CANSEC arms show has included company that sold rifles implicated in the murder of the Ayotzinapa 43 in Mexico

A Canadian soldier holds a HK416 assault rifle manufactured by Heckler and Koch during the CANSEC arms show in Ottawa, April 2008. Photo by Chris Wattie.

Last March, Deutsche Welle reported: “Germany’s Federal Court of Justice (BGH) upheld a 2019 lower court decision, finding that employees at German arms manufacturer Heckler & Koch (H&K) knowingly falsified information as to the nature and destination of arms sold by the company in order to attain federal export licenses.”

That article adds: “German export licenses allowed H&K to sell large amounts of arms — mainly more than 4,200 model G36 machine guns — and component parts to Mexico’s central purchasing body, which then proceeded to sell the guns to police departments located in states with dubious human rights records.”

DW has also noted: “While selling weapons to the country, in general, was allowed, German authorities wanted to ban their use in specific Mexican states: Chihuahua, Chiapas, Guerrero, and Jalisco, where war with drug cartels, corrupt police forces, and the attendant human rights abuses, were believed to be particularly prevalent.”

That DW article highlighted: “Some of the rifles were almost certainly used in the murder of six Mexican students, and the probable murder of 43 others whose bodies have never been found, in [Guerrero] in September 2014.”

The Ayotzinapa 43 were students from a politically radical, poor, mostly Indigenous teachers’ college in the town of Ayotzinapa in Guerrero.

Heckler & Koch sold the G36 assault rifles to Mexico between 2006 and 2009. In 2008, a Heckler & Koch HK416 assault rifle was displayed at the CANSEC arms show in Ottawa (as seen in the Chris Wattie/Reuters photo above).

CANSEC bills itself as Canada’s largest global defence & security trade show as well as “North America’s largest tri-lateral defence event”.

Over the past ten years (2010 to 2020), Canada has exported $26.4 million in “military goods” to Mexico. We will be asking Global Affairs Canada whether it has similar restrictions as Germany on arms exports to Chihuahua, Chiapas, Guerrero, and Jalisco.

We are also planning to highlight issues of concern in relation to Canadian arms exports and human rights violations and militarization in Latin America when the next CANSEC arms show is scheduled to take place in Ottawa on June 1-2.

Photo: A protest in Stuttgart, Germany in May 2018 linking the Heckler & Koch assault rifle with the deaths of the Ayotzinapa 43.