The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (SRE) filed a lawsuit against 11 conventional weapons companies before the courts in the United States. The lawsuit is not against Washington, DC, but against private companies whose business, lawful in that country, is to produce weapons.
The cause that the SRE undertook has a consensus: to seek the pacification of Mexico, a country with more disappeared and executed than many countries at war, however, the wave of violence is carried out with legal or contraband weapons and/or with weapons both from the United States and from other countries.
The Mexican government estimates that there are more than 200,000 firearms that enter the country illegally. The head of the SRE, Marcelo Ebrard, was emphatic in saying before the UN Security Council itself, of the need to “monitor and prevent illicit arms transfers, trade diversion and cross-border trafficking.”
For many, they made a mistake, going to ask a multilateral forum for a bilateral request, neither more nor less with the most important relationship for Mexico, which is the relationship with the United States. Previously, the United Nations General Assembly approved the Arms Trade Treaty in 2013, which entered into force on December 24, 2014. For many, the limitation of the Treaty is that there will be no arms trade if it is proven that a certain government uses them. for genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. Would the harsh reality of Mexico require another category? And when the buyers are not national governments?
Holding U.S. arms manufacturers jointly responsible for the death of 70% of those executed in Mexico and pointing out that “the lack of corporate responsibility” of said assemblers “reached the insult of creating weapons to suit the applicant,” is a risk and more so when It is an argument of the Mexican government.
What is a laudable action by the Foreign Ministry may have feet of clay. The recent presidential decree to regularize vehicles of foreign origin, the painful “regularization of chocolates”, that cyclical boomerang of each six-year term that refuses to take the bull by the horns, once again makes the illegal legal. Some have not seen or do not want to see that many of these weapons enter Mexico through those vehicles, most of which are discarded by US insurers. “Chocolate” vehicles that enter empty, without weapons and without dollars? The security and intelligence structures of the Mexican government know this. It is difficult to think that there is no coordination and flow of this information with the SRE.
If Mexico itself is going against a monster in which the sale of weapons globally before the pandemic had flows of almost 400,000 million dollars, of which more than a third are from US companies, which are suing Mexico, it would be a bad message and an inconsistency that in Mexican territory a means of transportation that benefits criminals who buy weapons becomes legal. That without thinking that those who produce weapons can argue that the ungovernability and corruption of Mexico’s borders are not their responsibility.
Alejandro Celorio, Legal Consultant of the SRE, has been clear in emphasizing that “our objective is to reduce the number of weapons that enter our country, to reduce the firepower of organized crime and by doing this, the State’s actions will to be much more effective”, achieving this also requires stopping the smuggling of “chocolate” vehicles that contributes to transporting part of these weapons, in addition to the indignity of turning Mexico into the great junkyard of the United States.
@balajucapitan