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 News from Around the Americas | August 2005 
U.S. Arms Fuel Drug Violence On Border
 Jonathan Roeder & Jorge Alejandro Medellín
The Herald Mexico/El Universal
| | Mexico's strict controls, coupled with loose ones in the United States, have turned the nation into a lucrative market for small arms traffickers. |
As the U.S. government continues to criticize Mexico for failing to control rising drug-related violence, many of the guns used in the recent wave of killings are smuggled into Mexico from the United States, according to defense officials.
Last week, police in Nuevo Laredo used machine guns, grenades and a rocket launcher to attack a house allegedly occupied by drug smugglers, and the residents answered with powerful guns of their own. On Monday, two grenades hurled during a cockfight in Jalisco killed four people and injured dozens of others. The conflict was believed to be drug-related.
The recent headlines show that drug traffickers are not shying away from using more powerful and sophisticated weaponry and most of it is believed to be smuggled in from the United States.
"It's logical that illegal arms enter from the United States because the United States is an enormous market for guns," said security specialist Jorge Chabat, who works at the Center for Economic Teaching and Research. "It is easy to get the guns there and it is very easy to cross the border with them."
"It's a problem that goes back years," he added. "In diplomatic reunions, the Mexican government constantly complains to the United States about the arms trafficking and says the U.S. government should do more to prevent it."
Recent seizures have shown the weapons obtained by organized crime are increasingly powerful.
Military and federal officials have seized from drug traffickers Barrett 50 mm machine guns. Too powerful to be hand held, these weapons are mounted on vehicles and can pierce conventional car armor or even light military vehicles. Authorities have also confiscated lighter machine guns, grenades and rocket launchers.
Sources from the National Defense Secretariat (Sedena) have identified numerous cities on the border with the United States through which illegal arms flow. The arms are also hidden among legitimate merchandise packed on boats.
Naval officials say they are fighting a losing battle in trying to control the illegal flow.
"It is physically impossible to check the thousands of containers that arrive at the nation's principle ports, so inspections are forced to be random," said one official.
According to Sedena, many of the guns entering Mexico illegally from the south border are leftovers from the civil wars that plagued Central American nations such as El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua in recent decades.
Bilateral Cooperation
Jorge Serrano Gutiérrez, who heads operations on illegal arms at the federal Attorney General's Office (PGR), says cooperation with the United States is good.
"We have close communication with U.S. agencies in charge of following the arms trade," Serrano Gutiérrez said in a recent interview. "We exchange information with them. We give them tips, they pass us tips."
However, Chabat said he wasn't sure the exchange was going as well as it might.
"Yes, there is cooperation, but I am not sure how effective it is," he said. "Part of the problem is the lack of gun control (in the United States). And if there is no control over who buys guns within the country, it is really tough to control them being smuggled over a border 3,000 kilometers long."
Mexico's gun control laws are much stricter than in the United States. Individuals may purchase pistols or lighter caliber rifles, but only after obtaining a license following an exhaustive background check and then registering the firearm with the federal government.
Relaxed gun legislation in the United States especially in border states such as Arizona and Texas and the long and porous U.S.-Mexico border facilitate the flow of arms from north to south. However, Serrano Gutiérrez said that federal officials have so far been unable to pinpoint where the trade is most active.
He added an international agreement approved at a recent United Nations conference required nations that manufacture arms to mark weapons so they can be more easily traced.
"This is going to help us out a lot," Serrano Gutiérrez said.
When asked if more sophisticated weapons might cross Mexico's borders, he responded, "Up until now, the arms that we have seized are about as powerful as they get. I don't think they can get any more powerful." |
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