Ebrard reproaches the US for not making an effort to curb illegal arms trafficking

Arturo Sanchez Jimenez

Newspaper La Jornada
Friday, November 4, 2022, p. 13

The Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Marcelo Ebrard, criticized yesterday that the United States does not make an effort to stop the illegal trafficking of weapons to Mexico, proportional to what the Mexican government is doing to control the introduction of fentanyl and chemical precursors into US territory.

He assured that our country suffers a pandemic of weapons with different degrees of intensity and that in the last three years the country has detected and seized weapons illegally introduced from the United States in all states.

Ebrard participated in the international conference The business of lethality: arms trafficking to Mexicoorganized by El Colegio de México.

From January 1, 2020 to September 22, the federal government has seized 55,996 weapons illegally introduced from the United States. In the same period, the US government has only seized 355 pieces of weapons that traffickers intended to cross the border.

With that I say everything. This is unsustainable and we will not allow it, exposed the chancellor. He stated that the number of illegal weapons available in our territory is much higher, although he did not specify the figure.

The effort that has to be made in the United States to drastically curb the flow of weapons is very small compared to what has to be done here to control the chemical precursors and drugs that reach the United States. There is a disproportion of efforts.

For the Mexican government, it is a priority to stop the flow of weapons that are trafficked from the neighboring nation, because without it, it will not be possible to reduce violence in the country in a sustained manner. Those weapons are the ones that equip Mexican criminal groups, stressed the Secretary of Foreign Affairs.

Although there are security cooperation agreements between the governments of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Joe Biden, we think that, so far this century, in the United States there have been no important actions in this matterhe added.

Ebrard explained that Mexico has even offered to pay for the installation of detector arches so that the US authorities reinforce their measures to control arms trafficking into national territory.

The three national municipalities with the most confiscated weapons are Tijuana, Baja California, with 3,201 pieces; Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, with 2,179, and Guadalajara, Jalisco, with 1,217.

Ebrard said that the seized weapons come from all the states of the neighboring country, especially from Arizona, Texas, Massachusetts, California and Connecticut.