Mexico Aims to Stem Flow of U.S. Guns Moving South

The Tec-9 semiautomatic pistol that changed the course of Mexican politics came off the assembly line at Intratec Corp. in Miami in early 1985.

That March, it went to a dealer in Merrill, Wis., who sold it the following month to a weapons merchant in Roma, Texas, where it was bought 18 months later by a gun buff from a Dallas suburb.

It changed hands legally several more times through Texas and Mississippi in the following years, until, Mexican officials say, the Tec-9 made an illegal--and fatal--journey across the U.S. border and into the hand of an assassin.

On Sept. 28, 1994, outside a hotel in downtown Mexico City, a horse trainer named Daniel Aguilar Trevino unzipped his black nylon jacket, whipped out the 9-year-old pistol and fired a single, fatal shot into the second-highest official in Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

The travels of the gun that killed PRI Secretary-General Francisco Ruiz Massieu--reconstructed through months of investigation by U.S. and Mexican federal agents--are emblematic of what officials from both nations agree is a potentially explosive smuggling business: gun running.

Each year, those officials say, thousands of pistols, assault weapons and rifles are illegally taken from the United States into Mexico. Many of them end up in the hands of drug traffickers, bank robbers, murderers and rebels who together are threatening to further destabilize Mexico.

Of the more than 20,000 guns seized from criminals here in the two years since President Ernesto Zedillo took power, Mexican authorities say, as many as 90% originated in the United States.

For the Mexican government, the weapons trade is the flip side of the American complaint about drugs flowing from Mexico into the United States: The Mexicans engaged in multibillion-dollar drug smuggling may well supply up to three-fourths of the cocaine sold in the United States, officials here say, but the U.S. supplies the sophisticated weaponry they use to do it.

The issue has been discussed at the highest levels of the two governments in recent months, and Mexican Foreign Secretary Jose Angel Gurria Trevino told the Mexican Congress last week that a contact group created by the Clinton and Zedillo administrations earlier this year to attack the drug trade now will also target arms trafficking “for the first time in the history of our bilateral relations.”

Deputy Atty. Gen. Bernardo Espino, who specializes in the arms and drug trades, said in a recent interview that for Mexico, guns and drugs are inseparable. The gun smugglers, he said, are using the same routes to bring U.S. weapons into Mexico that narcotics traffickers have forged to get drugs into the United States.

“The drug route goes north, and the arms route goes south,” Espino said.

Although senior U.S. officials said they are skeptical that the two illegal trades are so closely linked, they and Mexican authorities have begun an ambitious gun-tracing study to find out.

Even before the study’s results are in, however, U.S. officials conceded that most of the weapons used by criminals in Mexico are manufactured in or imported from the United States before they enter Mexico.

Mexico’s Tougher Laws

Mexico does not produce firearms, and its gun laws are far stricter than those in the U.S. But widespread police corruption here makes it relatively simple to buy a weapon. Moreover, officials say, it is far easier to smuggle guns into Mexico than to bring drugs into the United States.

Overworked U.S. Customs inspectors--swamped by the 84 million cars crossing the 2,000-mile border each year--focus most of their efforts on incoming vehicles; they inspect just 3% of those leaving the United States. Neither U.S. nor Mexican officials would comment on Mexican customs procedures for inspecting incoming vehicles.

“The most important and fundamental problem for us is drug trafficking,” said Ray Kelly, U.S. Treasury undersecretary for enforcement. He oversees the Customs Service and the department’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms division, or ATF, which enforces firearms laws.

As a result of stepped-up inbound inspections, Kelly said, drug seizures on the U.S. side of the border have increased 15% during the past six months. With 600 additional customs agents on the border next year, outbound inspections--and seizures of weapons and cash generated by illegal drug sales--also are expected to rise, he said.

Meanwhile, in an attempt to address the gun-running problem, the ATF has been working more closely with Mexican authorities to trace weapons seized in crimes committed south of the border, Kelly said.

Although such cooperation dates back several years--the exhaustive trace on the Tec-9 that killed Ruiz Massieu in 1994 was an early example--it has intensified in recent months. As Gurria told Congress, the weapons trade is among the subjects that top U.S. and Mexican drug enforcement officials will address here this week when they meet for the third time--their first session since Zedillo replaced his attorney general, drug czar and other top law enforcement officials last Monday.

Several teams of Mexican federal agents have already been trained at the ATF’s sophisticated National Tracing Center in West Virginia, which investigates the origin and movements of more than 70,000 firearms a year. And last month, U.S. and Mexican authorities launched their most ambitious joint project yet on the gun front.

The attorney general’s office here turned over to the ATF tracing details on 4,287 weapons confiscated by Mexican authorities during the past 10 months. As many as 90% of those pistols, rifles and assault weapons appear to have been manufactured in the United States, but the project’s goal is to track the precise routes the arms took into Mexico and determine whether they were linked to the drug trade.

Preliminary findings suggest that the task will be difficult at best.

Officials in Washington said the majority of the serial numbers or manufacturers that Mexican authorities supplied for those weapons were invalid, missing or too old to trace; only arms manufactured after 1968 are traceable by the ATF. The agency is seeking additional information from Mexico, and Mexican officials say they still hope the study will show what individual traces such as that of the Tec-9 did not: that the U.S. weapons are entering Mexico illegally through established smuggling routes.

Still, one agent said, “very rarely is a gun going to solve your case. In some cases, though, it can provide a valuable lead.”

Over the Border

Most of the weapons seized in Mexico are, in fact, like the Tec-9. ATF agents traced it to the border town of San Benito, Texas, where its last known owner said he sold it sometime in 1992 to a man from the northern Mexican state of Tamaulipas whose name he couldn’t recall.

Officials on both sides of the border know nothing of the gun’s whereabouts until two years later, when it became a murder weapon. Aguilar, who was tried and convicted and is serving a 50-year prison term for killing Ruiz Massieu, testified that one of the accused co-conspirators who hired him bought the gun shortly before the murder from a rural police commander in Tamaulipas.

Deputy Atty. Gen. Espino conceded that such a gap in the travels of a weapon is typical. He added that filling the gap is a key to proving Mexico’s theory that the gun runners are using the same routes as the drug smugglers.

He insisted that the theory is sound, based on investigations by Mexican law enforcement. Moreover, although officials say it is unclear to what extent the drug cartels are directly involved in arms smuggling, captured drug traffickers have confessed to using drug “mules”--couriers--to smuggle in weapons, he said. And Mexican customs agents have confiscated arms from suspected drug traffickers at the border.

But several U.S. officials, asking not to be identified, said they suspect that most illegal guns reach Mexico not through drug cartels but through individual owners, who cross the border to sell weapons for huge personal profits.

Driving the Market

Espino conceded that the markup on U.S. guns south of the border--estimated at a minimum of 300%--is driving the market. That markup rivals the profit margin for drugs that cross to the north, he said, although drug trafficking is far heavier.

He added that the profit incentive in guns is even greater for Mexican arms traffickers who smuggle U.S. weaponry through Mexico and beyond.

“We believe that the final destination for many of these arms is not Mexico,” he said. “Obviously, there are these big organized clients like the [Mexican] drug traffickers who require a great quantity of arms. But all of the arms do not end up here. A lot just pass through.”

Tracing the drug- and arms-smuggling routes on a large wall map in his Mexico City office, Espino began in Colombia--the source of much of the cocaine sold in the United States. As his finger moved northward over land and sea, through Central America and the southern Mexican states to the U.S. border and beyond, he explained that cocaine prices increase exponentially with each step north.

“It’s precisely the reverse phenomenon for arms,” he said.

But Mexican and U.S. officials agreed that Mexico itself is a large market for smuggled U.S. weapons--and has been a growing one during the past two years of economic and political turmoil.

As law enforcement priorities here, violent crime and the lack of public security rank second only to drug trafficking, which Zedillo has called Mexico’s chief national security threat.

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Smuggling Corridors

These are the principal for South American cocaine reaching the United States, authorities say. A new study tracing illegal guns seized in Mexico may help to determine if arms traffickers are using the same routes, in reverse, to smuggle weapons from the U.S. into Mexico.

Source: U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration