NY Daily News

Law-abiding Mexicans are up in arms over the murders of an American who had the courage to denounce the growing epidemic of gang violence.

Benjamin LeBaron, 32, and his brother-in-law, Luis Widmar, 29, lived in the tiny village of Colonia LeBaron, founded by a group of breakaway Mormons in the state of Chiuahua. The two men were kidnapped on Tuesday by a gang of armed thugs in military-style camouflage gear. LeBaron and Widmar were shot in the head and found dumped on a nearby road.

Mexican authorities believe local drug lords are responsible.

The lower House of Congress held a moment of silence and proposed a resolution condemning the slayings. National radio and television commentator Joaquin Lopez Doriga told the victims' relatives, "Millions of Mexicans share your indignation over this crime."

LeBaron helped lead the town's approximately 2,000 inhabitants in protests against the May 2 kidnapping of LeBaron's brother Eric LeBaron, 19. The residents refused to pay the $1 million ransom kidnappers requested and demonstrated in the Chihuahua state capital to demand justice.

Even after Eric was released unharmed a week later, the LeBaron people — most of whom are dual U.S. citizens and many of whom still practice a breakaway version of the Mormon faith — continued to lead marches demanding more law enforcement in the rural, isolated corner of Chihuahua state.

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Stratfor

STRATFOR has been closely following the cartel violence in Mexico for several years now, and the events that transpired in Apaseo el Alto are by no means unique. It is not uncommon for the Mexican authorities to engage in large firefights with cartel groups, encounter mass graves or recover large caches of arms. However, the recovery of the weapons in Apaseo el Alto does provide an opportunity to once again focus on the dynamics of Mexico’s arms trade.
White, Black and Shades of Gray

Before we get down into the weeds of Mexico’s arms trade, let’s do something a little different and first take a brief look at how arms trafficking works on a regional and global scale. Doing so will help illustrate how arms trafficking in Mexico fits into these broader patterns.

When analysts examine arms sales they look at three general categories: the white arms market, the gray arms market and the black arms market. The white arms market is the legal, aboveboard transfer of weapons in accordance with the national laws of the parties involved and international treaties or restrictions. The parties in a white arms deal will file the proper paperwork, including end-user certificates, noting what is being sold, who is selling it and to whom it is being sold. There is an understanding that the receiving party does not intend to transfer the weapons to a third party. So, for example, if the Mexican army wants to buy assault rifles from German arms maker Heckler & Koch, it places the order with the company and fills out all the required paperwork, including forms for obtaining permission for the sale from the German government.

Now, the white arms market can be deceived and manipulated, and when this happens, we get the gray market — literally, white arms that are shifted into the hands of someone other than the purported recipient. One of the classic ways to do this is to either falsify an end-user certificate, or bribe an official in a third country to sign an end-user certificate but then allow a shipment of arms to pass through a country en route to a third location. This type of transaction is frequently used in cases where there are international arms embargoes against a particular country (like Liberia) or where it is illegal to sell arms to a militant group (such as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish acronym, FARC). One example of this would be Ukrainian small arms that, on paper, were supposed to go to Cote d’Ivoire but were really transferred in violation of U.N. arms embargoes to Liberia and Sierra Leone. Another example of this would be the government of Peru purchasing thousands of surplus East German assault rifles from Jordan on the white arms market, ostensibly for the Peruvian military, only to have those rifles slip into the gray arms world and be dropped at airstrips in the jungles of Colombia for use by the FARC.

At the far end of the spectrum is the black arms market where the guns are contraband from the get-go and all the business is conducted under the table. There are no end-user certificates and the weapons are smuggled covertly. Examples of this would be the smuggling of arms from the former Soviet Union (FSU) and Afghanistan into Europe through places like Kosovo and Slovenia, or the smuggling of arms into South America from Asia, the FSU and Middle East by Hezbollah and criminal gangs in the Tri-Border Region.

Nation-states will often use the gray and black arms markets in order to deniably support allies, undermine opponents or otherwise pursue their national interests. This was clearly revealed in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s, but Iran-Contra only scratched the surface of the arms smuggling that occurred during the Cold War. Untold tons of military ordnance were delivered by the United States, the Soviet Union and Cuba to their respective allies in Latin America during the Cold War.

This quantity of materiel shipped into Latin America during the Cold War brings up another very important point pertaining to weapons. Unlike drugs, which are consumable goods, firearms are durable goods. This means that they can be useful for decades and are frequently shipped from conflict zone to conflict zone. East German MPiKMS and MPiKM assault rifles are still floating around the world’s arms markets years after the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist. In fact, visiting an arms bazaar in a place like Yemen is like visiting an arms museum. One can encounter century-old, still-functional Lee-Enfield and Springfield rifles in a rack next to a modern U.S. M4 rifle or German HK93, and those next to brand-new Chinese Type 56 and 81 assault rifles.

There is often a correlation between arms and drug smuggling. In many instances, the same routes used to smuggle drugs are also used to smuggle arms. In some instances, like the smuggling routes from Central Asia to Europe, the flow of guns and drugs goes in the same direction, and they are both sold in Western Europe for cash. In the case of Latin American cocaine, the drugs tend to flow in one direction (toward the United States and Europe) while guns from U.S. and Russian organized-crime groups flow in the other direction, and often these guns are used as whole or partial payment for the drugs.

Illegal drugs are not the only thing traded for guns. During the Cold War, a robust arms-for-sugar trade transpired between the Cubans and Vietnamese. As a result, Marxist groups all over Latin America were furnished with U.S. materiel either captured or left behind when the Americans withdrew from Vietnam. LAW rockets traced to U.S. military stocks sent to Vietnam were used in several attacks by Latin American Marxist groups. These Vietnam War-vintage weapons still crop up with some frequency in Mexico, Colombia and other parts of the region. Cold War-era weapons furnished to the likes of the Contras, Sandinistas, Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front and Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity movement in the 1980s are also frequently encountered in the region.

After the civil wars ended in places like El Salvador and Guatemala, the governments and the international community attempted to institute arms buy-back programs, but those programs were not very successful and most of the guns turned in were very old — the better arms were cached by groups or kept by individuals. Some of these guns have dribbled back into the black arms market, and Central and South America are still awash in Cold War weapons.

But Cold War shipments are not the only reason that Latin America is flooded with guns. In addition to the indigenous arms industries in countries like Brazil and Argentina, Venezuela has purchased hundreds of thousands of AK assault rifles in recent years to replace its aging FN-FAL rifles and has even purchased the equipment to open a factory to produce AK-103 rifles under license inside Venezuela. The Colombian government has accused the Venezuelans of arming the FARC, and evidence obtained by the Colombians during raids on FARC camps and provided to the public appears to support those assertions.

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corporation, zoning, anti-use commercials, the list goes on on how to return the state's monopoly on violence.

Pete and Repete were riding in a boat... It's a much larger version of the U.S. 1920's prohibition.

But we are the choir on this one aren't we.

These posts continue to be an invaluable source for us here. Thanks for your continued efforts.

I was speaking with an academic here in Denmark who is looking to do a cross border examination of the social effects of murders of women workers at US maquiladoras over the border. Something like 1000 murders in recent years I've heard. Don't even know what the statistics on rape and other physical abuses are. I pointed her to your series here. It's shocking, the utter dehumanization of communities along both sides of the border. How long can the corporate media servants of NAFTA keep this out of view? Too many human beings are dying and too many communities are being destroyed, on both sides of the border. Somos hermanos and we're all being crushed. Keep getting the word out.

Gunmen have launched a string of attacks on federal police bases in Mexico, killing five people.

At least six cities were hit - all in the western Michoacan state, a stronghold of Mexico's drug cartels.

Three police officers and two soldiers are reported to have been killed when the attackers, armed with grenades and assault rifles, opened fire.

In one incident, in the state capital Morelia, 40 gunmen arrived in a convoy of vehicles to carry out the raid.

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* Only a bit of promised $1.4 billion has been delivered
* Economy leaves U.S. security companies anxious for work
* 30 to 40 U.S. companies to benefit

By Mica Rosenberg

MEXICO CITY, July 16 (Reuters) - As Mexico battles to keep a lid on raging drug murders, American companies are vying for millions of dollars worth of contracts for military equipment and training under a long-promised U.S aid package.

Private U.S. security firms will get the bulk of a $1.4 billion package pledged by the United States in 2007 to help its southern neighbor crush rampant drug gang violence. Only a fraction of the aid has been delivered so far.

Almost all of an initial $400 million tranche approved by the U.S. Congress in 2008 and being released bit by bit to buy helicopters and inspection gear and train Mexican police will be doled out to 30 or 40 U.S. companies, said an official at the U.S. embassy in Mexico City, asking not to be named.

The state-of-the art equipment, promised by former President George W. Bush at a meeting with President Felipe Calderon in the colonial city of Merida, is badly needed in Mexico as the death toll from a 2 1/2-year drug war tops 12,800.

"We would love to get in on some of that Merida money," said Scott Newman, an executive from Texas firm Texcalibur, which specializes in bulletproofing cars used in war zones.

"You see these trucks that aren't armored and they've got the Mexican police in the back holding on to roll bars. They are exposed. The narcos have bigger more powerful weapons and they just spray them with bullets," said Newman, whose firm recently attended a security fair in Mexico to hawk its wares.

The Mexican government has welcomed the so-called "Merida Initiative" and a promise by President Barack Obama to try to stem the smuggling of U.S. guns to Mexico but is not holding its breath for the gear to arrive.

Calderon has poured some $7 billion into a high-stakes army crackdown on drug cartels but his security forces struggle to match the clout of powerful gangs that shunt $40 billion worth of drugs across the U.S. border each year and smuggle back sophisticated weaponry and technology.

The deployment of thousands of troops since Calderon took office in late 2006 has stoked fresh turf wars between rival gangs. Hitmen often shoot their victims at close range, behead them or slowly torture them to death in cartel safe houses.

U.S. COMPANIES TOUT MIDEAST EXPERIENCE

Many U.S. security companies that supported anti-drug operations in Colombia or worked in Middle Eastern or African conflict zones say they have the expertise to help Mexico.

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