U.S. authorities are increasingly concerned about another dangerous import from Mexico: grenades. The Associated Press says grenades have become a weapon of choice among Mexican drug cartels. The weapons are preferred by drug hit men because they are cheap and easy to find. Many are left over from Central America’s civil wars and sold on the black market. Some are brought in by weapons smugglers. Others are diverted from the region’s militaries.
And there is evidence that those grenades are making their way north. Last January, a grenade believed to have come from Mexico was tossed in a south Texas bar, although it failed to explode. U.S. firearms agents began taking a harder look at the grenade threat from Mexico after explosives popped up near the border. The Mexican military seized 165 grenades and 14 sticks of TNT last fall in the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, a dozen miles south of McAllen, Texas. That month, grenades were used as diversions in the fatal ambush of a state police chief a few miles south of Arizona in Nogales, Mexico.