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While US President-elect Donald Trump has warned that he will designate cartels as foreign terrorist organizations as soon as he takes office, he seems to have little understanding that the weapons used by criminal cells in Mexico come from the United States, which is why President Claudia Sheinbaum has recalled that she will not accept “interference” in what is done on Mexican territory.
“I said it in the letter I wrote to President Donald Trump, who will take office in January of next year: that is where drugs are consumed, mainly; that is where weapons come from, and that is where we put our lives. That is not true,” said President Sheinbaum at a rally in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, on Sunday afternoon.
In his speech, he stressed that Mexico intends to collaborate and work together, but does not allow other countries, such as the United States, to interfere in the nation's national security.
"We collaborate, we coordinate, we work together, but we will never subordinate ourselves. Mexico is a free, sovereign and independent country and we do not accept interference in our country," the president said.
He pointed out that Mexico is implementing the National Security Strategy, which focuses on addressing the causes, to prevent young people from joining criminal groups and also to strengthen zero impunity.
"The most important thing for us is to build peace throughout the country," he said.
This Sunday, the program “60 Minutes of Overtime,” broadcast by CBS News, made an extensive account of the weapons used by cartels in Mexico, which are trafficked from the United States and how difficult it is to buy an authorized and legal weapon in the country, unlike in the neighboring country to the north.
He recalled that it is estimated that between 200,000 and half a million American firearms are smuggled into Mexico every year, a fact for which the Mexican government has filed two lawsuits: one against the arms manufacturer Smith & Wesson and one of its wholesalers, and another involving five American gun stores.
“If they believe that fentanyl overdoses are a problem, if they believe that migration across the border is a problem, if they believe that the expansion of organized crime is a problem in the United States, then they should be concerned about stopping the flow of guns coming into Mexico. And it needs to be stopped at the source, because all of those problems are driven by the supply of U.S. guns to the cartels,” said U.S. attorney Jonathan Lowy in an interview with 60 Minutes.
The media also recalled that, while in Mexico there is only one gun store in the entire country, located at the military base in Mexico City, in the United States there are more than 75 thousand active dealers.
In addition, in Mexico, obtaining a weapon is not an easy task. 60 Minutos witnessed how obtaining a pistol or low-caliber rifle is an odyssey, since it requires a special permit, psychological tests, drug detection tests, and extensive background checks.
This only official gun store sells barely a thousand weapons a month, all of them registered.
It should be noted that the weapons that the drug cartels have are all high-caliber. But that has not prevented them from obtaining them, especially in the United States.
In March, 60 Minutes spoke with then-Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who said homicides and cartel violence had skyrocketed during his six-year term, and said the United States was partly to blame.
“We have confiscated, during the time I have been in government, 50,000 high-powered, high-caliber weapons,” he said. “Fifty thousand weapons. And 75 percent of them are from the United States,” López Obrador said in the interview.
Tim Sloan, an attaché for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in Mexico from 2019 to 2022, told 60 Minutes that when a gun is recovered at a crime scene, the ATF is tasked with tracking it down. In 2019, an incident at a cartel ranch near Guadalajara shocked him.
“There were dead bodies everywhere… There were 55-gallon drums with body parts in them,” Sloan said. “And every gun in that house came from the United States. All of them.”
Sloan explained that most guns in Mexico are sold directly to traffickers or to so-called “straw buyers,” someone who buys a firearm on behalf of another person. He explained that thousands of dollars are offered to someone to go into a store in the U.S. and buy the gun in their name, and for many it is easy, especially if they have addiction problems and no criminal record.
“If buyers have no criminal record, they can buy as many guns as they want in certain states. Then comes the easy part: “just drive across the border,” Sloan said.
Watch the full video of this chapter of 60 Minutes Overtime by clicking here.
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