Time for Daylight: U.S. Weapons Reaching Cartel Hands a Huge Scandal

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Pajamas Media:

The U.S. government is the top supplier of the most effective weapons in the narco-terrorist arsenal, a story that much of the U.S. media is trying hard to ignore.

Fox News has reported that the U.S. government is the ultimate source for the majority of cartel machine guns, as well as hand grenades and plastic explosives. These munitions have been used to kill law enforcement officers, government officials, and civilians. According to sources, the weapons get from our government to the cartels via three routes:

U.S. Defense Department shipments to Latin America, known and tracked by the U.S. State Department as “foreign military sales.”

Weapons ordered by the Mexican government, tracked by the State Department as “direct commercial sales.”

Aging but plentiful arsenals of military weapon stores in Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

Firearms such as M16 and M4 assault rifles — real, selective-fire weapons that can fire as machine guns — are sold directly to cartels by corrupt soldiers in the Mexican military, some of the weapons in new or like-new condition. Anecdotal evidence suggests that at least some of these firearms are sold to the cartels by Mexican soldiers that have gone AWOL with individual weapons, but many more are coming directly from corrupt government and military officials with armory access.

Some AK-pattern rifles and other Russian-designed automatic weapons can be traced to Latin American nations where the U.S. provided the governments these weapons as military aid.

Many of the grenades recovered from the cartels came from U.S. military assistance to central American countries decades ago, where aging stockpiles are being sold to cartels.