Mexico & Nafta - April 2011 (ISSN 1741-444X)

The question of where Mexico's drug trafficking gangs are getting their weapons has become a key issue for the governments of both the US and Mexico. On 29 March, a Mexican newspaper, La Jornada, published a series of leaked US State Department cables, which claimed that most of the heavy weapons used by the gangs came from Central America.

The cables sum up the product of three US-Mexican conferences on arms trafficking between March 2009 and January 2010 in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Phoenix, Arizona, and Tapachula, Chiapas. Each of these meetings was secret and it is not clear what subjects were on the agenda. What is clear from the cables is that US diplomats concluded afterwards that weapons and drugs are flowing north into Mexico, even though the Mexican government policy line is that the US is allowing the gangs to equip themselves in the US where the gun laws are lax and where demand for drugs is strong.

One background cable (09MEXICO880) said that the officials from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the US Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) had found that the gangs were demanding ever more powerful weapons, including light anti-tank weapons and heavy machine guns. The agencies said that powerful rifles such as the Barrett 0.50  and AK-47s were also being used by the gangs. The US study found that 90% of these heavy weapons were not coming from the US, as the gangs' traditional weapons did. Most were coming from military arsenals in Central America. The US did admit that 90% of the gangs' usual weapons, pistols and rifles, came from the US. This cable did not identify which countries were supplying the Mexican gangs.

Another US cable (10MEXICO77), which reported on the conclusions of the final bilateral meeting on weapons' trafficking, in October 2009 in Tapachula, also argued that the weapons were flowing north across Mexico's poorly policed southern border. This conference was attended by representatives from the Belize police and Guatemala's attorney general's office and, according to the cables, agreed to set up monitoring programmes along parts of the southern border. John Feeley, who was the US chargé d'affaires before the current US ambassador Carlos Pascual arrived, said that while 30,000 US officials from various US agencies monitored the 3,926km US-Mexican border, the 925km border between Mexico and Guatemala was patrolled by just 125 Mexican immigration officers.

The US, judging from the apparent tone of the leaked cables, was unhappy with Mexico's response to the suggestion that weapons were flowing north rather than south. The cables noted that the Centro Nacional de Planeación, Análisis e Información para el Combate a la Delincuencia, which was the part of the federal Procuradurí­a General de la República responsible for monitoring the flow of weapons north, refused to share information with US officials or,  apparently, with other Mexican agencies.

Presunto Culpable: A court in Mexico City has overruled the banning of a controversial documentary 'Presunto culpable' (Presumed Guilty) which has been wowing audiences in the city. The documentary illustrates flaws in the Mexican justice system, analysing the conviction (and sentencing to 20 years in jail) of José Antonio Zúñiga for a murder he almost certainly did not commit. There was no forensic evidence, or motive, to link him to the crime and the witness evidence was sketchy in the extreme.