There's a strip of "no-man's land" in the northernmost part of Mexico and on the US side along the Mexican border. You can feel the tension -- the risk -- when you're in certain parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and you can practically taste it in the remote , dry parts of the northern Mexican states. If you're driving (I've done this) along narrow dirt tracks south of Big Bend, you may well be stopped by the federales. Ostensibly they're just checking you out. Most people think they're checking for drug shipments (and sometimes they are). Most Americans don't seem to realize they're checking for armas -- US weapons being smuggled by Americans (and Mexicans) into Mexico for sale.
This is the first time I've seen a story about this in a national paper. We tend to think all the bad stuff comes from Mexico to the US, not that we're sending bad stuff down there.
100 percent of drug-related killings are committed with smuggled U.S. weapons.
The guns pass into Mexico through the "ant trail," the nickname for the steady stream of people who each slip two or three weapons across the border every day. The "ants" -- along with larger smuggling operations -- are feeding a rapidly expanding arms race between Mexican drug cartels.
The U.S. weapons -- as many as 2,000 enter Mexico each day, according to a Mexican government study -- are crucial tools in an astoundingly barbaric war between rival cartels that has cost 4,000 lives in the past 18 months and sent law enforcement agencies in Washington and Mexico City into crisis mode. ...
The arms traffickers have left Mexico awash in AK-47s, pistols, telescope sighting devices, grenades, grenade launchers and high-powered ammunition, such as the so-called cop-killer bullets believed to be able to penetrate bulletproof vests.
"You're looking at the same firepower here on the border that our soldiers are facing in Iraq and Afghanistan," Thomas Mangan, a spokesman in Phoenix for the ATF, said in an interview.
Weapons have been smuggled into Mexico for decades.
