Tegucigalpa, Jul 2 – A new route was created from the shops and markets in the United States to illegal arsenals of weapons in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador, explains Yahoo News.
The three Central American countries, called the Triangle of Death, have crime rates of 91.6 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in Honduras, 69.2 in El Salvador and 38.5 in Guatemala.
These data, provided by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), is considered by the body as an epidemic, a category that applies when the index exceeds ten.
The guns comes to Central America overland across the border with Mexico, camouflaged in other goods and luggage on commercial flights, said a report by the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, located in the United States.
With a network of about 51,300 retail stores and about 7,400 pawnshops, the U.S is the ideal place to acquire the equipment needed by organized crime in Mexico and Central America, said Yahoo News.
A joint report from the American University of San Diego and Brazil’s Igarapé Institute, said that between 2010 and 2012 253,000 firearms were transported across the Mexican border.
This figure is almost three times that reported between 1997 and 1999, while a law to ban assault weapons was still active in the United States.
About half of U.S. arms traders depend on sales to Mexico, which represent revenue profits of $127.2 million USD in 2010 and 2012, said the study.
In Central America there are about five million firearms circulating, of which less than half are registered by security forces, according to UNODC.
Via PL