Drug trafficking and weapon smuggling follow the same channels across the U.S.-Mexico border
By Richard Parker
Journal Washington Bureau
MEXICO CITY -- Even in the dim, early morning light the bullet found him.
Gonzalo Silva Perez had greeted the dawn with his friends, hanging out on the street corner after a night of drinking. His wedding was just a few days away.
One man in the group, a cocaine addict, broke away to trail a passer-by. Then he tried to rob him. The passer-by drew a pistol and fired. One bullet struck the attacker. Another struck Silva, ending his life at age 22.
|
|
|
|
Latin America Sees Surge In Murder Rates
Along with its general shift toward free markets and free elections, a new study by the World Bank says Latin America has become the most violent region in the world with an average of 20 homicides for every 100,000 people.
Colombia, the epicenter of the drug trade, has the highest murder rate in the world.
Mexico, too, has seen an increase in its murder rate: after dropping steadily in the 1960s and 1970s, it has edged up again in the 1980s and 1990s with more than 16,000 killings a year.
Its homicide rate, 18 killings for each 100,000 people, according to the most recent statistics, is more than twice that of the United States.
Throughout the decade, as populations swelled and governments dismantled state-run industries and programs, urban poverty rose across Latin America. Between 60 percent and 75 percent of Latin Americans are poor urban dwellers, according to the World Bank study.
And while the megacities swelled -- Mexico City is home to 40 percent of the country's people -- so did crime and violence.
As recessions, debt crises and the wrenching shift to full-throttle capitalism struck one major Latin country after another, spending on the urban poor dropped. Washington and Wall Street demanded austerity measures in exchange for investment and trade. Unemployment and underemployment prevailed.
Lucrative ways of making money -- from running drugs to ordinary street crime -- became more attractive to more people.
Latin American countries like Mexico may have had no choice but to adopt the economic strategies -- like leaner governments and free trade -- that they chose, according to World Bank researcher Robert Ayres. But the fallout from their choices, without buffers, has been devastating.
"No one is saying the problem is simple or that development alone will solve it," says Shahid Javed Burki, vice president of the World Bank in Washington, D.C.
"It isn't just drugs and guns, but one has to take into account the tremendous inequality," he says, "and the lack of attention to urban poverty since the 1970s."
|
|
Violence and drug use are on the rise in Mexico, and the United States plays an important role in both.
While Americans worry about Mexican cocaine and heroin flowing northward, a confidential study by the governments of both nations details another export: the steady flow of guns south from the United States.
Only a few years ago, the intersection where Silva died was, like Mexico itself, tough but safe.
But violent death has become a predominant fact of Mexican life as the trickle of guns has become a torrent -- intersecting with the flow of drugs and money.
Homicide is second only to heart attacks as the main cause of death for Mexican men. It is the leading cause of death for men between 15 and 34 years.
Mexico's homicide rate is quickly edging up near the levels Colombia endured in the early 1980s when the drug cartels began to cast a shadow over that country.
There is no way of knowing whether the gun that killed Silva was an American pistol. But there is no question that American guns are closely linked to Mexico's rising violence and intimately entwined with Mexican drugs.
The confidential study, prepared for the two nations' High Level Contact Group, documents nearly 8,600 weapons seized from drug traffickers in 1995 and 1996, along with more than 200,000 rounds of ammunition. Outside the organized drug trade, Mexican police seized another 13,660 weapons and just under 1 million rounds of ammunition.
"Mexico is a primary destination for the export of illegal firearms coming from the United States," concludes the still-unpublished study done by the group of top U.S. and Mexican officials, including U.S. drug czar Barry McCaffrey and Mexican Attorney General Jorge Madrazo Cuellar.
The 2,000-mile border is just as porous to guns as it is to drugs, the study concludes. Mexico has a demand for weapons just like the United States does for cocaine, and criminal organizations are sprouting up in both countries to take advantage of this.
Mexico has no arms industry of its own and Mexican law prohibits ownership of any weapon other than a registered .22 for self defense.
The American contribution comes in all sizes and calibers: from bullets, to handguns and shotguns, to the preferred weapons of the cartels -- AK-47s.
Trade terms
It is a simple exchange: guns for drugs.
As recently as 1994, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency watched as a trade unfolded. Mexican marijuana, transported by the Juarez cartel, slipped into El Paso after a $25,000 bribe to a U.S. Customs inspector.
The marijuana was picked up in El Paso by a New Mexico man and taken through the Border Patrol checkpoint at Orogrande.
When the marijuana finally arrived in Wichita, Kan., half the payment was in guns, mostly "assault" rifles, AR-15s easily converted from semiautomatic to full.
As early as 1991, the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms began documenting arms smuggling to the Mexican cartels, just as U.S. arms had been smuggled into Colombia in the previous decade.
In a single month in 1990, Mexican federal police seized 300 assault rifles, machine guns, pistols and ammunition hidden in food shipments.
California has been a main source of U.S. weapons flowing into Mexico. Hundreds of Mexico-bound guns have been seized at Los Angeles International Airport.
"The methods of trafficking firearms from the United States into Mexico are limited only by the imagination of the trafficker," ATF told Congress in 1991. They are hidden in cars and airline luggage, or simply carried across the desert.
The profit can be enormous. A handgun bought for $100 in San Diego can be sold in Tijuana, just 16 miles away, for $300 and for $500 elsewhere in Mexico.
U.S. and Mexican agents don't really know how the arms trade works. Most of those arrested have been so-called hormigas or ants, with no obvious connections to the drug trade. And the source of their guns appears to have been either licensed U.S. arms dealers or gun shows where the weapons are legally purchased and then illegally brought into Mexico.
But Mexican intelligence agencies believe they have detected organized arms trafficking over the same routes the cartels use to move narcotics.
"That's a great concern," says Arturo Sarukhan, a Mexican diplomat. "The firepower the cartels have in Mexico is definitely coming from the United States."
U.S. officials don't deny that. But it isn't clear whether there is organized arms trafficking, as Mexican intelligence seems to indicate, or simply rogue smugglers specializing in weapons.
Officials in both countries say not enough information is shared. U.S. agents complain their Mexican counterparts provide too little information from a seized weapon -- such as an incomplete serial number -- to adequately trace it to its source.
"The trick is to determine if U.S. citizens are simply selling these weapons to organized crime," agrees Sarukhan, "or if organized crime in Mexico has set up its own supply network."
Mexican investigations, cited in the new joint U.S.-Mexican study, suggest the cartels are buying the arms directly.
"The narcotics traffickers operating on Mexican territory have ample access to automatic and semiautomatic arms that are being illegally introduced into Mexico," the study says.
The states where Mexican police have seized the most weapons are those where the cartels dominate: Michoacan, Baja California, Tamaulipas, Durango and Sinaloa.
"The routes practically converge," Sarukhan says. "There's clearly a role."
The tides of drugs and money, life and death, wash both ways across the border.
Of the 250 murders in Ciudad Juarez last year, 50 of the victims, according to local police, were killed in El Paso and dumped on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.
At one time, Mexico had little hard-core drug abuse. It now has an estimated 10,000 cocaine and heroin addicts.
Researchers at the State Council Against Addictions in the northern border state of Nuevo Leon have watched cocaine begin to rival marijuana in use. Less than a decade ago, Nuevo Leon had no known cocaine users.
Tijuana has sprouted 20 different addiction-treatment centers.
One major reason for the growth in Mexican drug use is that the Mexican federation of cartels leaves a trail of cocaine in Mexico's cities as it pays small-time traffickers to run coke to the border.
The Mexican cartels are paid in cocaine by the Colombian cartels and they, in turn, make their payments in cocaine -- and increasingly it winds up on Mexican street corners.