You can’t order a mortar on alibaba, and it requires much more training to use it effectively than flying a drone.

Mortars are also large and heavy and require a crew to serve as well as spotters to direct fire which means you need to have people closer to your target and working communications.

All of this complicates the logistics considerably which makes them less effective and more dangerous to their operators.

Effective mortar attacks can be fairly easily countered in the long term by jamming radios, cutting brush and removing other natural hiding spots and by killing experienced mortar crews.

Drones can be piloted by nearly anyone and with basic consumer grade equipment they can also be piloted from anywhere in the world as long as you have an internet connection.

> You can’t order a mortar on alibaba

Well you can’t order C4 on Alibaba either. But if you can get C4 you can likely get a mortar.

You can get C4 much more easily than you think plastic explosive has a ton of civilian uses from demolition to mining and oil and gas.

Mortars and mortar rounds on the other hand aren’t as easy to get and require trained crews to employ.

A mortar tube without training is nothing more than an exciting way to get yourself and your mates killed.

Mortars also have the nasty habit of drawing counter-battery fire, which occasionally leaves you short of a mortar and mortar crew. Drones are much lower risk to the operator, which is exactly why the US uses them too.

I’m not sure cartels have much trouble finding military hardware or people trained to use it

Believe it or not they do, small arms are much easier to get than heavy weapons they also are much easier to use. The cartels ironically rely on a lot of weapons coming in from the US especially as the remnants of Cold War era proxy wars in central and South America die out and they can no longer benefit from both the US and the former USSR dumping enough weaponry to invade Europe into the jungles.

Weapons don’t grow on trees, they are easy to get as long as there are conflicts in the region which are sponsored by superpowers or other patrons with sufficient resources that facilitate those shipments once those end they become rarer and rare.

Smack the back of a mortar round of pavement, and you now have an impact grenade. Hang that under a drone, and you have a way to drop impact grenades on unsuspecting targets from an altitude high enough that the drone can’t be detected visually.

ISIS was doing just that a few years ago. There were/are plans floating around on the Internet for stabilizing fins for common mortar rounds - 3D print those, and you’re 90% of the way there.