ENGLISH DEYEA NEWS

New initiative is intended to curb border violence, cut off drug cartels

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS | CUERNAVACA, Mexico - U.S. and Mexican officials say they will soon name a group to develop strategies for stopping the cross-border flow of weapons and drugs.

Emerging from a conference Thursday with U.S. officials, Mexican Attorney General Eduardo Medina-Mora said more meetings are needed to develop plans to bring warring drug cartels under control along the border.

Medina-Mora also announced plans to begin checking 10 percent of the vehicles entering his country from the U.S. for illegal weapons.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder met privately for several hours with Medina-Mora, Interior Minister Fernando Gomez-Mont and Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna.

Obama to visit Calderon later this month
The officials hammered out an agreement that might be signed when U.S. President Barack Obama visits Mexican President Felipe Calderon later this month.

Holder said the U.S. is not seeking to change any of its gun laws as part of the effort to curb weapons smuggling.

"I don't think our Second Amendment will stand in the way of what we have begun," he said.

Until recently, the U.S. did not regularly inspect southbound vehicles, and the Mexicans didn't scan the license plates of cars coming into the country. Now Mexico will begin scanning vehicles for drugs and money and using intelligence to target the right vehicles, Medina-Mora said.

Mexico will also rely on the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to use technology to help trace the illegal sale of guns.

Weapons come from U.S. dealers
Most of the weapons being used in the Mexican drug wars — 6,290 people died last year and more than 1,000 this year — are smuggled across the border from gun dealers in the United States.

The Cuernavaca meetings come one day after Napolitano announced plans to spend more than $400 million to upgrade U.S. ports of entry and surveillance technologies to help thwart drugs and arms smuggling along the border.

Napolitano said the U.S. and Mexico are in a better position than ever before to take on this fight.

"Now you have the political will at the highest reaches of the Mexican government to take this on and to be public about it," she said. "That combined with our own interest in taking on these cartels and the resources that we have give you kind of a one-two punch that we didn't have at that level before."

Stepped up outbound inspections
Besides the $400 million, which is part of President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package approved by Congress, Napolitano has directed her department to step up its outbound inspections. Customs and Border Protection officials would not provide specific details, but said there were about five outbound inspection operations in the past year.

Two weeks ago Customs officials at the eight railroads between the U.S. and Mexico began scanning rail cars on the way out of the U.S. instead of just on their way in. When U.S. officials see something suspicious in the X-ray, they alert Mexican law enforcement, which intercepts the rail cars in Mexico.

It was as simple as flipping a switch, said Marko Lopez Jr., chief of staff for Customs and Border Protection.

Lopez, who came on recently with the new administration, said he did not know why this wasn't being done before. "Bottom-line is that we weren't," Lopez said. "It's a huge vulnerability."