born live love die

The Mexican drug war has a very simple equation: drugs go from Mexico into the US, and guns go from the US into Mexico.  Read:

When I met García Luna in Washington in January, soon after the shootout in Tijuana made headlines in the United States, he was carrying with him a manila envelope full of color photographs. The photographs were grisly full-color shots of dead Mexican police and narco gun caches — a police officer bleeding on the ground; the aftermath of the shootout; the underground firing range. García Luna thought of them as a sort of secret weapon of his own.

García Luna was in Washington to make the rounds of U.S. government agencies and Congressional offices — visiting those who would have to approve and implement the Merida Initiative, a $1.4 billion package of counternarcotics aid that the Bush administration proposed. (Congress has since authorized $400 million worth of aid to Mexico for next year, including equipment and technical support for García Luna’s police.) Seeming out of his element in the government buildings and think tanks — unlike many powerful Mexicans, he does not speak much English (all of my interviews with him were conducted in Spanish) — García Luna met with government officials and diplomats and gave a stilted power-point presentation to policy experts. He seemed more interested in the photographs he had brought, his way of making a blunt point about a touchy aspect of U.S.-Mexican relations: the vast majority of weapons in the cartel’s arsenals (80 to 90 percent, according to the Mexican government’s figures) are purchased in the United States, often at loosely regulated gun shows, and smuggled into Mexico by the same networks that smuggle drugs the opposite direction. García Luna has a hard time concealing his anger about the fact that U.S. laws make it difficult to do much about this “brutal flow” of firepower. “How is it possible,” he asked me, “that a person is allowed to go buy a hundred cuernos de chivo” — AK-47’s — “for himself?” In the United States, he said, “there was a lot of indifference.”

In meetings with U.S. officials, García Luna passed around the photographs, with little fanfare or preface. Davy Aguilera, the Mexico attaché for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who was present for one of García Luna’s presentations, said that the images of gun violence “made a real impression inside the Beltway.” Many U.S. officials have come to share García Luna’s frustration. “You take the guns away and you’ll win,” a senior Senate staff member who worked on the Merida Initiative (and who is not authorized to talk publicly about legislation that came out of his committee) said to me. “But if you can’t deal with the issue of guns, you’re not going to see much progress. They’re finding unopened boxes of AK-47’s.”

Take the guns away?  Yeah, like that is going to happen.  I favor the Second Amendment to the Constitution, but hells bells, we need to get some sanity here.  We make people take training before we let them drive, but anyone can walk in off the street and buy guns.  Gun shows….  oh, crap, don’t get me started.

The Republicans need to take responsibility for what their support for the NRA has done to the problem of drug abuse in this country.  Like that’s ever going to happen.

The article is a great read in how the drug cartels are trying to take over control of much of Mexican society.  Read it.