Reply #33: Phew. It isn't just me.

[iverglas]

http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/international-news/portfolio/2008/06/16/Examining-the-US-Mexico-Gun-Trade

Not your loony lefty source.
(With my emphases; lengthy article, excerpts here constitute fair use/fair dealing)

Arming the Drug Wars
by James Verini July 2008 Issue

The U.S. has pledged more than $1 billion to help Mexico win its war on drugs. But even as the body count rises above 10,000, most of the guns that do the killing—Colt .38 Supers and big-bore Barrett rifles among them—keep pouring in from the U.S.

See how Mexico's free-wheeling gun and narcotics trades feed off each other.

Guns are nearly impossible to buy legally in Mexico, so when the Beltrán Leyva haul was brought into federal police headquarters in Mexico City, agents sent serial numbers to the American embassy. There, they were fed into eTrace, a network created by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the agency that investigates arms trafficking, and the information emerged seconds later at the A.T.F.’s National Tracing Center in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The center receives more than 800 trace requests a day. Each usually takes two weeks to process, but in an urgent situation, one can be performed in a day or less. (View an interactive look at which guns are produced where.)

... “Every gun has a story to tell,” as A.T.F. agents like to say. Beltrán Leyva’s Colt told not only its own story but also one that American and Mexican authorities and residents of the bloodstained border region know all too well—namely, that almost every gun fired in Mexico’s drug war comes from the U.S.

... In late 2007, the Bush administration, which counts Calderón as one of its few friends in Latin America, announced the Mérida Initiative. If passed by Congress, it will provide Mexico with $1.4 billion in equipment and training over three years. But the initiative, with its unprecedented outlay of funds, is fraught with contradictions, since it would go to fight the flow of weapons coming in illegally from the U.S. More than 90 percent of the A.T.F.’s traces of guns seized in Mexico lead to the States. The Mexican ambassador recently estimated that 2,000 guns cross the border every day. Even if that figure is halved, it’s a trade worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

... The guns move south in the same way that the drugs move north. Their flow is overseen by “gatekeepers,” transportation specialists who control “plazas,” which are border towns that serve as hubs of the drug corridors. When guns are needed in Mexico, just as when drugs are needed in the U.S., an order is called in to a gatekeeper on the U.S. side, who then subcontracts purchasers and drivers. Gatekeepers, often members of Latin American prison and street gangs that sell cartel-trafficked drugs, “own these corridors,” says Steve McCraw, director of Homeland Security in Texas. Adds Richard Valdemar, a former gang investigator with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department: “If you can trust a guy to sell your 50 kilos, you can trust him to get you 50 machine guns. Guns are the stock-in-trade for bartering.”

... No cops came looking for him. The store owner didn’t call. No sweat. A few weeks later, the men left another bundle of cash, and Rodriguez went back to Ammo Depot and bought an AK-47 <yes, it was probably a semi-automatic>, which he likewise handed off. Still no questions. A week later, the men dropped off about $10,000, and Rodriguez bought nine AR-15s. It turns out the men were driving the guns to Reynosa, Mexico, where Cárdenas Guillén and the Sinaloans were waging a fierce battle for control of the plaza. Rodriguez earned $50 a gun. Eventually, an A.T.F. agent who visited Ammo Depot noticed Rodriguez’s name coming up repeatedly in the store’s sales records. After months of tracking him, in November 2003 agents arrested Rodriguez, who by then had bought more than 150 guns. He is now serving a 70-month sentence in federal prison. The men who paid him were never caught, and only five of the guns Rodriguez bought were recovered. One was connected to the shooting of a local police officer in Reynosa. I ask the agent why Ammo Depot didn’t alert the A.T.F.; after all, Rodriguez was paying cash for dozens of weapons popular with drug traffickers. The agent’s reply: “As long as he passes the background check, it’s a completely legal sale.”

... Buying guns in America is easy. Transporting them across the border requires more invention. Weapons are usually seized from passenger vehicles, which are often stolen. But the gatekeepers are getting smarter. In Laredo, investigators have noticed that traffickers now like to invest in used-car dealerships. “If you stop a guy and he says, ‘I’m a used-car salesman,’ there’s a good chance he’s a trafficker,” says Robert Garcia, a homicide investigator with the Laredo Police Department.

Smuggled guns have also turned up in freight trucks, which is troubling to some investigators since it suggests that gatekeepers have infiltrated the flow of commercial traffic. There are numerous ways to put the guns on trucks. Bribing drivers is the most prevalent. Trailers can be fitted with hidden compartments and false walls and leased to unsuspecting trucking companies. In Mexico, it’s not uncommon for these companies to be partly owned by traffickers.

... On the way back from Mexico, I stop at a gun show at a fairground in Phoenix. There are hundreds of people here, a cross section of America. ... I watch as a group of well-dressed men—Mexican nationals, judging from the license plate on their S.U.V.—buy thousands of AK-47 bullets without so much as presenting identification. ...

Anybody who is still thirsting after facts and figures should feel free to read the entire seven pages, and of course do their own research.