Mexico threatens to escalate US gunmakers lawsuit with terror charges [View all]

Source: The Guardian/AFP

Fri 14 Feb 2025 13.06 EST
Last modified on Fri 14 Feb 2025 13.11 EST


Mexico’s president has warned US gunmakers they could face fresh legal action as accomplices of organized crime if Washington designates the country’s cartels as terrorist groups. The Latin American country, which is under mounting pressure from Donald Trump to curb illegal drug smuggling, wants its neighbor to crack down on firearms trafficking in the other direction.

“If they declare these criminal groups as terrorists, then we’ll have to expand our US lawsuit,” Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, said at a daily press conference. A new charge could include alleged complicity of gunmakers with terror groups, she said. “The lawyers are looking at it, but they could be accomplices,” Sheinbaum warned.

She said the US justice department itself has recognized that “74% of the weapons” used by criminal groups in Mexico come from north of the border. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the US state department plans to classify criminal groups from Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador and Venezuela as “terrorist organizations”. They include Mexico’s two main drug-trafficking organizations, the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels, the report said.

Trump signed an executive order on 20 January creating a process for such a designation, saying that the cartels “constitute a national security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime”. Mexico says that between 200,000 and 750,000 weapons manufactured by US gunmakers are smuggled across the border from the United States every year, many of which are found at crime scenes.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/14/mexico-gunmakers-lawsuit-terror