Escalating Murder Rate Is Byproduct of Decades of Legal and Covert U.S. Arms Shipments to Latin America. The rising death toll, more than 40,000 lives to date, in Mexico's drug war have clearly been inflamed by President Felipe Calderon's U.S.-appeasing militaristic policies, but many of the weapons fueling that war were put on the ground years ago via the vast quantities of arms shipped into Mexico and Central America, often covertly, during the civil and proxy wars waged in Latin America during the Cold War.