Weapons flowing from US into Mexico leave their mark
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 US side as they approach the Rio Grande that separates the two countries here. ''Illegal to carry firearms/ammunition into Mexico. Penalty, prison."
But the signs have done little to stop what US and Mexican officials say is a steady and growing commerce of illicit firearms in Mexico, from 9mm pistols to shotguns, from 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 hot commodity for the cartels fighting one another for control of the lucrative trade in narcotics, US 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 Mexico. By contrast, police confiscate 256 on average weapons per day from suspects, officials from the Attorney General's office said recently.
Javier Ortiz Campos of Mexico's Federal Preventive Police says traces by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives on weapons confiscated in Mexico often lead to gun shops, gun shows, and flea markets in Texas. The US state has some of the most liberal gun laws in the country and a porous, 1,240-mile-long border with Mexico.
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The weaponry confiscated in Mexico comes mostly from US border cities such as Laredo, El Paso, and Brownsville, Ortiz 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," Ortiz 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, one US official said.
Typically, the Mexican buyer will pay a Texas resident $50 to $100 to acquire the weapons, the official said.
In one case, Mexican and US 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 9mm handgun last year at the scene of a shoot-out 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 United States.
