New Concerns Over Mexican Drug Cartel Access To American Military Weapons
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United States military M67 fragmentation grenades were used in an attack against the Televisa television station in Jan. 2009, according to newly released WikiLeaks cables cited in the Narco News report.
Media have also reported M16 machine guns, .30 and .50 caliber munitions, and other military-grade weaponry being confiscated in the Mexican drug cartel war.
While many arms trafficking theories related to the U.S.-Mexican border center around private sales and illegal smuggling into Mexico, Conroy presents an entirely new theory:
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, measured in the billions of dollars...
Between 2005 and 2009, a total of $41 billion worth of U.S. defense articles were exported under the FMS program and a total of nearly $60 billion via the DCS program, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. The bulk of those exports went to seven nations, including South Korea, but Mexico, too, was a receiving nation, with some $204 million in military arms shipments approved for export in fiscal year 2008 alone, according to the most recently available DCS report.
So, based on that evidence, it is clear that there is a grand river of military-grade munitions flowing out of major gun factories in the U.S. and being exported globally — completely bypassing the mom-and-pop gun store.
Many of the military-grade weapons used by narco-traffickers in Mexico that can be traced back to the United States were originally provided to El Salvador during the Contra wars and are now being refurbished, according to Conroy.
Conroy's full report can be read here.
