Weapons Pipeline to Mexico

The drug war kills; the U.S. also benefits substantially from the weapons. The drugs from South America are also taken readily. A new report isn’t being received very well.

At the White House, the report of the anti-drug panel found little favor. “Drug addiction is a disease that can be successfully prevented and treated,” explained a spokesman for the Office of Drug Control Policy. “Making drugs more available — as this report suggests — will make it harder to keep our communities healthy and safe.”

What’s more, it’s the American addiction to illegal drugs and the dirty weapons trade that fuel the drug war in South America.

During a visit to Mexico, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged this: “Our insatiable demand for illegal drugs fuels the drug trade,” she said some time ago. “Our inability to prevent weapons from being smuggled across the border to arm these criminals causes the deaths of police, of soldiers and civilians.”

Hundreds of High Caliber Weapons

Tens of thousands of people die annually as a result of the drug war. According to reports from U.S. agencies, 20 to 40 percent of confiscated weapons originate from there. The Mexican police claim that the actual amount is twice that. An example of this is the armory of arms dealer George Iknadosian in southern Arizona. Recently, he furnished hundreds of high caliber weapons in his Dignity Gun Store, some of which have been used in civil wars, among them the U.S.-produced AK-47.

The agencies know that the dealer regularly delivered a large number of these to the Mexican drug cartel Sinaloa. “We had a direct pipeline from Iknadosian to the Sinaloa cartel,” said Thomas Mangan, a spokesman for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix. In the territory of the cartel alone, over 6,600 people were killed within a year with these weapons from the U.S.

Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón has repeatedly called for help “to stop the flow of firearms across the border.”* He associates the escalation with the repeal of the U.S. ban on assault weapons in 2004. At the same time, most of the controlled substances from his country are consumed in the U.S. — yet the promises of Congress to tie the hands of the weapons smugglers have thus far fizzled out.

Nevertheless, Attorney General Eric Holder announced on Wednesday his plans to reduce punishment for consumers of crack cocaine. With that, 12,000 prisoners in the U.S. could be set free.

*This quote, while accurately translated, could not be verified.