Javelin Sent to Ukraine Turns Up in Mexico

A US-made anti-tank missile launcher identified as a Javelin, thousands of which were sent to Ukraine by the Pentagon has found its way to Mexico. 

 

Footage filmed in Matamoros, a city in the north-eastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, on Monday and aired the next day by Milenio TV, a Mexican television cable news channel showed a gang member wearing the insignia of Mexico’s notorious Gulf Cartel (Cartel Del Golfo, CDG) armed with a Kalashnikov rifle and a Raytheon-made FGM-148. 

 

Over 10,000 Javelins from Pentagon stockpiles have been sent to Ukraine since last February, to the point where the US military has begun to run out of them itself. 

 

Milenio presenter Azucena Uresti noted on Twitter that the estimated value of a Javelin launcher on the black market was anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000, while the average cost of a missile was about $30,000. 

 

Keen-eyed military experts, however, believe the weapon in the Milenio footage may actually be the AT-4, a Swedish-made disposable anti-tank launcher, which is also in use by the US military and likewise supplied to Ukraine by the thousands. 

 

A RT investigation in July 2022 found Western-supplied weapons, including anti-tank rockets, for sale on the “dark web”. And Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova even warned that $1 billion a month worth of Western weapons was ending up in the hands of “terrorists, extremists and criminal groups in the Middle East, Central Africa, and Southeast Asia”. 

 

Kiev, of course, denounced this as “propaganda” and insisted all were accounted for. 

 

FYI, the Gulf Cartel is based in Tamaulipas, specifically in the border city of Matamoros, just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville in Texas, USA. They are primarily known as a drug smuggling cartel, but the CDG have also been accused of racketeering, abductions, money laundering, and trafficking of people, sex slaves and weapons. 

 

In March, the cartel apologized for one of their factions kidnapping four Americans and killing two of them, in what they said was a case of mistaken identity. Five members were handed over to the Mexican police.