Car Bombs and Grenades in Mexico: Look South to FARC, Maras, and Chavez

Ray Walser / July 19, 2010

Reporting on the July 16 car bombing in Ciudad Juarez led one journalist to evoke images of the battle against Islamist terrorist in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The attack, seemingly lifted from an al-Qaeda playbook, demonstrated once again that the cartels are a step ahead of both an already guarded public and federal police, who have recently taken over command from the military of the battle against traffickers in Ciudad Juarez, a city across the border from El Paso, Texas.

The proper analogy is not the Middle East or Afghanistan but Colombia. There the use of car bombs and IEDS is also a hallmark of the narco-terrorists of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Most recently, FARC detonated a car bomb that killed 9 in the Colombian city of Buenaventura. Car bombs were also a dreaded weapon of choice used by the notorious Pablo Escobar, head of the deadly Medellin cartel in the 1980s and 1990s. The numerous bombings carried out by the Medellin Cartel included a 1989 car bombing of a police headquarters in Bogotá that killed 80. (more…)