Republican nominee said ‘No one wins in either country when … illegal weapons and cash flow from the United States into Mexico’, which could upset the NRA

For years, Mexican politicians have said lax US gun laws help to arm the country’s drug cartels.

At a press conference with Donald Trump on Wednesday in Mexico City, President Enrique Peña Nieto said: “Every year, thousands of weapons and millions of US dollars in cash enter illegally into Mexico from the north, strengthening the cartels and other criminal organizations that create violence in Mexico.”

The National Rifle Association (NRA), one of Trump’s key conservative backers, has long rejected such claims, arguing that guns sold by American dealers and smuggled across the border are not a major driver of crime in Mexico.

On Wednesday, however, in a largely conciliatory speech in Mexico City that preceded a more aggressive address on immigration at home in Arizona, Trump did not question Peña Nieto’s comment about guns. Instead, the Republican presidential candidate echoed the Mexican president’s longtime talking points.

“No one wins in either country when human smugglers and drug traffickers prey on innocent people, when cartels commit acts of violence, when illegal weapons and cash flow from the United States into Mexico,” Trump said.

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The NRA did not immediately comment. The organization has been one of Trump’s most consistent supporters, endorsing him for president in May and investing in major anti-Hillary Clinton television ad campaigns.

Before the NRA’s endorsement, at its annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, some of the group’s members said they questioned whether Trump’s support for gun rights was genuine, and said they were concerned he might compromise on the issue if it proved politically expedient. Several prominent gun rights advocates, including some closely allied to the NRA, have spoken out against Trump.

The NRA’s leadership has continued to rally behind its candidate, even trying to smooth over his controversial remarks about “second amendment people” doing something to deal with Hillary Clinton’s supreme court nominees, a comment that was widely interpreted as a casual reference to assassination or other political violence.

A 2016 report from the Government Accountability Office found that from 2009 to 2014, 70% of more than 100,000 firearms seized by Mexican authorities and then submitted for tracing by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) originated in the US. Most were purchased in south-west border states.

But this statistic reflects only the proportion of guns used in crime and submitted for tracing that were from the US – not the proportion of all firearms seized in Mexico that were purchased in the US.

NRA officials have focused on the caveat that not all Mexican crime guns are traced by the ATF and suggested that cartels are more likely to arm themselves with guns trafficked from other countries, or that cartels purchase legally imported guns from Mexico’s police or military, as an NRA spokesman said in 2012.

