Wednesday - April 01, 2009

Not Exactly A Great Idea

Anybody see the flaw in that plan? Like, you could have 10 AK47s in your trunk and be almost out of gas, but on the return trip you have no guns and a full tank of gas ... and your car weighs the same? Or you pack the body panels full of ammo, drop it off, wire you payment to a bank in the Cayman Islands, then fill the fenders up with sand ... and your car weighs the same? Not what I’d call a very bright idea. Oh, but they’re trying! Yeah, that counts for soo much.

Mexico trying harder to catch smuggled US guns

Try to bring a refrigerator into Mexico in the back of your pickup, and you are almost certain to get stopped by Mexican customs officials. Stick a couple of AK-47 rifles in your trunk, and chances are you’ll whiz right through. Now Mexico is owning up to its leaky border as it launches a new program to monitor vehicles entering the country. The goal is to weigh and photograph southbound cars and trucks, in hopes of snaring more gun smugglers.

Um, yeah. Sure.

As the Obama administration promises a crackdown on the illegal U.S. weapons trade that supplies the drug cartels, Mexico is acknowledging shortcomings on its side of the 2,000-mile border.

“Security concerns require a customs overhaul,” Alfredo Gutierrez Ortiz, who oversees border checkpoints as director of Mexico’s tax collection agency, said in an interview Wednesday with The Associated Press. “Today, passenger vehicles really enter without being inspected.”

Mexico checks only 10 percent of the 230,000 vehicles that cross the border each day, according to the federal Attorney General’s Office. By weighing cars to see if they are unusually heavy, and running license plate numbers through a database of suspicious vehicles, the government hopes to catch more hidden contraband.

The United States has long weighed and checked the license plates of northbound vehicles, but the technology is new to Mexico, which is installing it at all customs checkpoints. It was introduced last week at Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, and should be added along Mexico’s border with Guatemala by year’s end.

Ah, Ok, “unusually heavy”. Fine, that’s a little better. So I’ll just fill the car with skinny people wearing fat suits, stash a bunch of rifles somewhere, and lose the fat suits south of the border. Nobody will ever know. Doctor up a few passports and driver’s licenses to match their false weight. Or maybe replace certain parts of the vehicle with much lighter ones ... cuz it would be sooo hard to find a chop shop in LA run by Mexicans who could kit something like that up. 500 pounds goes a long way in terms of guns and ammo.

Inside Mexico, strict gun control laws prohibit sales of weapons with calibers higher than a .38 handgun. Even to buy those, citizens must get permission from the Defense Department.

Hey, an 8mm Remington Magnum is a caliber less than the .356” bullets fired in a .38 handgun. And that bad boy will shoot through any body armor made, the steel plate you’re hiding behind, and the solid concrete wall behind you. It’s just not going to work guys.

But I have to give this news article a leetle credit. While they are blaming the US for the sale of lots of the regular weapons, they do admit that the actual, real military grade stuff is coming up from further south. Of course, they don’t extend that thought to a) why go for sporting arms when you can get actual genuine military hardware and b) if military issue firearms can get in from the south, then anything else can too. Like more sporting arms. Or whatever.

“You’re seeing truly military-type guns, like grenade launchers,” Mangan said. “They’re not coming from the U.S. The hand grenades that are being used, you’re looking at that stuff migrating up from Central America.”

Experts also agree that the Mexican military, which is often outgunned by traffickers, has not been a significant source of weapons despite the potential for corrupt soldiers to sell out to the cartels.

Many of the cartels’ grenades and other heavy weapons could be leftovers from Central America’s civil wars, Mangan said.

Mexico has seized more than 2,702 unexploded grenades since the start of President Felipe Calderon’s term in December 2006, compared to 59 during the first two years of the previous administration. Grenades have been traced back to the militaries of many countries, from South Korea to Spain and Israel, Mangan said.

Gutierrez acknowledged that the new system will not be as effective the southern border, where many communities straddle the frontier and residents regularly bypass official crossings.

“We need to address the breach — everything that doesn’t go through customs — because that’s the biggest problem in the southern border,” he said.

Ok, yeah, they’ve got an awful problem. I think Mexico needs a 3 way Civil War right about now. Druggies on side A, the Padrones (them with all the money) on side B, and 800 billion really pissed off Mexican peasants who are sick of the never ending bullshit on side C. My money is on side C, but not until the 12th round. The druggies have already won the first few rounds, now I expect the rich guys to bring their toy soldiers into play in a big way. Side C won’t make a play until the other two bleed each other out quite a bit.

Posted by Drew458     on 04/01/2009 at 10:17 PM   
Filed Under: • Crime • Latin-America •  
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