A former State Department Foreign Service Officer gives us the low-down on "Lies, Guns, and Mexico." Plus: "Cartels get heavy weapons from Cent. Am."

From The DiploMad 2.0 who describes himself as a "long time US Foreign Service Officer; served all over the world and under all sorts of conditions. Convinced the State Department needs to be drastically slashed and reformed so that it will no longer pose a threat to the national interests of the United States."

I was glad to read a good post at The PJ Tatler debunking the oft-heard claim that Mexican drug cartels get the majority of their weapons from the US. This lie has been a constant meme at the State Department. Over the past two years, I don't know how many meetings I attended given by "smart" and "well-educated" State Department personnel on how drugs flow north from Mexico and guns flow south from the US. We were shown pictures of guns and told they come from the US. In fact, however, none of the guns shown, not one, was a weapon freely available in the US market, even in the "notorious" gun shows of Texas and Florida.

I remember, in particular, one briefing at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) in which the presenter said that M-16s and AK-47s were being sent from the US to Mexico. I remember asking her, "Where were they purchased?" "Gun shows," was the answer. I bet her and the audience that none of us could walk out of the FSI and purchase an M-16 or an AK-47, or any of the other weapons shown on the slides, including heavy machine guns and submachine guns, at a gun show or a gun store. I defied the speaker to buy one. I would go with her to the next gun show out at Dulles, in Virginia, and we would try to buy a fully automatic weapon. She turned down the offer. . .

Having worked in Mexico, Central America, and northern South America, I can tell you the guns are not coming from the US (except, of course, for the ones the ATF has shipped south as part of the most idiotic "sting" operation in history--a topic for another day.) They come mostly from Asia, Eastern Europe--including Russia and Ukraine--and from stocks of older weapons held in Central America from years of warfare, and the overwhelming majority of those are of Soviet/Russian/Chinese design and fabrication.

And if confirmation of the above testimony is required:

Mexican cartels get heavy weapons from CentAm, U.S. cables say

The most fearsome weapons wielded by Mexico's drug cartels enter the country from Central America, not the United States, according to U.S. diplomatic cables disseminated by WikiLeaks and published here Tuesday by La Jornada newspaper.

Items such as grenades and rocket-launchers are stolen from Central American armies and smuggled into Mexico via neighboring Guatemala, the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City reported to Washington.

The assertions appear in embassy cables written after three bilateral conferences on arms trafficking that took place between March 2009 and January 2010 in Cuernavaca, Mexico; Phoenix; and Tapachula, Mexico, respectively.

The cables' authors note that Mexican officials and politicians never hesitate to remind U.S. diplomats that Mexico's drug war - which has claimed 35,000 lives in the last four years - is fueled by Americans' demand for illegal drugs and by guns bought in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Yet one of the cables maintains that 90 percent of the heavy armament Mexican security forces seize from cartel gunmen comes from Central America.

And, Kurt Hofmann asks: "What percentage of Mexican 'crime guns' are 'gunwalked' by Obama administration?"