American military training and Texas guns are helping boost drug-war violence

This article from the Fort Worth Weekly is the most comprehensive overview I've read this year of how US is inextricably implicated in Mexico's drug war violence that is now spilling across the border into the US. And it mentions my article that uncovered US-based private contractor Risks Incorporated's role in torture trainings for Mexican police. An excerpt from A Border Under Siege:

At least one other U.S.-based security firm is already operating in Mexico. In July, the day after Bush signed the Mexico Plan, two different videos of a torture training session for police in the city of Leon, Guanajuato, were released by the local paper El Heraldo de Leon. The tapes showed graphic images of torture techniques (as practiced on police volunteers), including images of one volunteer having his head forced into a pit of rats and feces, and another being dragged through his own vomit after he was beaten.

Kristin Bricker, an investigative reporter with NarcoNews.com, subsequently uncovered evidence that the trainers in the video were from Risks, Incorporated, a Miami-based private security outfit that specializes in, among other things, teaching psychological torture techniques.

"There is no question that the U.S. is involved in every aspect of the drug war in Mexico," Castillo said. And if you don't believe the author and former DEA undercover agent, how about the departing U.S. ambassador to Mexico? Tony Garza is now saying that they United States must accept responsibility for the gun trade and for providing the market for Mexican drugs. The Dallas Morning News reported last week that Garza said in a recent speech that Mexico "would not be the center of cartel activity or be experiencing this level of violence, were the United States not the largest consumer of illegal drugs and the main supplier of weapons to the cartels."

Read all of A Border Under Siege