A pact to be inked Saturday between Gov. Janet Napolitano and Sonora Gov. Eduardo Bours Castelo will make Arizona's southern neighbor the first Mexican state to trace illegal weapons.
Arizona and Sonora officials said the states will team up to combat gunrunning and share databases of fugitive felons on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
The states also will promise to work on improving border entry points and share more information to combat drug smuggling.
Other terms call for bolstering responses to border-spanning disasters and the development of digital maps to improve responses to emergencies.
The governors meet twice a year at the Arizona-Mexico Commission, and past meetings have often yielded vaguely worded resolutions.
But this weekend's pact will lead to specific plans with immediate enforcement actions, training and investigations, federal agents and the Governor's Office said.
The office and Arizona's top agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said they hope the agreements will be a model for other border states to follow when their governors assemble in August.
"Kudos to Arizona and Sonora for being the first along the border to do this," ATF Special-Agent-in-Charge Bill Newell said. "They are trying to show the other states the benefits."
The bust last month of a Phoenix gun store, X-Caliber Guns, previewed the kind of investigation that the states' officials expect to become more common.
When Mexican authorities recovered the pistol of a cartel boss in one raid, an ATF weapons trace found it had been sold at X-Caliber. Other weapons found in Mexico led back to Phoenix.
Ultimately, investigators raided the store, arrested the owners and accused them of selling hundreds of semi-automatic rifles to Mexican cartels.
Until now, only Mexican federal agents have had access to the trace data. Under the new agreement, Sonora state police will have the same access, just as police throughout the United States.
ATF agents will train Sonora state police on the trace system and how to identify unique weapons and recover tampered serial numbers.
Arizona will form a task force involving the state Department of Public Safety, U.S. customs agents and police from border towns and regions.
The team will start immediately, said Napolitano's law enforcement advisor Suzie Barr.
Using existing resources, officers will pull over more cars suspected of running guns to Mexico and will launch more investigations like the X-Caliber case.
"This enhances Project Gunrunner, and Project Gunrunner has been very successful," Barr said, referring to an ATF pro- gram which during the last fed- eral fiscal year traced nearly 1,500 guns in Mexico back to sales in Arizona.
Newell said that since Jan. 1, Mexico has dramatically increased its requests for trace data. Last year, 8,000 guns were seized in Mexico, a country with very strict gun laws.
The agreement comes amid increased scrutiny of gun smuggling.
This spring, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents launched "Armas Cruzadas," a program to stop guns from getting into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.
Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a $1.6 billion, three-year aid package to Mexico to help that country fight its increasingly bloody drug war.
The money will pay for training and equipment, including improvements in tracking weapons.
The aid package of the Merida Initiative which was negotiated between President Bush and Mexican President Felipe Calderon and announced in October 2007.
Arizona and Sonora will also swap databases to track thousands of fugitives.
Arizona is seeking 60,000 felons, with an unknown number hiding in Mexico.
Mexican prosecutors have asked their U.S. counterparts to help arrest fugitives hiding in Arizona.
Under the new pact, each state law-enforcement agency will have a full-time officer assigned to sending and receiving updated lists and to ease extraditions of caught fugitives who.
The agreements, obtained by The Arizona Republic, will be signed at a ceremony in Phoenix on Saturday.
"We absolutely hope that this becomes an inspiration for other border states to follow," Napolitano spokeswoman Jeanine L'Ecuyer said.
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