LARGE U.S. ARMS SUPPLIERS, NOT GUN DEALERS AND GUN SHOWS, ARE THE SOURCE OF CARTEL WEAPONS

Now we learn the real truth! The vast majority of cartel weapons and munitions have been obtained in shipments from U.S. arms supply companies WITH THE APPROVAL OF THE U.S. STATE DEPARTMENT.

U.S.-BACKED PROGRAMS SUPPLYING THE FIREPOWER FOR MEXICO’S SOARING MURDER RATE
Felipe Calderón's Drug War Has Become Hot Market for U.S. Arms Trade

By: Bill Conroy

Narcosphere
April 17, 2011

The dollar value of U.S. private-sector weapons shipments to Mexico in fiscal year 2009 exceeded the value of private arms shipments to two other major conflict regions elsewhere in the world, Iraq and Afghanistan, and even outpaced the value of arms shipped to one of the United States’ staunchest allies, Israel.
U.S. private-sector suppliers shipped a total of $177 million worth of defense articles — which includes items like military aircraft, firearms and explosives — to Mexico in fiscal 2009, which ended Sept. 30 of that year.

By comparison, over the same period, private arms companies in the U.S. shipped $40 million worth of weapons to Afghanistan; $126 million to Iraq; and $131 million to Israel.

In fact, Colombia, the source of most of the world’s cocaine and a major battlefront in the so-called war on drugs, received only $30 million in private-sector arms shipments from the U.S. in fiscal 2009.

The onslaught of weapons that hit Mexico in fiscal 2009 via these legal commercial exports is multiplied even further by the thousands of additional illegal weapons that the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allegedly allowed to cross the border into Mexico, unchecked, as part of what appears to be a seriously flawed operation known as Fast and Furious — which was launched in October 2009.

This double whammy of deadly firepower pouring into Mexico through these U.S.-sanctioned programs also coincides with a major spike in Mexico’s murder rate over the same period.

The revelation of Mexico’s emergence as a leading market for the private-sector arms trade in fiscal 2009 surfaced after an examination of the most recently available figures for the State Department program that oversees foreign arms sales by U.S. companies.

Under that program, the U.S. State Department requires private companies in the United States to obtain an export license in order to sell defense hardware or services to foreign purchasers — which include both government units and private buyers in other countries. These arms deals are known as Direct Commercial Sales (DCS). Each year, the State Department issues a report tallying the volume and dollar amount of DCS items approved for export and shipped — with the most recent report covering fiscal 2009.

Narco News reported in March 2009 that the deadliest of the weapons now in the hands of criminal groups in Mexico, particularly along the U.S. border, by any reasonable standard of an analysis of the facts, appear to be getting into that nation through perfectly legal private-sector arms exports authorized under programs such as DCS.

Between 2005 and 2009, nearly $60 billion worth of U.S. defense articles were exported globally by U.S. private companies via the DCS program, according to a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

In addition to the $177 million in defense hardware shipped by private U.S. companies to Mexico in fiscal 2009, some $204 million in arms were shipped to Mexico in fiscal year 2008, according to DCS data compiled by the State Department. Now, war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan dwarfed Mexico in terms of DCS arms shipments in fiscal 2008, with a total of $3.8 billion collectively, but in terms of actual DCS arms shipments in fiscal 2009, according to the State Department data, Mexico beat out both of them — as private-sector arms shipments to Iraq and Afghanistan fell off sharply.

At the same time that hundreds of millions of dollars in legal arms shipments were crossing the border into Mexico though the DCS program, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or the ATF, allegedly was allowing thousands of illegally purchased firearms to be smuggled into Mexico by warring narco-trafficking organizations.

As part of its Fast and Furious operation, launched in October 2009, some 2,000 or more firearms illegally purchased in the U.S. were allegedly allowed to “walk” (or be smuggled under ATF’s watch) across the border in a supposed effort by the federal law enforcement agency to target the kingpins behind Mexico’s gun-running enterprises, ATF whistleblowers contend.

This flood of weapons, including high-powered assault rifles and even military-grade munitions, coursing into Mexico in fiscal 2008 and fiscal 2009 via the DCS program and ATF’s Fast and Furious seems to have been, in part, the catalyst for a huge spike in narco-related bloodshed in the country.

According to a report issued in February of this year by the Trans-Border Institute at the University of San Diego, narco-trafficking-related homicides in Mexico jumped from 2,826 in 2007 to 6,837 in 2008, and spiked again in 2009, hitting a record 9,614. In 2010, the homicide mark shot up to 15,273.

Those three years (2008-2010) account for the bulk of the nearly 40,000 drug-war murders since President Felipe Calderon of Mexico declared his war on the “cartels” in late 2006 and subsequently inserted the Mexican military into that battle.