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 Editorials | Issues | January 2008 
US, Mexico Set Sights on Stopping Flow of Weapons to Cartels
 Alfredo Corchado & Laurence Iliff - The Dallas Morning News
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| | Mexican police have been fighting heavily-armed drugs gangs. | | |
Faced with spiraling drug violence along the border, senior U.S. officials met with their Mexican counterparts Wednesday and announced steps to stem the flow of illegal weapons into Mexico.
Officials said that many of the weapons – including powerful handguns and semiautomatic assault rifles – are purchased legally at shops and gun shows, and that Houston and Dallas are two of the top sources. The guns are typically carried south across the border by multiple couriers whom some officials referred to as an "army of ants."
Even black-market military-style weapons, such as .50-caliber machine guns, bazookas and grenades, have been seized in raids.
The increasingly sophisticated and powerful weapons pose a risk on both sides of the border, officials said, but especially in Mexico, where at least 105 people have been killed in drug-related violence since 2008 began.
"Drug-trafficking organizations have made life at the border increasingly dangerous," Michael J. Sullivan, acting director of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said in El Paso. "And this danger extends across the border and into several parts of Mexico."
In Mexico City, U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said the goal of what officials are calling Project Gunrunner is to dry up the cartels' arms supply in the U.S. by punishing gun dealers who knowingly sell weapons to "straw" buyers who then resell them illegally.
"I certainly foresee a tightening-up of the way gun dealers distribute guns if, in fact, they are selling to straw purchasers," Mr. Mukasey said after meeting with his Mexican counterpart, Eduardo Medina Mora, and Mexican President Felipe Calderón.
"I see tighter enforcement of regulations requiring that they get proper identification and that they check these people before they sell guns, and inevitably we are going to find people who are not doing what they ought to do, and they will be prosecuted," Mr. Mukasey said in an interview.
The new measures will also give Mexican law enforcement officials greater access to the eTrace computer database in the United States, allowing them to use the serial numbers to trace weapons used in Mexican crimes to U.S. gun dealers.
The database, currently accessible at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, will be made available to officials at all nine U.S. consulates in Mexico, beginning with those in Monterrey, Hermosillo and Guadalajara. A Spanish-language version of the database might also be created, U.S. officials said.
Under Project Gunrunner, ATF is adding 35 special agents along the border. The multi-agency El Paso Intelligence Center will receive three additional ATF agents, for a total of 10, and an additional investigator, for a total of four. Other agents will be stationed in Mexico. EPIC will serve as a clearinghouse for ATF operations and will gather intelligence on the cartels responsible for the violence.
"The weapons we're seeing now is stuff normally used for war," said one ATF official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "These guys are armed to the teeth, probably because they have unlimited budgets."
Some of the weapons "can take out an airplane," the official said. "The Mexican narco has come a long way."
One of the most popular weapons is the FN 57, a Belgian-made handgun known in Mexico as mata policias – "cop killer" – because the bullets can penetrate body armor, the official said.
Law enforcement officials have been frequent targets in the latest wave of violence, a sign that the cartels are responding aggressively to Mr. Calderón's campaign against them, authorities say. At least seven law enforcement officials have been killed this year.
Mr. Calderón's campaign has deployed hundreds of troops and federal agents to trouble spots in several states and has especially targeted the Gulf cartel, based along the Texas border, authorities say.
But the "core infrastructure of the Gulf organization and the Zetas remains intact," said a U.S. law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The Zetas are the paramilitary enforcement arm of the Gulf cartel.
"The campaign has instilled fear in narcos who felt they owned the region," the U.S. official said. "Now they're nervous, looking both ways, hiding, and that is very positive because any disruption hurts their business. But we're looking at a protracted war here. There is no light at the end of the tunnel yet."
Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhán has said that as many as 2,000 weapons enter Mexico from the U.S. each day, most through Texas and Arizona. The weapons are key in the drug-related bloodshed, which last year killed more than 2,500 people, a record.
ATF officials said the guns are often bought legally at gun shows and gun shops throughout Texas, particularly in Houston, because of its proximity to the border, and Dallas, because of the direct route along Interstate 35 to Nuevo Laredo.
In a "straw purchase," the weapons are typically bought for drug traffickers by other people – including friends, relatives and, increasingly, women – who are legally entitled to own a gun in Texas. Mexican officials applauded the announcement.
In Mexico City, Mr. Medina Mora acknowledged the spike in drug violence and compared it to the spate of execution-style killings and beheadings that peaked in March and April of last year. He called cartel hit men "cowards" for killing the family members of police officers, including the wife and 12-year-old daughter of an officer killed Tuesday in Tijuana.
Mr. Mukasey compared the drug traffickers to terrorists for their grisly deeds. "It's the same kind of message the terrorists send: 'You will do what we want or else,' " he said.
He said the drug violence is likely to get worse before it gets better, because the cartels and their paramilitary hit men are now fighting back against the government crackdown.
The drug traffickers "may very well be now so constrained that they fell the necessity to hit back the way they are hitting back," he said. "That's not to say that we are rejoicing in the violence, but we have no choice but to continue the pressure and to confront them."
The Bush administration will lobby Congress to support the so-called Merida Initiative, a program of U.S. assistance for anti-drug operations that would give Mexico $500 million in equipment and training this year as part of a three-year, $1.4 billion package.
Mr. Mukasey said the administration has a strong argument, given Mr. Calderón's unprecedented cooperation with the U.S. in the drug fight since he took office one year ago.
"Talking about all of the arrests and all of the extraditions and all of the intelligence that's going back and forth is going to be a major selling point, and we're going to be beating the drum as loudly as we can with Congress," Mr. Mukasey said.
He said that Mexican cartels are recruiting members on the U.S. side of the border and in major U.S. cities, as indicated by the arrests of Americans during anti-drug operations in Mexico.
"They're recruiting because they can pay," he said.
Alfredo Corchado reported from El Paso (acorchado(at)dallasnews.com) and Laurence Iliff from Mexico City (liliff(at)dallasnews.com) |
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