By Via a reader’s tip comes news that even South Korean weapons are making their way over to Mexico to arm the country’s various drug armies:
It was a brazen assault, not just because it targeted the city’s police station, but for the choice of weapon: grenades.
The Feb. 21 attack on police headquarters in coastal Zihuatanejo, which injured four people, fit a disturbing trend of Mexico’s drug wars. Traffickers have escalated their arms race, acquiring military-grade weapons, including hand grenades, grenade launchers, armor-piercing munitions and antitank rockets with firepower far beyond the assault rifles and pistols that have dominated their arsenals.
Most of these weapons are being smuggled from Central American countries or by sea, eluding U.S. and Mexican monitors who are focused on the smuggling of semiauto- matic and conventional weapons purchased from dealers in the U.S. border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.
The proliferation of heavier armaments points to a menacing new stage in the Mexican government’s 2-year-old war against drug organizations, which are evolving into a more militarized force prepared to take on Mexican army troops, deployed by the thousands, as well as to attack each other.
These groups appear to be taking advantage of a robust global black market and porous borders, especially between Mexico and Guatemala. Some of the weapons are left over from the wars that the United States helped fight in Central America, U.S. officials said. (…..)
The enhanced weaponry represents a wide sampling from the international arms bazaar, with grenades and launchers produced by U.S., South Korean, Israeli, Spanish or former Soviet bloc manufacturers. Many had been sold legally to governments, including Mexico’s, and then were diverted onto the black market. Some may be sold directly to the traffickers by corrupt elements of national armies, authorities and experts say. [LA Times]
I have written before about the criminal insurgency going on in Mexico right now as a result of the Mexican army crackdown on drug traffickers. Few people though realize that this insurgency is being fueled by mostly American weapons and now even weapons from places far from Mexico such as South Korea.
Stopping the flow of these weapons is just one of the many things that needs to be done to stop the current ongoing drug war that has caused Mexico’s city of Ciudad Juarez to be more deadly then Baghdad.
It is the sad reality. No mistake...
2:58 am on March 16th, 2009 1
Your title is misleading. It gave the impression that Koreans are illegally smuggling in weapons into Mexico and giving them to drug lords.
8:53 am on March 16th, 2009 2
I've read things here and there discussing the efforts by South Korea to develop a more robust and globally competitive national arms industry, but the majority of those discussions were concerned with things such as tanks, artillery and aircraft. A lot of the articles discussed "small arms" but they never went into any detail to define what they meant by "small arms". They would iterate "small arms" and then continue on about tanks, artillery, and aircraft. I don't know, I'm not an expert in regards to arms manufacturing let alone South Korean arms manufacturing, so I would love to hear what some knowledgeable folks have to say about the matter. For example, what the South Koreans are pouring the majority of investment dollars into, what items have been most successful in developing, are they investing in rifles, rocket launcher and other infantry related equipment?
Finally, like "Tom" I found this snippet from the LATimes article to be a bit misleading. Obviously, the US is going to be the largest source of arms smuggled into Mexico by virtue of the US's geographic propinquity as well as its notoriously and irrational gun laws. Frankly, there isn't much more to be said or really explored. But if one is going to cite evidence of other countries arms entering into Mexico then I think that it's imperative to contextualize such thing with some numerical data to really show the extent of the problem. Because simply lumping US arms with arms from other nations gives too skewed a perspective on arms smuggling to Mexican drug cartels. By citing the fact that arms from other countries enter Mexico without any quantified qualifications can lead casual observers as well as policy makers to lose sight of what the biggest and most salient problems are in regards to Mexico's tragic drug wars.