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Is the Flow of U.S. Weapons to Mexican Drug Cartels Increasing?
 Michael Isikoff - Newsweek
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May 17, 2010
| | Mexican soldiers inspect the arms which were seized at a training camp from the armed group 'Los Zetas' at the Mexican state of Nuevo León. (Juan Cedillo/EPA-Corbis) | |
The Mexican military has discovered a major training camp run by the notorious Zetas drug cartel and stocked with an arsenal of military weapons, including 140 semi automatic assault rifles and 10,000 rounds of ammunition — all of them believed to be purchased in the United States, U.S. law enforcement officials said.
The discovery last week of the training camp in the town of Higueras, just 70 miles south of the U.S. border in the state of Nuevo León, provides fresh evidence for Mexican President Felipe Calderón—due to meet with President Obama in Washington on Wednesday – to press his case that the U.S. government is failing to crack down on a massive flow of illegal weapons into Mexico.
A senior U.S. law enforcement official, asking not to be identified talking about sensitive matters, tells Declassified there’s mounting evidence that the illegal trafficking of high-powered U.S. weapons into Mexico is continuing unimpeded and may actually be increasing, despite repeated statements by Obama administration officials (including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a March visit to Mexico City) that they are forcefully addressing the issue.
One yardstick, used internally by U.S. law enforcement officials but almost never publicly discussed, is what they call the “time to crime” measurement: the elapsed time between a gun’s purchase in the United States and its seizure by Mexican authorities in the course of a raid on drug traffickers. Mexican authorities routinely provide serial numbers on the weapons they seize to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) so the guns can be traced back to their original source.
The shorter the time to crime, the higher the likelihood that the gun was bought directly from a U.S. gun store by “straw buyers” or other drug-cartel operatives and then smuggled across the border into Mexico. As recently as 2006, the official says, the average time to crime for guns seized in Mexico was between six and seven years, suggesting that the weapons had gone through several buyers and sellers before ending up in the hands of Mexican drug traffickers.
But by this year the time-to-crime figure had dropped to less than three years, and in recent months ATF has been tracing weapons seized in Mexico with time-to-crime numbers that in some cases are as low as weeks or even days, says the law enforcement official. Such a dramatic reduction almost certainly means that the guns were initially purchased for a criminal purpose and could mean the Mexican cartels have stepped up their already aggressive efforts to obtain high powered weaponry, such as semi automatic assault rifles and pistols from the United States, the law enforcement official says. |
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