The truth about Mexican drug cartels

Maybe now that the president's birth has been settled, we can get back to the other issues that continue to plague this country. Not the least of which are armed Mexican drug gangs murdering and spilling over into the US. And where their weapons are actually coming from.

Guns are coming from the US alright

If you ever watch video or look at pictures of the drug war in Mexico, you'll notice some pretty heavy weapons. This is a war being waged with rockets and plastic explosives, not pea shooters and Saturday Night Specials. Consider these incidents:
- A M26A2 fragmentation grenade used against a U.S. Consulate in Mexico in 2008
- Explosive projectiles and 21 grenades found during a raid in Guadalupe
- An unexploded grenade and pull ring used to attack a TV station in Monterrey
- Automatic weapons, including U.S.-made M16s found at a cartel crime scene in May 2009

- U.S. military-issued ammunition found in a cartel raid in Reynosa in November 2008
You can't buy this stuff at a U.S. gun store. So where do the cartels get it? According to leaked diplomatic cables, there are three sources.
1. U.S. Defense Department shipments to Latin America, known and tracked by the U.S. State Department as "foreign military sales."
2. Weapons ordered by the Mexican government, tracked by the State Department as "direct commercial sales."
3. Aging, but plentiful arsenals of military weapon stores in Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.
Even though these facts were well-known by the Obama administration, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder, it blamed much of the violence in Mexico on U.S. gun stores.
"More than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States, many from gun shops that line our border," President Obama said in February 2009.
That was contested, but few listened to gun store owners and former vets like Lynn Kartchner, owner of Allsafe Security, a gun shop in Douglas, Ariz.
"We in the gun industry knew from day one the allegations that the preponderance of sales came from gun stores like this one was totally not true," Kartchner said.
In fact, many of these weapons are getting to Mexico via the U.S. government. Tens of thousands of firearms and explosives are sold legally through the U.S. State Department to the Mexican government. These weapons are then funneled to the traffickers and cartels by corrupt officials within the Mexico Ministry of Defense and local and state police departments.