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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | January 2006 
Guns Flow South Across Border
 Hector Tobar - LATimes
| | In Nuevo Laredo last month, Mexican police stumbled upon an arsenal in the hands of suspected organized crime members that included grenades, semiautomatic handguns and seven AR-15 assault rifles. |
Nuevo Laredo, Mexico – The most popular instruments of robbery, torture, homicide and assassination in this violence-racked border city are imported from the United States.
“Warning,” reads the sign greeting motorists on the U.S. side as they approach the Rio Grande that separates the two countries here.
“Illegal to carry firearms/ammunition into Mexico. Penalty, prison.”
The signs have done little to stop what U.S. and Mexican officials say is a steady and growing commerce of illicit firearms in Mexico, from 9-millimeter pistols to shotguns, AK-47s to grenade launchers.
An estimated 95 percent of weapons confiscated from suspected criminals in Mexico were first sold legally in the United States, officials in both countries say.
Guns are the essential tool of a war between competing underworld crime syndicates that claimed between 1,400 and 2,500 lives in 2005, according to tallies by various newspapers and magazines.
The biggest criminals in Mexico are engaged in an arms race, with an armor-piercing machine gun the new must-have weapon for the cartels fighting each other for control of the lucrative trade in narcotics, U.S. and Mexican officials say.
In 2005, Nuevo Laredo residents endured the specter of more of 100 suspected drug-cartel executions in their city, and the release of a horrific videotape in which a suspected drug-cartel gunman executes a “prisoner.”
The city has become a tragic symbol of the gun violence sweeping through the entire country.
“It’s obvious where all the arms are coming from,” said Higenio Ibarra Murillo, a Nuevo Laredo business owner in the city’s historic downtown district. “We don’t make any guns or rifles here” in Mexico.
Buying a weapon legally is extremely difficult in Mexico. The country’s defense secretary issues all gun licenses – the wait is a year or more, and the cost about $1,900. Licenses must be renewed every two years.
There are fewer than 2,500 registered gun owners in the entire country.
By contrast, Mexican police confiscate an average of 256 weapons per day from suspects, officials from the Attorney General’s office said recently.
Javier Ortíz Campos of Mexico’s Federal Preventive Police says traces by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms on weapons confiscated in Mexico often lead to the gun shops, gun shows and flea markets of Texas.
The U.S. state has some of the most liberal gun laws in the country and a porous, 1,240-mile-long border with Mexico.
“Over there they even sell guns at Wal-Mart,” Ortíz Campos said. The weaponry confiscated in Mexico comes mostly from U.S. border cities such as Laredo, El Paso and Brownsville, Ortíz Campos added. But many come also from Houston and San Antonio.
“We’re finding a lot of weapons from Houston, because the buyers get a better price there than at the border,” Ortíz Campos said. Organized-crime groups in Mexico often buy their weapons in bulk via “straw purchases” in Texas, where there is no limit on the number of firearms a resident can purchase, said a U.S. official who asked not to be named.
Typically, the Mexican buyer will pay a Texas resident $50 to $100 to acquire the weapons, the official said
In one case, Mexican and U.S. authorities working together have traced 80 confiscated firearms to a Mexican national who paid Texas residents to buy weapons on his behalf, the official said.
Police recovered one 9-millimeter handgun last year at the scene of a shootout between officers and suspected drug-cartel hit men outside the Mexican border town of Reynosa.
A trace of the weapon by ATF agents led to another Texas man who had bought 160 weapons. That man is facing gun-trafficking charges in the U.S. Last year, ATF officials in Arizona arrested a man trying to buy 30 U.S. military hand grenades: The man told undercover agents the grenades were intended for drug traffickers in Sonora, Mexico.
And in August, a Tucson, Ariz., man was charged with smuggling AK-47s and AK-47 parts into Mexico. Large caches of weapons routinely turn up here and in other border communities.
Twenty assault rifles were seized in Tijuana on Dec. 20; that same day, Mexican army troops in the northern state of Sinaloa detained a group of men who were armed with five AK-47 rifles and one AR-15 rifle.
In Nuevo Laredo last month, Mexican police stumbled upon an arsenal in the hands of suspected organized crime members that included grenades, semiautomatic handguns and seven AR-15 assault rifles.
No store in Nuevo Laredo sells handguns or rifles over the counter. But if you take a 15-minute walk over the border to Laredo, you’ll find the Bushmaster AR-15 rifle on sale at one gun store for $1,199.
The salespeople at the store speak Spanish, but the sign over a display case of semiautomatic handguns is in English: “If guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns.”
The slogan, popular with U.S. gun-rights activists, certainly seems to apply on the other side of the border.
Only one person has a private gun permit in the entire Mexican state of Tamaulipas, which includes Nuevo Laredo. And yet guns seem to be everywhere.
On the impoverished edges of the city, small-time drug dealers protect their investments with semiautomatics.
And many law-abiding citizens can tell of an encounter with armed bandits.
Businessman José Luis Ortíz Cárdenas, witnessed an attempted carjacking by armed robbers earlier this year outside a grocery store he owns.
And he’ll never forget the notorious 2003 shootout a few blocks from the cantina he operates downtown: The shooting spread to the bridge leading to the United States.
“It was a hail of bullets, federal agents firing at other federal agents, hit men firing at other hit men, with bazookas and everything,” the cantina owner said. Mexican police have, in recent years, confiscated a handful of bazookas from organized-crime groups.
According to Mexican and U.S. officials, a very small amount of military surplus from recent wars in Central America has found its way into Mexico.
But U.S. officials say a bazooka recovered recently from suspected drug cartel hit men in Mexico was traced to an Army depot in Ar-kansas – the weapon had been deposited there and last accounted for in 1967.
The AK-47 appears in several narcocorrido songs about bad men and their adventures. The song “The Terrifying Cuerno de Chivo” by the group Los Incomparables de Tijuana was made into a movie of the same name.
“Its barrel is decorated, the butt and the trigger too,” the lyrics say.
“Inlaid with silver all around, it’s a weapon fit for a man of courage...
It’s an instrument of death.”
Assault rifles that are sold legally in the United States are not fully automated. But officials say that there are gunsmiths in Mexico who are adapting the weapons to make them fully automatic.
“We have found a few in Mexico that have been converted by a machinist,” the U.S. official said. “This tells us someone with vast experience in weaponry is working here.”
The gun violence continues to take on new, disturbing dimensions.
Television viewers across Mexico were horrified last month by the airing of a video in which members of the one cartel competing for control of the drug trade in Nuevo Laredo torture hit men from another cartel. The video, obtained by The Dallas Morning News, ends with one of the hit men executed with a shot to the head from a 9-millimeter pistol.
As Nuevo Laredo becomes a war zone, its streets are increasingly empty.
For the most part, tourists are avoiding the city, frightened by the kidnapping and disappearance of several Americans here.
“The one consolation we have is that we know it can’t get any worse than it is right now,” business owner Ortíz Cárdenas said.
“We’ve hit rock bottom.” |
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