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.
Last August, a US judge dismissed a $10bn lawsuit brought by the Mexican government against six gun manufacturers based in the United States that sought to hold them responsible for deaths from guns trafficked into Mexico.
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”.
“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.
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.
