Efforts to stem the smuggling of weapons from the United States to Mexican drug cartels have been frustrated by bureaucratic infighting, a lack of training and the delayed delivery of a computer program to Mexico, according to U.S. and Mexican officials.
In the past four years, Mexico has submitted information about more than 74,000 guns seized south of the border that the government suspects were smuggled from the United States. But much of the data is so incomplete as to be useless and has not helped authorities bust the gunrunners who supply the Mexican mafias with their vast armories, officials said.
According to U.S. agents working here, Mexican prosecutors have not made a single major arms trafficking case.
In an address before a joint session of Congress this year, President Felipe Calderon asked the United States to reimpose a ban on the assault-style rifles favored by Mexican drug cartels and to work harder to stop weapons flowing from gun shops and shows along the southwest border into Mexico.
Obama administration officials have responded with a surge in spending to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Department of Homeland Security, and promises to curb cross-border gunrunning.
"Mexico is facing an unprecedented and a terrible struggle" against arms traffickers, money launderers and organized crime, Mexico Attorney General Arturo Chavez said Tuesday, standing beside U.S. ambassador Carlos Pascual. "We have to fight these criminals together. Positive results have been attained, but we need to do more and move faster."
Mexico has some of the strictest gun laws in the world. It is extremely difficult for citizens to legally buy or possess pistols or rifles. The country has just one gun store, operated by the military.
And yet it is awash in weapons, from the ubiquitous 9mm handguns found in the glove box of every thug in Mexico to .50-caliber sniper rifles capable of downing a helicopter. Both guns are sold legally in the United States and are easily obtainable in the worldwide black market in arms. More than 28,000 Mexicans have died in drug violence in the past four years.
As a pillar of a $1.4 billion aid program to Mexico to fight the surging violence and corrupting power of the drug cartels, the U.S. government announced three years ago that it would provide Mexico with its proprietary eTrace Internet-based system. On Tuesday in Mexico City, U.S. and Mexican officials signed a memorandum of understanding allowing for its full implementation.
The ATF describes the system as "a cornerstone" of its effort to fight arms trafficking to Mexico. Users enter basic data about a weapon, such as its make, model and serial number, and then receive intelligence from the ATF about where and when it was manufactured and sold.
But translating the program into Spanish took two years. And since its delivery almost a year ago, only a dozen Mexican agents have been trained to use it.
The U.S. government gave laptops to the agents in the Mexican attorney general's office, but the handful of ATF agents working in Mexico City had to enter much of the data themselves. U.S. officials say the Mexicans only sporadically used the tool, and when they did, often entered incomplete information that made it impossible to trace the weapons.
"ATF's attempts to expand gun tracing in Mexico have been unsuccessful," concludes a report by the Inspector General of the Justice Department on its own agency's efforts. The draft report, subject to change before its release later this month, states that although information-sharing about guns has increased, "most trace requests from Mexico do not succeed in identifying the gun dealer who originally sold the gun."
The report states that only about 30 percent of the trace requests submitted by Mexico to the ATF are successful. Furthermore, the Inspector General concludes, based on interviews in Mexico, Mexican law enforcement does not consider gun tracing an important tool, and authorities suspect that traces mostly benefit U.S. law enforcement.
ATF deputy director Kenneth Melson defended the agency and called the Inspector General's report "very preliminary."
Translating eTrace into Spanish "is more complicated than you would think," as two software systems needed to be synchronized, he said, adding that Mexican agents are now ready to be trained to use the software and that he hoped to have 300 trained in the coming year. "To attribute unsuccessful traces to ATF when we're not putting the data in is not fair," Melson said. The information from the Mexican military was submitted "by people who didn't know how to trace weapons, who weren't trained."
The U.S. government and Mexico both refuse to release the results of the traces.
The Mexican government often says that 90 percent of the weapons it confiscates come from the United States. In 2009 testimony before Congress, the ATF director gave that same figure.
But gun lobbyists, arms manufacturers and some members of Congress question that, and U.S. law enforcement agents and officials who have seen the trace results also say the raw numbers do not support the 90 percent figure.
In an interview, Melson said the ATF would no longer release such figures "because these percentages have been misused, misinterpreted, for political agendas on both sides of the gun issue."
U.S. agents along the southwest border are seizing a small percentage of the weapons likely to be smuggled south, based on tallies provided by the US agencies.
Last year, Calderon said his forces seized 34,000 illegal guns in operations in Mexico.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in a joint U.S.-Mexico task force along the border called Armas Cruzadas, confiscated 125 guns last year. The Department of Homeland Security, which includes customs, Border Patrol and ICE, captured 1,404 guns on their way to Mexico from March 2009 to March 2010.
