How to find quest in Just Cause 2

1. Use a mod (for example Less Psychic Police or Less Vehicle Heat) to increase the threshold of police reaction
2. Run/fly away. Police are only aware of you within a certain range, so if you call in either an extraction (can't with heat, forgot about that), or a black market chopper and fly up really high, the heat will fade. Then just bail out/reingress and continue the fun.

I found the exact same thing. The only thing I could surmise is that it is a way of increasing the difficulty curve.

There is probably some rubbish justification for it along the lines of "the Panauan military is taking measures to stop you from destabilising their country" or some rubbish. Dunno why they wouldn't just put a bullet in your head and go back to dictatoring...

As for the resource constraints, I'm not overly convinced that they affect anything. Having completed the game, nothing really seemed to change much, other than the aforementioned increase in difficulty when getting 100% on settlements.