Arturo Sánchez Jiménez
La Jornada newspaper
Sunday, April 20, 2025, p. 5
The illicit traffic of weapons from the United States to Mexico occurs mostly by the land border, in non -commercial vehicles, according to a report by Small Arms Survey, source of information on the world of firearms, which is a reference for international organizations.
Of the 1,323 seizures made from 2016 to 2023 by US weapon shipping authorities for Mexico, 91 percent came from buses, private cars, trucks and vans.
By including bicycles, pedestrians and commercial trucks, this figure rises to 96 percent, according to the document that reveals that traffickers also used postal service, specialized parcels and private and commercial flights to try to introduce weapons into the country.
According to Mexican authorities, about 200 thousand weapons enter the country, about 70 percent of them from the United States, which end up in the hands of organized crime.
The study indicates that the seizures of Arsenal shipments to Latin America and the Caribbean increased significantly since 2016. While between that year and 2019 708 seizures were reported – which can include more than one per package – between 2020 and 2023 were thousand 556, which represents an increase of 120 percent. Mexico was the main responsible for this rebound, the report points out.
The type of insured armament also reflects a high demand for semi -automatic rifles, particularly by Mexican cartels. 35 percent of the weapons seized in shipments to Latin America were rifles, and in the case of Mexico this proportion was 38 percent. The most frequent models were AK and AR, followed by .50 caliber, although the latter are less common: just one percent of the intercepted to our country were of that type.
In addition, 82 percent of the loaders identified in shipments to Mexico were high capacity, that is, for more than 10 cartridges. While this percentage is high, it is lower than that registered in shipments to the Caribbean, where 95 percent were high capacity.
As for seizure places, most shipments bound for Mexico were intercepted in the states of Texas and Arizona, confirming a documented trend in previous investigations
according to the report, which also emphasizes that Florida acts as a logistics center for arms trafficking towards other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The report concludes that, although some dynamics are consistent with previous studies, it is also revealed that traffic to most Latin America nations are more similar to those of the Caribbean than to those of Mexico. These differences underline the need to avoid the grouping of regional data on arms trafficking and having detailed data by country
he points out.
