The cartel? Anything they can get their hands on really, with a strong preference for the top shelf gear of their opposing army. You can see this in videos of people accidentally encountering cartel members: There’s a lot of similarities with normal militaries, but with a few more grenade launchers and heavy machine guns than what one would normally expect.
As an example: I’m an OK machine gunner (or, at least, I used to be decades ago), and while my preferred machine gun (Rheinmetall MG3) is probably not top shelf anymore, I’ve trained more in tactics with that gun than some cartel member has with whatever fully decked out kit they were given. My job wasn’t intimidation. My job wasn’t cartel security. My job wasn’t keeping track of people straying into our territory. My job was to be the best machine gunner I could be with the hardware that was standardized for my role. And I spent almost all day every day training with that as a premise.
I am of course not saying that I’m better than cartel members but they have other responsibilities too, whereas my focus was on one thing only, and the reast of the squad practiced our roles together extensively.
To approach the subject from a different angle: Let’s say you have someone under you, employed to ha dle territorial security- You supply them with the best that your contacts can provide for whatever money you can spare. And in Mexico (which I assume is a reasonable location for your story), this would probably mean an HMG akin to what the US army would use; M249
The cartel? Anything they can get their hands on really, with a strong preference for the top shelf gear of their opposing army. You can see this in videos of people accidentally encountering cartel members: There’s a lot of similarities with normal militaries, but with a few more grenade launchers and heavy machine guns than what one would normally expect.
As an example: I’m an OK machine gunner (or, at least, I used to be decades ago), and while my preferred machine gun (Rheinmetall MG3) is probably not top shelf anymore, I’ve trained more in tactics with that gun than some cartel member has with whatever fully decked out kit they were given. My job wasn’t intimidation. My job wasn’t cartel security. My job wasn’t keeping track of people straying into our territory. My job was to be the best machine gunner I could be with the hardware that was standardized for my role. And I spent almost all day every day training with that as a premise.
I am of course not saying that I’m better than cartel members but they have other responsibilities too, whereas my focus was on one thing only, and the reast of the squad practiced our roles together extensively.
To approach the subject from a different angle: Let’s say you have someone under you, employed to ha dle territorial security- You supply them with the best that your contacts can provide for whatever money you can spare. And in Mexico (which I assume is a reasonable location for your story), this would probably mean an HMG akin to what the US army would use; M249