-Caveat Lector- http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/19/world/19MEXI.html?pagewanted=print New York Times May 19, 2001 U.S. Guns Smuggled Into Mexico Aid Drug War By TIM WEINER and GINGER THOMPSON MEXICO CITY, May 18 � Though public attention focuses on the drugs smuggled from Mexico to the north, officials here are increasingly concerned by an ever more lethal flow of guns south from the United States. The growing number of assault rifles and semiautomatic weapons showing up in shootouts and assassinations has bolstered the arms caches of Mexico's drug cartels, officials in both countries say. And they feed one of the highest rates of gun homicide anywhere in the world. This weekend, Attorney General John Ashcroft is coming here to meet with the nation's top law enforcement officials, and the firearms issue is on the agenda. High-level American and Mexican officials will meet here on Tuesday to discuss the problem. But such meetings have been going on for years with little result, save a 1997 treaty, which the United States Senate has yet to approve, aimed at reducing the illegal traffic. And when he was a senator, Mr. Ashcroft consistently opposed stricter gun laws. United States officials "had not put this issue at the same priority level that they put the issue of drugs," said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, national security counselor to President Vicente Fox. But the arms are being "used by people who are doing exactly those things that most concern the United States, drug trafficking," Mr. Aguilar Zinser said. Mexico has strict if poorly enforced gun laws and strong criminal syndicates. In contrast, the United States has perhaps 200 million firearms, 103,718 federally licensed dealers and some of the world's least stringent firearms statutes. Most of the guns in Mexico were bought in the United States, then smuggled across the border, and officials of both governments say little can be done to stop that traffic. "This is a large problem," said Gary Thomas, chief of the firearms division at the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. It is magnified, he said, by the increasing number of high-powered semiautomatic weapons and assault rifles entering the country. "These firearms are utilized more by the narcotraffickers and organized crime groups," he said. The profit margin in gun-running rivals that of cocaine; the potential penalties do not. A $125 handgun sold in San Diego sells for three times that sum in Tijuana, 18 miles away, and $500 or more farther south. And violations of some United States gun laws � for example, falsifying gun-sale records � are mere misdemeanors that rarely lead to long prison terms. One Mexican federal police officer, Alfonso Cu�llar Guevara, made more than $100,000 in less than two years buying 231 handguns from Texas gun shops and smuggling them to Mexico City. He received an 18-month federal sentence in Texas. Had he smuggled $100,000 worth of cocaine into the United States, he would have faced at least 15 years in prison. No one knows the precise number of weapons illegally imported from the United States to Mexico, although it is assumed to total hundreds of thousands over the last decade. Mexican officials believe that guns from the United States account for 80 percent of the weapons in this country. The border states of California, Texas, Arizona and New Mexico, with a total of 12,706 licensed firearms dealers at gun shops and pawnbrokers, are thought to be among the big sources. Mr. Thomas said Florida was also emerging as a major provider of weapons sent by air and sea. Typically, the weapons are smuggled in small shipments, hidden in secret compartments in car doors or washing machines, stashed in stolen automobiles, sent as checked luggage on commercial flights � or, most commonly, carried over the border in a car trunk or a suitcase. Mexican officials call that last kind of smuggling "ant traffic." The ants, they say, can be members of sophisticated criminal organizations or migrants making a little extra cash. "When there are thousands of people crossing the border each day, there are only a certain number that can be stopped and searched," said Nicolas Su�rez Valenzuela, intelligence coordinator for the Federal Preventive Police. "And usually, it's a very small number." "There is always some new way of smuggling guns into the country," he added. "We have found guns in boxes of powdered milk. We have found guns in marmalade." Not long ago, United States Customs officials in California seized two cargo containers of weaponry abandoned by the United States military after the fall of Saigon in 1975, headed to Mexico from Vietnam. The smaller-caliber handguns from the United States go mostly to common criminals and ordinary citizens, but they are increasing the violence of everyday life in Mexico, law enforcement officials in both countries say. Mexico's rate of gun homicide � about 10 murders for every 100,000 people, compared with 6.3 per 100,000 in the United States � is surpassed only by Colombia, South Africa and possibly Brazil. One of Mexico's murder capitals is the state of Sinaloa, whose governor, Juan S. Millan, calls it "the birthplace of Mexican drug trafficking." Governor Millan said killings in Sinaloa usually involved high-powered weapons, like AK-47's. Last week, President Fox sent more than 1,000 federal police officers to Sinaloa in response to the murders and kidnappings plaguing the state, the second such deployment this year. The worst mass murder in Mexico's history was committed by the country's most violent cocaine cartel, the Arellano F�lix gang, at Rancho el Rodeo, about 60 miles south of the border from San Diego, in September 1998. The killers came to settle a score with a man who had crossed them. The 19 dead included two infants, six children and a pregnant 17-year-old. Two Chinese assault rifles lay where the assassins had dropped them. The Mexican police picked them up and sent their serial numbers to the American Embassy in Mexico City, which sent them to a federal crime lab in Martinsburg, W.Va. At the crime lab, run by the firearms bureau, an agent had sifted through thousands of pending gun trace requests filed by Mexico. She saw that the guns were part of a pattern: 5 identical rifles, with consecutive serial numbers, had turned up after a 1996 shootout where Arellano F�lix enforcers killed two Mexican soldiers; 15 more had been seized after another battle with the gang. The agent called the two federally licensed firearms dealers in the United States to whom the guns could be traced on paper. The first was Loretta Welch, who ran a weapons shop just outside San Diego called the Shooter's Emporium. The second was a man who ran a small mom-and-pop gun shop in Nevada. Ms. Welch faxed paperwork to the firearms agent showing that she had sold the 80 assault weapons to the Nevada dealer. He adamantly denied it. "I now have one gun dealer who's lying to me," the firearms agent said in an interview. "I thought it was a huge problem." Search warrants and interviews revealed that Ms. Welch's paperwork was phony. She had sold 80 of the Chinese assault rifles, along with 14 used handguns, to a Tijuana weapons dealer she met at a California gun show in 1995. So far, 21 deaths have resulted from that $27,000 transaction. Ms. Welch faces a maximum prison term of four years at her May 29 sentencing. Since arriving in Mexico in 1991, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has reached the point of being able to track more than 40 percent of the guns used in crimes seized by the Mexican authorities back to their sources, up from less than 10 percent. But the bureau has only two people in Mexico, and in the United States there are fewer than 500 inspectors to audit the more than 100,000 licensed weapons dealers. And, as the following cases illustrate, corrupt dealers conduct business as if they know that "their chances of being audited are not all that great," said Keith Heinzerling, the agency's country attach� in Mexico. After a shootout in 1996, Mexican officials seized a .50-caliber machine gun owned by a member of the Arellano Felix organization. The firearms bureau traced the weapon back to RNJ Guns in Carson, Calif., one of Los Angeles County's largest gun stores. The owner, Romulo Reclusado, had sold it off the books to a straw buyer named Octavio Espinoza, who counted among his close relatives a midlevel member of the Arellano F�lix gang. Mr. Espinoza and three of his relatives in the United States bought at least two dozen assault rifles and three .50-caliber weapons from RNJ. Five of those assault rifles were seized in Mexico in 1999 after yet another battle with the Arellano Felix gang. Mr. Reclusado was sentenced to 27 months for conspiracy and selling machine guns. Mr. Espinoza received a sentence of a year and a day. William H. Eckenrode, a convicted felon, illegally sold more than 1,000 weapons he had amassed in Texas, including fully automatic rifles, the firearms bureau says. Mexican officials say they found two of his weapons in 1997: one after a shootout in which drug traffickers killed two Mexican military officers, the second in the apartment of Gen. Jesus Guti�rrez Rebollo, Mexico's drug czar, who was convicted of working with cocaine traffickers. In 1998, Mr. Eckenrode was sentenced to six and a half years in prison; one of his straw buyers, Richard Garcia, received three years' probation. Edward L. Leduc and Gary L. Wofford were federally licensed firearms dealers in Texas who, according to the firearms bureau, were suspected of illegally selling scores of firearms to Mexican citizens. They each pleaded guilty to a count of selling weapons to "unauthorized persons," and received probation � no jail time � in 1998. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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