Armed Mexicans Mean Disaster

• What do you do when your new best friend arms your enemies? Ignore it.

On April 9, a Japanese freighter, the Sasebo Maru, anchored off the Mexican port of Peurto Madero and off-loaded into lighter craft a heavy cargo of boxes and crates marked as "farm machinery" from Spain.

According to an unreleased State Department report, a wide array of weapons are being supplied to communist revolutionary terrorist groups in southern Mexico for use in their continued guerrilla war against the Mexican government and to destabilize the border regions of the United States. Most of those weapons are coming in by sea.

"We are will aware of the arms traffic and are keeping it under close supervision,' said a top State Department official on condition of anonymity. "However, no diplomatic action will be taken in the foreseeable future because of the attitude of the current administration toward both the governments of Mexico and certain Pacific Rim countries."

U.S. Intelligence agencies have the capacity to monitor the movements of any suspect shipping through satellite observation and the on-loading and off- loading of these cargoes were reported to Washington within hours, according to Department of Defense officials.

The unloading began at 6 am and was completed shortly after 2 pm and the ship weighed anchor an hour later, sailing out into the Gulf of Tehuantepec on a nerthwesterly course, bound for San Diego, California, according to the State Department source. By that time it was no longer the Sasebo Maru, but the Santiago Victory and the new name showed at the bows and stern. Both the port of registry and the national flag were Panamanian.

The false registration was not the only counterfeit aspect of this ship. Her cargo was not farm machinery from Barcelona, but a massive shipment of automatic firearms, rockets, ammunition, plastic explosives and drugs which were slowly heading for the revolutionary Zapatista movement in the southernmost Mexican province of Chiapas, the source said.

Along with the armaments, five passengers disembarked at Pureto Madero. One was a former member of the East German Stasi, the communist German equivalent of the Soviet KGB, and an instructor for the elite Walli Sanger East German airborne sabotage unite: another was a former Polish weapons expert and three were Mexican nationals who had been trained in guerrilla warfare in Cuba.

The ship, originally built in 1963 in England, was on charter to a Communist Chinese weapons consortium and had received three name and country of origin changes since the Chinese leased it three months before the Chiapas arrival.

Its last port of call before going through the Panama Canal, was at Turbo on the Caribbean coast of Columbia, where 2,000 kilos of cocaine and three Cuban- trained Mexicans were taken of board, according to State Department sources.

Before making landfall on the south American continent after its three-month journey, the Sasebo Maru had last docked at the Spanish Mediterranean port of Barcelona, her final European stop after a lengthy voyage during which she had stopped at Trieste at the top of the Adriatic, Haifa in Israel, Alexandria in Egypt and Tunis in Aleria.

The crates marked in Spanish as farm equipment contained a total of 6,000 AK-47 automatic assault rifles. None of these had been made in China. These weapons were basically AK variants such as the Finnish Balmet, the Russian AK- 47, the Egyptian-made Misr and the Israeli Galil as well as Korean made pieces. The 4 million rounds of ammunition, ball, armor-piercing and tracer, were manufactured in Red China, but the rounds had been head-stamped with Russian markings to mislead anyone who encountered them.

Among the shipment was 2,000 kilos of Czech-made Simes, a plastic explosive that is extremely difficult to detect, 1,230 Soviet-made RPG-7s and SA-7s, obsolescent but very deadly one-man rockets which were destined to destroy tanks, vehicles of even train engines.

Other deadly imports consisted of a total of 4,500 various anti-persnnel and anti-vehicle land mines made in such undetectable material as ceramics and plastics and originating in nearly every country that ever made them.

Smaller, lighter cases contained various fuses, explosive primacord material and booby trap devices made in North Korea.

And the Sasebo Maru was not the only ship to discharge such a lethal cargo into the mountainous wild of the remote and revolutionary Mexican province.

U.S. intelligence and surveillance records indicate that there have been at least 20 similar visitations by different ships carrying deadly weaponry to Chiapas and Zapatistas fighters in Mexico from 1995 through 1997.

Additional shipments of automatic weapons, ammunition and explosives have slipped into the province from Guatemala, which shares a common border with Mexico and from Nicaragua and El Salvador further south. The three countries who have instigated this dangerous and destabilizing trade are Red China, Cuba and North Korea.

Along with weapons of destruction, these three countries have supplied or transported a number of "advisors" to assist the Mexican rebels and their ranks read like a roster of the French Foreign Legion. Represented are Afghans, Iraqis, Sudanese, Germans, Poles, Czechs, Russians, Koreans, Chinese and Vietnamese.

MONKEY BUSINESS

While the Chinese hide behind a desire of the Clinton administration to support their communist government and U.S.-China trade, their aims are not the business of money, but the business of revolution, destabilization and captive markets.

A Mexico in the hands of a radical, anti-American government would be in a position to give Red China and her few remaining Stalinist allies more than a significant toehold at the very doorstep of her enemy, an enumy that is a major factor to blocking her expansion, in the manner of Imperial Japan, into Southeast Asia and the tempting targets of Singapore, Brunei and Vietnam with their vast oil and other natural resources.

Once the deadly shipments have been landed, they are quickly transported by trucks through the rugged coastal mountains on Mexican Federal Highway 190, eventually ending uborder and even inside America. The shipments of South and Central American drug cartel cocaine and terrorist weapons into p in depots much further inland, depots such as the mountain towns of Altamirano and Tapiula from where they can be transshipped to the north along the Pan American Highway.

Rebel units in and near the capital of Mexico City are one destination for the weapons of clandestine warfare, but other ones lie much closer to the United States America are deadly mix in the hands of both street gangs and alien political extremists in American cities.