The Bloodstained Trafficking in Guns from the US to Mexico

As news and rumors swirl around the current status and future success of the Merida Initiative, a plan to combat narco-trafficking in Mexico, those who argue the plan’s merits can agree on at least one point: The front line of the so-called war on drugs has moved north from Colombia to the US-Mexican border, but the focus on drugs has overshadowed an element of the regional black market that is just as important.

Mexican authorities now estimate that during the administration of former Mexican president Vicente Fox (2000 to 2006), some 2,000 guns per day entered Mexico. That works out to about 1.4 guns per minute. During that same period, the Fox administration seized 8,088 guns of the estimated 4,380,000 that entered the country, representing 0.18 percent of all the arms illegally smuggled into Mexico over six years, according to the Mexican daily Reforma.”*

Comments are closed.