Mexico asked the United States to
urgently
investigate the entry into Mexican territory of
weapons "for the exclusive use of the US army"
and that are falling into the hands of the cartels, the Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Alicia Bárcena, reported on Monday.
“There is one very important thing and that is that the Secretary of Defense alerted the United States about weapons that are entering Mexico that are for the exclusive use of the United States military,” he stated during the morning presidential conference. “And it is very urgent that Do some research on it.”
According to Bárcena, the request was made last Friday, at the meeting that took place in Washington between high-level officials from both governments.
What weapons do drug traffickers have?
In June, the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena) said it had seized 221
fully automatic
machine guns , 56
grenade launchers
and a dozen
rocket launchers
from drug cartels since the end of 2018.
The Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Alicia Bárcena.
Photo: EFE
The sale in gun stores and the possession for civilian use of this type of weaponry is prohibited by law in the United States, which suggests that they have been acquired and transferred to Mexico
by another means.
Military-grade U.S. weaponry, which cartel members
have openly displayed in social media posts
, poses an added challenge to Mexican security forces who have long watched these groups
operate homemade armored vehicles and
bomb-dropping drones.
As explained in June by the Secretary of Defense, Luis Cresencio Sandoval, five rocket launchers had been seized from the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, four from the Sinaloa Cartel and three more from other criminal groups.
At the time, General Sandoval did not specify whether the weapons came from US military arsenals.
"We are committed to working with Sedena to see what there is," said the US ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salazar, at a press conference on Monday.
The United States ambassador to Mexico, Ken Salaza.
Photo: EFE
“I don't know what happened in this case,” he added, but insisted that the United States has among its priorities
stopping the illegal flow of all types of weapons
to Mexico.
How do weapons get to Mexico?
The Mexican government estimates that
70% of the illegal weapons
that arrive in Mexico come from the United States, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
There are several possible routes by which it may have reached Mexican territory.
On the one hand
, Central America was flooded with such weapons during the conflicts of the 1980s
and, in addition, journalistic investigations reported that the United States
hid the loss of weapons
from its arsenals for years.
Mexican security analyst David Saucedo talks about another way.
What seems more viable is that these weapons
were obtained on the black market
by traffickers who bought them from intermediaries of those who manufacture them.
Additionally, Mexico has long had a problem with semi-automatic rifles for civilian use permitted in the United States and being smuggled into Mexico, where only low-caliber firearms are permitted and strictly regulated.
For this reason, the Mexican government took
legal action against American gun manufacturers and gun shops
, arguing that they contribute to the violence.
In fact, on Monday, a Boston appeals court
granted Mexico a victory
in one of those actions, reviving
a $10 billion lawsuit against seven
U.S. arms manufacturers and one distributor.
Mexico argued that the companies knew that the weapons were sold to traffickers who smuggled them into Mexico and decided to take advantage of that market.
In 2022, a US federal judge dismissed the Mexican lawsuits based on a 2005 US law that
protects gun manufacturers from damages
“arising from the improper, criminal or unlawful use” of a firearm.
Mexico appealed the ruling and on Monday the appeals court agreed, revived the lawsuit with the argument that the aforementioned law is not applicable in cases of weapons that caused deaths, damages and injuries in Mexico and returned the case to the court of first instance to re-examine the case in depth.
Migration, the other problem
The issue of US military weapons was just one of the points of the high-level meeting last Friday, which was more focused on migration and was a continuation of the meeting held in December in Mexico City, given
the uptick in irregular crossings
in the border between both countries.
According to Bárcena, the United States informed Mexico of its intention to sanction South American, Central American and possibly Mexican companies that transport migrants in an irregular situation, although in the case of Mexican companies, the chancellor asked that it not be done unilaterally by Washington. and assured that the Mexican government is already analyzing the issue.
When asked about this, Ambassador Salazar limited himself to giving as an example the actions against airlines that moved migrants through Nicaragua.
Another Mexican request was that
the CBPOne application,
which allows many migrants to request an appointment with US authorities to immigrate legally, can also be used
from the south of the country
and not only from the capital or the northern half of Mexico.
With information from the Associated Press