February 18, 2008
Shocking
Numbers of Banned Weapons Seized in Mexico
Frontera
NorteSur
Mexican authorities have reported confiscating enough
weapons to supply a small army. Cited in the Mexican press, unnamed sources with the Office of the Federal Attorney General
(PGR) said more than 45,000 weapons were seized from 2001 to 2007. According to the PGR, the firepower included 17,361 assault
rifles, 27,461 small arms and 711 grenades. In the same time period, more than 3 million bullets were confiscated. According
to Mexican Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mouriņo, 4,447 assault weapons and 4,451 small arms came into the hands of the Mexican
government in 2007.
The latest figures don't include the February 7, 2008 seizure of four tons of weaponry from a ranch
in the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. In the latest raid, authorities discovered more than 89 assault rifles and other
military-type weapons at a property in Miguel Aleman, a municipality located across the border from Texas. Officials suspected
the ranch could have served as a training facility for the Zetas, the paramilitary arm of the Gulf drug cartel.
Five
coastal or border states led the list of hot spots for illegal arms confiscations in recent years. In order of importance,
Tamaulipas, Michoacan, Chiapas, Veracruz and Sonora were the states with the richest troves of guns, grenades and ammo.
Perhaps not coincidentally, all the states are zones where the Zetas either dominate or have a significant presence.
In
multiple comments to the media over the past year, many Mexican officials have blamed arms trafficking from the United States
for a "river of lead" flowing into Mexico, a country where sales and ownership of guns is strictly limited – at least
on paper. Nonetheless, Mexican officials rarely if ever publicly disclose the exact origin of confiscated weapons.
In
addition to acquisitions from the United States and other countries, Mexico supplies its own arsenal from local production.
Some of the weapons confiscated from the Miguel Aleman ranch this month reportedly had the initials of the Mexican Defense
Ministry stamped on them. As is routine practice, the most recent numbers released to the press did not shed light on the
origin of illegal grenades.
In other revelations, Interior Minister Mouriņo, who recently took over the cabinet-level
post after the resignation of Francisco Ramirez, told reporters in Mexico City that the first year of the Felipe Calderon
administration was a highly successful one in terms of disrupting the illegal drug business and seizing dirty money.
According
to Mouriņo, Mexican law enforcement seized 50.7 tons of cocaine, 2,262.5 tons of marijuana, 312 kilos of opium gum, 103,000
pills, 298 kilos of heroin, and 37.5 tons of ephedrine and pseudoephedrine in 2007. Nearly half the cocaine recovered came
from a single shipment busted in the Pacific port of Manzanillo last November.
As a result of Mexico's actions, Mouriņo
contended that street prices in the United States for cocaine and methamphetamine rose 44 percent and 73 percent, respectively,
last year. Mouriņo estimated the US retail value of cocaine seized in Mexico last year at slightly more than $7 billion.
On
the cash front, Mexican authorities confiscated currency valued at almost $228 million in 2007, Mouriņo said. A review of
earlier reports indicates that more than 90 percent of the money came from a single, joint US-Mexico operation linked to the
detention of Chinese-Mexican businessman Zhenli Ye Gon, who is accused of importing large quantities of precursor chemicals
used to make methamphetamines.
"We've damaged the structure of organized crime," Mouriņo said. "(Mafia) presence is
no longer significant in places where it was, which are now no longer under its control."
Mouriņo added that more than
20,000 people "linked to organized crime" were detained in 2007, but he did not detail how many were legally processed or
convicted of a crime.
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Sources:
El Universal, February 9, 2008. Article by Silvia Otero. La Jornada, February 9, 2008. Article by Gustavo Castillo Garcia.
El Diario de Juarez, February 4, 2008.
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Frontera
NorteSur (FNS)
Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University
Las Cruces, New Mexico
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(Reprinted with authorization from Frontera NorteSur,
a free, on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news source. FNS can be found at http://frontera.nmsu.edu/)
Translation FNS
