a recent Newsweek article...The Mexican military has discovered a major training camp run by the notorious Zetas drug cartel and stocked with an arsenal of military weapons, including 140 semi automatic assault rifles and 10,000 rounds of ammunition—all of them believed to be purchased in the United States, U.S. law enforcement officials tell Declassified. The discovery last week of the training camp in the town of Higueras, just 70 miles south of the U.S. border in the state of Nuevo León, provides fresh evidence for Mexican President Felipe Calderón—due to meet with President Obama in Washington on Wednesday – to press his case that the U.S. government is failing to crack down on a massive flow of illegal weapons into Mexico. A senior U.S. law enforcement official, asking not to be identified talking about sensitive matters, tells Declassified there’s mounting evidence that the illegal trafficking of high-powered U.S. weapons into Mexico is continuing unimpeded and may actually be increasing, despite repeated statements by Obama administration officials (including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during a March visit to Mexico City) that they are forcefully addressing the issue.
One yardstick, used internally by U.S. law enforcement officials but almost never publicly discussed, is what they call the “time to crime” measurement: the elapsed time between a gun’s purchase in the United States and its seizure by Mexican authorities in the course of a raid on drug traffickers. Mexican authorities routinely provide serial numbers on the weapons they seize to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) so the guns can be traced back to their original source. The shorter the time to crime, the higher the likelihood that the gun was bought directly from a U.S. gun store by “straw buyers” or other drug-cartel operatives and then smuggled across the border into Mexico. As recently as 2006, the official says, the average time to crime for guns seized in Mexico was between six and seven years, suggesting that the weapons had gone through several buyers and sellers before ending up in the hands of Mexican drug traffickers.
But by this year the time-to-crime figure had dropped to less than three years, and in recent months ATF has been tracing weapons seized in Mexico with time-to-crime numbers that in some cases are as low as weeks or even days...
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Instead, the ATF official says, it may mean only that particular kinds of weapons are being purchased for Mexican traffickers directly from U.S. gun stores, as opposed to used weapons being bought on the secondary market at U.S. gun shows or from unregulated private sellers. In part because of legal restrictions that limit ATF’s ability to track overall gun sales, and in part because of the multiple ways that weapons are legally bought and sold in the United States, the agency has “no idea how many weapons are going to Mexico,” says the official, also asking not to be identified talking about politically sensitive matters. “The bottom line is there is no way for us to track those sales,” said ATF spokesman Scot Thomasson.
http://www.newsweek.com/blogs/declassified/2010/05/17/is-the-flow-of-u-s-weapons-to-mexican-drug-cartels-increasing-under-obama.html
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