What connection do mass shootings in the United States have with the disappearance of 43 students in the state of Guerrero and even with northward immigration from Latin America?
A 16-person, international fact finding delegation that recently arrived in Mexico, drawn by the critical level of human rights abuses here, has tied all these problems to at least one lynchpin — a superabundance of American-made weaponry.
“There are many more victims of assault guns in Mexico than in the United States,” said John Lindsay-Poland, a specialist in U.S. foreign policy affiliated with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker-founded peace and justice group. “Assault guns are an international problem,” he emphasized.
Lindsay-Poland, who visited Mexico City, Guerrero, Chiapas and Cuernavaca with the AFSC delegation starting June 12, added that the massive legal and illegal southward movement of U.S.-manufactured weapons is causing the current “crisis of violence” in Mexico, which has been labeled the third most deadly conflict in the world, after the civil war in Syria and the ISIS advance in Iraq.
The delegates met with U.S. embassy officials, migrants who left Central America due to threats from forces using U.S. supplied weapons, Guerrero state police, and families of the Guerrero students who were shot in well-attested attacks but whose bodies then disappeared.
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