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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | August 2006 
Santiago Vasconcelos Seeks US Help on Arms Trade
 Mark Stevenson - Associated Press
| | Mexico's top anti-drug prosecutor, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, explains how Mexico's main drug cartels have joined up into two rival alliances, and how their use of Mara street gang members has increased the level of brutality in Mexicos drug gang battles, while speaking to a small group of foreign correspondents, Thursday, Aug. 3, 2006. Santiago Vasconcelos said violence would probably continue, but called on the United States and Venezuela to do more to stop arms and drug trafficking. (AP/Marco Ugarte) |
Mexico's top organized crime prosecutor called on U.S. officials Thursday to do more to halt illegal weapons trafficking to help Mexico stem a wave of bloody, drug-fueled violence.
Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos said the rising brutality of recent drug executions was due to hit men taking over cartels after their bosses were arrested.
"It's foreseeable that this type of violence will continue like this," Santiago Vasconcelos told a small group of foreign reporters, "because the Mexican government will never make any deals" with drug gangs.
The Gulf and Tijuana gangs have formed an alliance, and are fighting a group led by Joaquin Guzman and Ismael Zambada — Mexico's two most-wanted drug lords — and several others.
The two alliances have begun using heavier weapons, like rocket-propelled grenades, Santiago Vasconcelos said. Most of those weapons come from the United States, and he called on Washington to do more to halt their flow south.
"We know that there is a large amount of arms traffic ... in the United States, that they have to bring under control," Santiago Vasconcelos said. "There's this incredibly big black market that has to be controlled."
"The last time we spoke with (U.S. officials), we told them ... 'If these types of weapons weren't flowing through, they'd have to use stones to attack each other,'" he said.
He said Mexico is also troubled by increasing amounts of cocaine as well as small-scale heroin shipments arriving from Venezuelan airports.
"It's worrisome, it's historic, this is the first time we've seen that quantity of cocaine ... we have not seen such flights since the jets used by Amado," he said, referring to Amado Carrillo Fuentes, a drug lord known as "Lord of the Skies" for smuggling huge amounts of cocaine aboard jets in the 1990s.
"When we see so much repeated trafficking of heroin, they have to adjust their controls," he said of the Venezuelan government. |
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