BORDER NO BARRIER TO WEAPONRY

Most Illegal Firearms Traced To U.S.

Drug Industry Fuelling Rising Demand

TIJUANA, Mexico--It was another deadly day in this lively border
town, a day of drugs, delinquents and guns.

Before the day was out, four male denizens of the community had been
murdered, execution-style, three of them by gunshots to the head. The
fourth man was strangled. During the same day, a fifth man was killed
in what was later described as a shoot-out with local police. That
was on Feb.8.

"Incontenible ola de crimenes!" exclaimed the headline in the next
day's issue of El Sol de Tijuana. "Uncontainable crime wave!"

The carnage was news, certainly, but it wasn't exactly new, not in
light of the explosive growth in recent years of the illicit drug
trade along the Mexico-U.S. border.

Narcotics traffickers have an insatiable appetite for
weapons.

Last year, federal police in the Mexican state of Baja California,
which contains Tijuana, captured more than 1,100 illicit weapons, and
the overwhelming majority of them -- 95 per cent by a common estimate
- -- will turn out to have been smuggled into the country from the
United States.

"It's a very large number," says Franceska Perot of the Houston Field
Office of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. "If you
add it all up, it's a lot of weapons."

In Toronto, it is widely accepted -- and a source of keen alarm --
that roughly half the heat packed by local hoodlums originated
somewhere in the United States, a land where it is notoriously easy
to acquire things that go bang in the night.

No matter how stringently they are framed, one country's gun-control
laws cannot provide protection against weapons acquired in another
land, then smuggled across a border.

Lately, Canadians have been taking this lesson to heart, sometimes
literally, but it's one that Mexico has been grappling with for years.

In Mexico, it is extremely difficult for civilians to acquire
firearms legally. Ownership permits are prohibitively expensive, they
are issued only by the defence ministry, and they involve intrusive
background checks that can easily take a year to complete. Even
then, no civilian may legally own more than four guns, and none of
them may be heavier than .38 calibre.

You might think that these and other restrictions would keep the
gunplay down to a dull roar, but they don't. Instead, Mexico fairly
bellows with the discharge of weaponry.

Each year, police in Mexico recover upwards of 5,000 illegal weapons
or more. They duly record the serial numbers, report them to U.S.
authorities -- and guess what.

"The bulk of the guns that we trace are U.S.-sourced weapons," says a
U.S. law-enforcement agent in Mexico City, who declined to be
identified by name or organization.

The problem he describes is bad, and fast getting
worse.

"Before, we were seeing pistols," says the same agent. "Now we're
seeing a lot more of the high-calibre assault weapons."

He means automatic rifles such as M-16s and AK-47s.

Even more popular -- because they are cheaper and easier to acquire
- -- are AR-15s, the semi-automatic version of the U.S.-made M-16.

The cross-border traffic in firearms between the U.S. and Mexico is
not really difficult to understand -- an inevitable consequence of
geography and of very different approaches to the commercialization
of weaponry.

"It's near impossible to get a gun licence in Mexico," says Perot.
"It's very expensive, and you have to purchase through the military."

But U.S. authorities impose comparatively few restrictions on firearm
ownership -- and among the most lenient jurisdictions of all are
states such as Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, conveniently located on
the Mexican border.

Meanwhile, Mexico's booming trade in illicit drugs -- mostly cocaine
and marijuana bound for the U.S. market -- has created a powerful and
growing demand both for bullets and for things to shoot them with.

"A large percentage of the guns are going to drug traffickers," says
Perot. "They need the guns for their protection."

Drugs are a mean business at the best of times, but in Mexico the
flames of narcotics-related violence have been fanned by a
U.S.-endorsed policy of hunting down and arresting the leaders of the
welter of drug cartels operating in the country.

"The Mexicans have had success in knocking off some of the kingpins,
which leads to a power vacuum, which results in violence," says
Jeffrey Davidow, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico.

The troubles are concentrated in northern Mexican border towns such
as Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, Nuevo Laredo and Matamoros, where
in-fighting among drug dealers has produced shocking levels of
lawlessness.

Thankfully, there can be few places on earth where people deem it
necessary to coin a term for a man who turns up dead in the trunk of
an abandoned car. But, here in Tijuana, such an individual is known
as an encajuelado -- literally, a "trunked one."

"Every day, you have two or three encajuelados," says Jorge
Santibanez, president of a prestigious private university in Tijuana,
el Colegio de la Frontera del Norte. He is exaggerating, but not by
much. "This has become an extremely dangerous place."

But the dangers are deceptive.

"If you look strictly at the murder rate in Tijuana, it can be very
alarming," says Liza Davis, a spokeswoman at the U.S. Consulate here.
"It was close to 400 dead last year."

Most of the killings are contained within a shadowy demimonde of
crooks and thugs, so that law-abiding folk can still stroll
unmolested around Tijuana and other border towns by day, oblivious to
the hazards -- unless they get unlucky.

Or happen to be journalists.

On Feb.5, for example, unidentified gunmen strode into the editorial
offices of El Manana, the largest newspaper in Nuevo Laredo, where
they detonated a fragmentation grenade and sprayed more than 100
rounds of automatic weapon fire through the newsroom, gravely
wounding reporter Jaime Orozco Tey, before escaping.

The attack was by no means the first assault on reporters in the
troubled border region in recent years and is being interpreted by
Mexican journalists as a general warning not to delve too deeply into
stories about drugs, payola or guns.

Most of the weapons that wind up in Mexico are obtained through
so-called "straw purchases" in the United States -- U.S. residents
buying firearms through legal channels and then reselling them on the
black market.

It's unlikely that many of the weapons destined for the Mexican
market originate in California, because the Golden State imposes some
pretty strict controls on gun purchases.

In Texas, however, it is a straightforward matter to buy handguns --
in quantity -- and it is also legal for civilians to acquire
semi-automatic rifles. All you have to do is get the guns to Mexico
- -- and that doesn't seem to be a problem at all.

"It's tough," admits the U.S. law-enforcement agent in Mexico City.
"It's a challenge for both countries."