80% of weapons legally imported to Mexico from 2006 to 2019 come from the U.S.

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Mexico City. During the launch of the Peace without Arms campaign promoted by various non-governmental organizations, Global Exchange reported that between 2006 and 2019, 80 percent of the weapons legally imported by Mexico came from the United States, a country from where 70 percent of the weapons were also introduced. illegal weapons to the country. In that period, according to the Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion of Human Rights, 147 thousand weapons of various caliber were legally imported.

According to organizations such as Stop Us Arms to Mexico, Centro de Estudios Ecuénicos, Global Exchange, in Mexico the Secretariat of National Defense has a monopoly on imports, production and commercialization, but their operation, they denounced, is carried out in total opacity because In the vast majority of these imports, the final destination was not the armed forces but the police corporations, with the aggravating circumstance that many have been “lost” in possession of them and later used by organized crime.

Taking stock of the impact of the growing acquisition of weapons in Mexico, it goes beyond militarization in security strategies, but has other impacts on daily use. Nancy Carmona de Equis, Justice for Women, denounced that in the framework of the worsening of femicides in Mexico, the use of firearms in 2006 caused 3 out of 10 violent deaths of women, while by 2020, it doubled, because now six are committed, with the characteristic that now there are more and more murders on public roads.

The pronouncement of several organizations demanding a Peace without arms highlights that “armed violence has drastically increased in Mexico in recent years. Although this type of violence responds to multiple factors, the proximity to the United States, being the largest producer and consumer of firearms in the world, as well as the decision to militarize security in Mexico.

When denouncing the lack of transparency in the importation of weapons into the country – beyond those that are introduced illegally – they questioned the opacity assumed by the Sedena. The seriousness of this behavior is evident, they said, because according to information from the Secretary of Foreign Relations and the US Office of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, of the total number of weapons recovered in Mexico in crime scenes “between 70 and 90 per one hundred were imported from the United States ”.

For this reason, they demanded that the federal government adopt a punctual and transparent strategy to adequately monitor the legal imports of arms into the country, including: transparent records; controls and tracking of the final use of weapons; design a public policy on arms control in the country, among other aspects.

Source: jornada.com.mx

Mexico Daily Post