going where having an AK or an M-16 variant isn’t enough and you need to penetrate armor. That’s why we’ve seen them go to various 50 cals. That is why you see RPG’s show up from time to time. That’s why improvised explosive devices are showing up.”

Juan Alberto Cedillo - A monstruo, or improvised armored vehicle in Tamaulipas, Mexico.

Text copyright by Ioan Grillo and CrashOutMedia 2023.