Center for American Progress

The Senate must act to help curb gun trafficking to Mexico
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The Senate must act to help curb gun trafficking to Mexico

Eugenio Weigend Vargas writes that compromising the U.S. government’s ability to respond to illegal gun trafficking into Mexico has consequences on both sides of the border.

In January 2014, Mexican federal forces were ambushed in Tamaulipas while conducting a routine inspection near the border town of Reynosa by assailants armed with assault rifles. A few months later, another ambush of military forces in Jalisco perpetrated by a criminal organization again armed with semiautomatic rifles and grenades left a toll of four dead soldiers and two more seriously wounded. A year later in the neighboring state of Michoacan, four soldiers were killed in another ambush outside the city Ucacuaro, once again by a criminal organization armed with assault rifles.

The use of these highly dangerous firearms by criminal organizations in Mexico has become all too common. And the bulk of these guns are illegally trafficked from the United States. In fact, approximately 70 percent of firearms recovered in crimes in Mexico originated in the United States, and the vast majority of those were illegally trafficked from the border states of California, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona.

The above excerpt was originally published in Fox News Latino. Click here to view the full article.

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Authors

Eugenio Weigend Vargas

Former Director