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A recent gun trafficking case in federal court in El Paso in Texas shows one of the most common ways of buying and selling that stimulates arms trafficking between the United States and Mexico.
It is not a mass traffic that requires commercial land or air transport, but rather small-scale trafficking carried out by individuals .
A man was arrested and tried recently in El Paso, Texas, because he bought 49 pistols and rifles of 12 dealers and was spotted driving into Mexico shortly after the purchases. Guns included 9mm Berettas and semi-automatic rifles.
José Luis García Jr., from 34 years, he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for buy close to 50 guns in the United States and take them to Mexico
During that period, García lived in Mexico and attracted the attention of federal agents because he often crossed the border into the United States for only a few hours to buy firearms and then returned to the ground. Mexican.
Garcia would include his address as 226 Holy Cross in El Paso on Federal Firearms License forms, but actually lived in Juarez, Mexico, during that period, federal officials said.
Mexican officials s say that those weapons are contributing to the increase in homicide rates in your country and the empowerment of transnational criminal organizations blamed for the majority of 120, 000 murders reported in Mexico in the last three years.
“ We estimate that half a million Arms are trafficked from the United States to Mexico each year . The problem is that all this weaponry is reaching criminal organizations, giving them a very strong firepower to commit all kinds of crimes, “said Mauricio Ibarra Ponce de León, consul general of Mexico in El Paso to BorderReport.com .
Ibarra says Mexico has strict gun laws and its one army-run gun store only issues a couple hundred gun licenses per year. Practically , and seven out of each 10 arrive from the United States, as shown by the records .
On August 8, 1200, Garcia was interviewed by federal agents who investigated whether he had power any of the 49 firearms you purchased. Garcia replied that he did not have firearms at that time.
The past 11 August, a federal jury found Garcia guilty of one count of unlicensed firearms trafficking.
The court sentenced Garcia to pass 41 months in federal jail, the DOJ noted.
U.S. Attorney Ashley C. Hoff said in a statement that the DOJ aggressively prosecutes violations related to firearms , “particularly when firearms are placed in the hands of prohibited persons or trafficked to Mexico” .
For his part, Taekuk Cho, special agent in charge of National Security Investigations (HSI) in El Paso, warned that “ Illegal firearms and ammunition trafficking in the United States often results in guns falling into the hands of Cr Transnational iminals in Mexico “.
” This illicit activity not only fuels crime , but it also helps provoke violence on both sides of the border, ”he added.