Unlike your humble reporter, someone at bloomberg.com watched Charlie Rose interview Mexican President Felipe Calderon. Apparently, Calderon repeated his thoroughly debunked but politically expedient claim that “drug-related violence is being fueled by illegal imports of U.S. guns that have surged since a ban on assault weapons ended in 2004.” That’s the agit-prop recap provided by Mayor Bloomberg’s homies, who are never influenced by the boss’s gun control agenda. Here’s the Mexican’s misegos, straight from the horse’s . . . mouth . . .
“The violence in Mexico started when the assault weapons ban expired,” Calderon asserted to an all-too-credulous Rose.
So now you know. Prior to September 13, 2004 there was no drug cartel-related violence south of the border. It all started because Americans couldn’t keep their damn guns to themselves. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any mass graves containing men and women slaughtered by the drug cartels as part of their subversion of Mexican democracy (such as it was) and internecine slaughter.
There are a lot of ways to dismiss Calderon’s absurd statement. Rather than link to hundreds of articles chronicling pre-’04 Mexican drug cartel-related violence—a Google search too far for Bloomberg’s minions—let’s let wikipedia.org do the dirty on Calderon’s laughable distortion.
When enforcement efforts intensified in South Florida and the Caribbean, the Colombian organizations formed partnerships with the Mexico-based traffickers to transport cocaine through Mexico into the United States.[30]
This was easily accomplished because Mexico had long been a major source of heroin and cannabis, and drug traffickers from Mexico had already established an infrastructure that stood ready to serve the Colombia-based traffickers. By the mid-1980s, the organizations from Mexico were well established and reliable transporters of Colombian cocaine.
At first, the Mexican gangs were paid in cash for their transportation services, but in the late 1980s, the Mexican transport organizations and the Colombian drug traffickers settled on a payment-in-product arrangement. Transporters from Mexico usually were given 35 to 50 % of each cocaine shipment. This arrangement meant that organizations from Mexico became involved in the distribution, as well as the transportation of cocaine, and became formidable traffickers in their own right.
Claro? Needless to say, it gets worse. Bloomberg:
Authorities have seized more than 100,000 weapons in the past four years, 85 percent of which came from the U.S., Calderon said during an interview earlier at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York. Sixty percent of the guns seized were assault weapons, including AR-15 and AK-47 rifles, he added.
“All those weapons are not going to the good hands of the good American citizens — all those weapons are going to the hands of the criminals,” Calderon said. “They are killing people.”
Memo to Calderon: cut the shit. Your guys may have seized 100k weapons from the drug cartels in the last four years, but you and I know that 85,000 of them did NOT come from Bob’s Gun Store north of the border. Even the ATF couldn’t manage to smuggle more than a few thousand guns into Mexico.
Don’t tell me you forgot about that little business. Funny how you and Chuck neglected to discuss the Gunwalker scandal, in which the U.S. government enabled guns for Mexican drug thugs. Whereupon these esteemed members of your criminal syndicates used them to kill Mexicans. Oh, and a couple of U.S. federal agents.
But I guess that doesn’t count. And I supposed it’s easier to blame the NRA for your mess than the ATF. Either that or you have something to hide relative to your government’s relationship with the drug cartels.
Perish the thought. And perish the media that dares parrot this a-factual BS without fact checking, or deigning to grab a quote from someone willing to tell the truth about the ballistic instruments of violence in Mexico. And that is this: no matter where they come from or how they got there, guns in the hands of the narco-terrorists are a symptom of a disease, not its cause.
If Calderon wants to stop the cartel-related violence in Mexico, he should lobby the U.S. to legalize dope and restore his people’s right to keep and bear arms. Otherwise, what’s Spanish for STFU?