WHY THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS WANT OBAMA AGAIN:
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2012/02/arizona-gov-brewer-endorses-mitt-romney_26.html
BILLIONS
SQUANDERED OVER THERE IN THE WAR FOR BUSH’S BIG SAUDI OIL!
WHILE THE
SAME WHORES KEEP WORKING FOR OPEN BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX.
REALLY!
WHICH BORDER ARE YOU MOST CONCERNED OVER? THE ONE WITH IRAQ-IRAN, OR THE ONE
WITH NARCOMEX ON THE OTHER SIDE OF YOUR BACKYARD?
EVERY DAY
THERE ARE 12 AMERICAN MURDERED BY ILLEGALS, AND BILLIONS PAID OUT IN SOCIAL
SERVICES/WELFARE TO THE SAME.
NEW YORK
TIMES
February 26,
2009
U.S. Is Arms Bazaar for Mexican
Cartels
By JAMES C.
McKINLEY Jr.
PHOENIX — The Mexican agents who moved in on a safe house full of
drug dealers last May were not prepared for the fire power that greeted them.
When the shooting was over, eight agents were dead. Among the guns
the police recovered was an assault rifle traced back across the border to a
dingy gun store here called X-Caliber Guns.
Now, the owner, George Iknadosian, will go on trial on charges he
sold hundreds of weapons, mostly AK-47 rifles, to smugglers, knowing they would
send them to a drug cartel in the western state of Sinaloa. The guns
helped fuel the gang warfare in which more than 6,000 Mexicans died last year.
Mexican authorities have long complained that American gun dealers
are arming the cartels. This case is the most prominent prosecution of an
American gun dealer since the United States promised Mexico two years ago it would clamp down on the
smuggling of weapons across the border. It also offers a rare glimpse of how
weapons delivered to American gun dealers are being moved into Mexico and
wielded in horrific crimes.
“We had a direct pipeline from Iknadosian to the Sinaloa cartel,”
said Thomas G. Mangan, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Phoenix.
Drug gangs seek out guns in the United States because the
gun-control laws are far tougher in Mexico. Mexican civilians must get approval
from the military to buy guns and they cannot own large-caliber rifles or
high-powered pistols, which are considered military weapons.
The ease with which Mr. Iknadosian and two other men transported
weapons to Mexico over a two-year period illustrates just how difficult it is
to stop the illicit trade, law enforcement officials here say.
The gun laws in the United States allow the sale of multiple
military-style rifles to American citizens without reporting the sales to the
government, and the Mexicans search relatively few cars and trucks going south
across their border.
What is more, the sheer volume of licensed dealers — more than
6,600 along the border alone, many of them operating out of their houses —
makes policing them a tall order. Currently the A.T.F. has about 200 agents
assigned to the task.
Smugglers routinely enlist Americans with clean criminal records
to buy two or three rifles at a time, often from different shops, then
transport them across the border in cars and trucks, often secreting them in
door panels or under the hood, law enforcement officials here say. Some of the
smuggled weapons are also bought from private individuals at gun shows, and the
law requires no notification of the authorities in those cases.
“We can move against the most outrageous purveyors of arms to
Mexico, but the characteristic of the arms trade is it’s a ‘parade of ants’ —
it’s not any one big dealer, it’s lots of individuals,” said Arizona’s attorney
general, Terry Goddard, who is prosecuting Mr. Iknadosian. “That makes it very
hard to detect because it’s often below the radar.”
The Mexican government began to clamp down on drug cartels in late
2006, unleashing a war that daily deposits dozens of bodies — often gruesomely
tortured — on Mexico’s streets. President Felipe Calderón has
characterized the stream of smuggled weapons as one of the most significant
threats to security in his country. The Mexican authorities say they seized
20,000 weapons from drug gangs in 2008, the majority bought in the United
States.
The authorities in the United States say they do not know how many
firearms are transported across the border each year, in part because the
federal government does not track gun sales and traces only weapons used in crimes.
But A.T.F. officials estimate 90 percent of the weapons recovered in Mexico
come from dealers north of the border.
In 2007, the firearms agency traced 2,400 weapons seized in Mexico
back to dealers in the United States, and 1,800 of those came from dealers
operating in the four states along the border, with Texas first, followed by
California, Arizona and New Mexico.
Mr. Iknadosian is accused of being one of those dealers. So brazen
was his operation that the smugglers paid him in advance for the guns and the
straw buyers merely filled out the required paperwork and carried the weapons
off, according to A.T.F. investigative reports. The agency said Mr. Iknadosian
also sold several guns to undercover agents who had explicitly informed him
that they intended to resell them in Mexico.
Mr. Iknadosian, 47, will face trial on March 3 on charges
including fraud, conspiracy and assisting a criminal syndicate. His lawyer,
Thomas M. Baker, declined to comment on the charges, but said Mr. Iknadosian
maintained his innocence. No one answered the telephone at Mr. Iknadosian’s
home in Glendale, Ariz.
A native of Egypt who spent much of his life in California, Mr.
Iknadosian moved his gun-selling operation to Arizona in 2004, because the gun
laws were more lenient, prosecutors said.
Over the two years leading up to his arrest last May, he sold more
than 700 weapons of the kind currently sought by drug dealers in Mexico,
including 515 AK-47 rifles and one .50 caliber rifle that can penetrate an
engine block or bulletproof glass, the A.T.F. said.
Based on the store’s records and the statements of some
defendants, investigators estimate at least 600 of those weapons were smuggled
to Mexico. So far, the Mexican authorities have seized seven of the
Kalashnikov-style rifles from gunmen for the Beltrán Leyva cartel who had
battled with the police.
The store was also said to be the source for a Colt .38-caliber
pistol stuck in the belt of a reputed drug kingpin, Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, when
he was arrested a year ago in the Sinaloan town of Culiacán. Also linked to the
store was a diamond-studded handgun carried by another reputed mobster, Hugo
David Castro, known as El Once, who was arrested in November on charges he took
part in killing a state police chief in Sonora.
According to reports by A.T.F. investigators, Mr. Iknadosian sold
more than 60 assault rifles in late 2007 and early 2008 to straw buyers working
for two brothers — Hugo Miguel Gamez, 26, and Cesar Bojorguez Gamez, 27 — who
then smuggled them into Mexico.
The brothers instructed the buyers to show up at X-Caliber Guns
and to tell Mr. Iknadosian they were there to pick up guns for “Cesar” or “C,”
the A.T.F. said. Mr. Iknadosian then helped the buyers fill out the required
federal form, called the F.B.I. to check their
records and handed over the rifles. The straw buyers would then meet one of the
brothers to deliver the merchandise. They were paid $100 a gun.
The Gamez brothers have pleaded guilty to a count of attempted
fraud. Seven of the buyers arrested last May have pleaded guilty to lesser
charges and have agreed to testify against Mr. Iknadosian, prosecutors said.
In one transaction, Mr. Iknadosian gave advice about how to buy
weapons and smuggle them to a person who turned out to be an informant who was
recording him, according to a transcript. He told the informant to break the
sales up into batches and never to carry more than two weapons in a car.
“If you got pulled over, two is no biggie,” Mr. Iknadosian is
quoted as saying in the transcript. “Four is a question. Fifteen is, ‘What are
you doing?’ ”
NEW YORK TIMES
February 27, 2009
Editorial
The Drug Cartels’ Right to Bear Arms
The hypocrisy grows all too gruesome: The Justice Department
pronounced the Mexican drug cartels “a national security threat” this week,
even as American gun dealers along the border were busily arming the cartels’
murderous gangs. Mexico complains that American dealers supplied most of the
20,000 weapons seized last year in drug wars in which 6,000 Mexicans died.
A vast arms bazaar is rampant along the four border states,
enabled by porous to nonexistent American gun laws. Straw buyers can pick up
three or four high-powered war rifles from one of more than 6,600 border
dealers and hand them off to smugglers. They easily return to Mexico, where gun
laws are far less permissive.
Licensed dealers routinely recruit buyers with clean criminal
records to foil weak laws and feed the deadly pipeline, according to a report
by James C. McKinley Jr. in The Times. The countless unlicensed “gun
enthusiasts” free to deal battlefield rifles at weekend shows, thanks to
loophole-ridden laws, are a second source.
The federal government is allowed to only trace weapons used in
crimes and has no idea of the full scope of the border trade, which accounts
for 9 out of 10 recovered weapons.
One dealer exploited the lack of federal controls by packing up
his California shop, where laws were tougher, and moving to the lenient Arizona
border. He is accused of selling hundreds of AK-47 rifles to the cartels before
he was finally arrested in a sting by undercover agents. He’s more the
exception. At best, 200 agents work the border expanse where gun smugglers
operate as a “parade of ants,” in the words of one frustrated prosecutor.
There should be enormous shame on this side of the border that
America’s addiction to drugs is bolstered by its feckless gun controls. Firm
federal law is urgently needed if the homicidal cartels are to be seriously
challenged as a threat to national security.
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