I have been trying to I. D. Subcomandantes Retro rifle..
So far I have seen 3 pics of it.  And it looks like a 723.

It has an A2 upper,delta ring, 14.5 pencil barrel, birdcage flash hider or A2 birdcage.
slab side lower, Fiberlite collapsing stock, A2 pistol grip. (30 round Orlite magazine)

Definitly colt gray in color,  another picture from the other side shows the selector in the vertical (semi) position.

Could this rifle be a semi-auto colt AR-15A2 carbine???

I don't see the sear pin!


Large front pin (ala SP1)


ETA: A2 FH!

Mag inserted with safety "off".  Obviously a man with plenty of time on his hands (two watches).  Looks awsome with all that pistol ammo in loops, but then again being a shot-caller and all he probably isn't crawling around in the mud and stuff all day or actually doing reloads under stress, so guess that'll do.

There is another picture of him with his rifle on his left shoulder and you can see the other side of it very clearly...I would post it but I don't know how to upload photos...

Anyway it was the slab side lower that really threw me off.  Is it on an SP1 lower?

(edited to add ) It definitely has the large screw front slotted receiver pin bolt.

OldDirtyAR

If that's an SP-1, I wonder if it's been converted to auto?

If it is, is's got a DIAS or a lightning link. Not the way I'd do it if I was serious.

The beads on the fringe on the sling mean you are a badass. Who is this guy? What have I missed?

ETA: never mind - I looked it up.

A2 hider, you can see the peel washer in pic1 and no slots on the bottom in pic2.

16" barrel

looks like hes not the only one with that setup..



"Zapatista "Subcomandante Marcos," right, appears in the rebel-controlled area of the southeastern Mexican state in 1994. (Australfoto/Douglas Engle)"

What bothers me about Guerilla movements is how, like FARC for example, the lines quickly become blurred between being 'freedom fighters' and criminals controlling the drug trade. The Taliban (whom we supported in the '80's when they were fighting the Russians) would be another good example of this, as would Sendero Luminoso. If you want to get simplistic and talk about communists, remember Guatamala right wing death squads trained in the School of the Americas, or Noriega, who was our pal for some time. Peron and yes, Saddam Hussein would also be good examples of right-wing dictators who took things too far. If When there is another revolution in this country, the challenge will be to not become as corrupt as the regime that is being replaced. Other examples of this biting us in the ass would be Ho Chi Minh and yes, Mao Tse Tung, who both were trained by US Special Forces (OSS, Rangers) during WWII. Irony is the way of the world it seems.

this thread is about retro carbines...thanks for playing though

Sorry I got OT - you're right. Those carbines were probabaly sold to them by the ATF, seeing as they are Colt Commercial. Is that better?

LOL

Meow.

I love it.

back to the OT. So that is an A2 upper, A1(SP?) lower, commercial mag, hippie fringe sling, and what else? Oh, yeah, He's a Gorilla. No telling where they picked up that setup back around '94. They might cruise the Tulsa gunshow.

That's an A2 upper, not an A1, and also Sergeant Sucks-em-off's (Subcomandante's) A1 front sight base appears to be cast, not forged...

ETA ...well - appears cast in some photos and forged in another...

I'd almost be willing to bet in the other picture posted with another guy equipped with one of those rifles that its actually the same exact gun and they have to share... lol

16" barrel.  

R6520 Gov't Carbine, early-version, semi-auto only unless converted.  Readily available for years, and quite popular still in ban-states.  

The AR6520 was finally discontinued from the Colt catalog in favor of the AR6720 (same thing, but flattop) last year along with the MT6601, and supposedly the AR6450, making all current production Colts flattop recevers.  

~Augee

The problem is assuming their goals are the same as our goals.

Saying Saddam "went to far" is a gross understatement, was a  monster from the outset, just read about what happened to the Iraqi congress in the first hours when Saddam took power.

Am I the only one who wants to buy a couple Orlites now?

Well IIRC, George Bush Sr. was Dept. Director in charge of operations in the CIA at the time, and they rigged the election to put him in power, just as they did in Vietnam and other countries. (Tried it in Australia even.) Ultimately we are responsible for a lot of bad shit that's gone down in the world, and tend not to play the human rights card until our boy pisses us off. In Saddam's case, he started charging us more for oil which didn't set well with his handlers. He was a monster, and we're the ones who helped him into power. Just look what it eventually cost us, and I'm not just talking about money.

Sorry I got OT on this, but it's a possibility that the ATF  may have allowed that particular rifle across the border in their infinite wisdom. I thought it was ironic enough to touch on. It was clearly a commercial model, which I'm fairly sure are not usually sold outside the U.S. That means it came from here. A US border agent was shot with one of the guns the ATF let through, and I'm just tired of regular people trying to do their jobs paying for the mistakes of some idiots in the Federal gov't. Rant over.

Doubtful. The photographs of Subcomandante' Marcos are from the mid 90's

Back on track. I am going to make a sling like that.

I note that he is proud enough about his country to wear a flag pin.

Actually, the US never supported the Taliban. We supported seven (7) various mujahideen groups, ranging from the loyalist NIFA to the whacked-out HIG.  The groups ran the Russians out in 1989 and overthrew the last Communist government in 1992, but they fell out among themselves... hard. At that time, Kabul wasn't destroyed yet. Hekmatyar shelled Kabul while the Tajiks and Hazaras went at each other throughout 1992 and 1993. Of those groups, only two Pashtun ones initially made common cause with the Taliban. We never gave a dime or a lousy 7.62mm round to Bin Laden, either. Common myth, but not true. The Taliban seized most of the country by the end of 96 but were not able to take the Panjshir Valley and fell out with the head of the Uzbeks, Dostum. All the smaller ethnic minorities then joined the northern alliance and ganged up on the Pashtun Taliban.

The principal supporters of the Taliban were (and are) the Pakistani ISI. We did funnel a lot of aid through the ISI and they stockpiled it and used it to support terror and jihad groups not on;y in Afghanistan but also in India. The two groups that join the Taliban today are the Haqqani Network (a fragment of the Hezb-i Islami Khalis) and the Hezb-i Islami Gulbuddin or HIG.  

Subcomandante Marcos is (was?) an ethnically white Mexican leader of the Chiapas guerilla movement. That movement never received an iota of US support (never sought any). As I understand it they looked for support for Cuba but Cuba was way too broke. I would guess his SP1 (and it's definitely an SP1, as others in the thread have established) probably was bought and sent south by a supporter in some radical university cell in the USA.



Nobody learned to be a death squad at the Schoo for the Americas. I wonder about these stories sometimes... nobody cares about 100 million killed for Marx and Lenin, they weep for the 3000 Leninists whacked by Pinochet.


Yes, we did support Noriega, and his (left-wing, inciedentally) predecessor/mentor/just as crooket $#!+heel Torrijos) on the Let It Be Our Bastard theory.


Perón was a man of the left. Just not a Communist. The Right in Argentina fought him....


Probably not a good example of a right-wing dictator, Hussein's ideology was socialist and pan-Arab (that's what Ba'ath was supposed to be). In time of course, all these jerks turn into a low-rent Louis XIV in a tacky uniform.


That's the challenge in every revolution, and in most cases it fails and the people wind up worse off, just the positions of oligarchs change. To take it out of contemporary politics, consider the French Revolution and its sequelae. The American Revolution is a rare counterexample.


This is another common myth. The only US officer that spent any significant time with Mao was Evans Carlson, before the war. The US had no liaison at all to Mao. We did send a team under Maj. Archimedes Patti to meet with Ho. They didn't provide any training to speak of, but did meet and spend time with him in 1945, Patti wanted the US to support Vietnam's independence, but someone, probably the President (not sure if Roosevelt or Truman), had already promised the French and Dutch a free hand in their former Pacific colonies.

In the early years of the Vietnam war, the VC were well-provided with US weapons, but analysis of these weapons by USSF showed that they were a mixed bag of weapons once Lend-Leased to China or France and captured by Asian communist forces, and weapons the communists n Vietnam got from the ARVN by theft, corruption or battlefield recovery.

Which brings us back to retro AR-15s and back on topic, finally!

We have established that Marcos had an SP1 carbine with some unusual characteristics that certainly date it in the very late eighties or early nineties. And I've suggested that an American supporter straw-bought it (the US left has been hip to this, in the 1970s and 1980s they acquired weapons for various European terrorist groups including ETA in Spain and PIRA in Northern Ireland that way). But there's another possibility, that it was a recovery (battlefield/theft/corruption) from a Mexican police order. US cops often used SP1s back in the day, and various military and law enforcement foreign aid would have been available to Mexico, contingent on spending the money buying US stuff. So that is a second plausible explanation for why he has the SP1.

Second –– I've mentioned before the vast mountains of supplies that we lost in China, and in the first brutal year in Korea where the term "bugging out" entered the English language. Likewise, during the 1980s we were bedeviled by supplies of vast quantities of US weapons to people who did not like us much. And to some who did (i.e. the Karen rebels in Burma, who were always pro-US even when the US was backing the Burmese junta). The M16s carried by the FMLN and Sandinistas often traced back to Vietnam combat losses or weapons supplied to the ARVNs, Lon Nol forces, even Vang Pao's Free Hmong. Sometimes these weapons change hands for money, sometimes for reasons of political affinity, sometimes just to mess with the heads of the USA.

Israel has also captured M16A1s that were supplied to Vietnam and Cambodia in the early seventies.

EDITED: fixed busted quotes

That carbine might have either been taken from the large Narco ranchers who's land they took over in 94 or from the Mexican Army barracks that they stormed, the federal army troops carry all sorts of non-standard gear down there. That set-up seems to be extremely common.



wish this pic was bigger- looks like Chiapas police with something similar.

Found this on wikipedia:
"Colt Model no. R6521 AR-15A2 Government Carbine (Special export model with receiver block and large pin upper receiver)" A1 profile barrel etc., might be the one? Think it might have to be because the R6520 had the small pivot pin, but maybe my understanding of the whole pin size issue is off.

Here's a whole thread about them http://www.ar15.com/archive/topic.html?b=2&f=29&t=152691
"The carbine was a small contract for a forien order which was cancelled and colt sold the guns to the open retail market here in the usa to regain cost and expenses. "



Also found an old photo of Marcos from the magazine La Jornada that shows him with his carbine and revolver in hand.
Revolver: Colt model 66

His also has the Pachmayr finger-groove grips like those in the above picture, rather than the wood grips


Interestingly, In  some of the photos he's got an old Orlite in the carbine (designed for the Israelis, dropped in the late 80s due to reliability issues)


In an interview he talks about carrying the shotgun shells in the bandolier because it's reminiscent of the Zapatista's namesake, Emilliano Zapata.

I'll post a pic of the article if I get my camera working

The 6521 is the "Colt Carbine" marked version.  Almost all of the existing ones live in Connecticut, because they're the only "preban" Colt lower that's not banned by name in CT.  

6520s came with both large and small pivot pins, and both slabside and "fenced" lowers.

Their designation was originally R6520, then LE6520, and finally (IIRC) AR6520 before they were discontinued in favor of the AR6720.    

~Augee