US President Barack Obama backed Mexico’s war on its violent drug cartels in a first stop on a four-day trip to Latin America, calling for a crackdown on weapons trafficking and admitting shared responsibility.

In a first official visit to Mexico, Obama on Thursday said he would ask the US Senate to ratify a long-stalled regional arms-trafficking treaty following Mexican requests to stem the flow of US guns to its drug cartels.

Obama said he would not “pretend this is Mexico’s responsibility alone. A demand for these drugs in the United States is what’s helping keep these cartels in business. This war is being waged with guns purchased not here, but in the United States.”

More than 7,000 people have died since the start of last year in violence between Mexican cartels and security forces that is spilling into the United States, and Obama followed a string of top US officials who have visited Mexico to support its crackdown.

“I’m urging the Senate in the United States to ratify a treaty to curb” arms trafficking “that is a source of so many weapons used in this drug war,” Obama told journalists here.

The treaty, a legally-binding regional agreement on illicit firearms trafficking, was adopted by the Organisation of American States in 1997. It was never ratified by the United States.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who has deployed tens of thousands of soldiers across the country in a risky strategy to take on the cartels, said that Mexican authorities decommissioned 16,000 assault weapons in the past two years, almost 90 per cent of them from the United States.

Obama, welcomed by a sea of screaming schoolchildren waving US and Mexican flags, said his first visit to Mexico marked the start of new relations between the closely-tied neighbours.

“I see this visit, as I know (Mexican) President (Felipe) Calderon does, as an opportunity to launch a new area of cooperation and partnership between our two countries,” Obama said.

The two leaders pledged cooperation in the face of the economic crisis, a message Obama was expected to take to regional leaders at an Americas Summit in Trinidad and Tobago, which starts on Friday.

The US president also reiterated that he would push for comprehensive immigration reform, although the economic crisis has raised doubts over his plans to begin moving this year.

Mexico, Latin America’s second biggest economy, depends on the United States – where some 12 million documented and undocumented Mexicans live – for around 80 per cent of its exports and most of its remittances.

Calderon and Obama also announced plans to work together against climate change and to promote clean energy, although drug violence dominated the meeting.

On the eve of his visit, Obama slapped sanctions on three drug cartels and named a top US official to stiffen enforcement on the southern US border.

Last month he announced extra agents for the US border.

In the latest violence, sixteen died in a shootout between suspected drug hitmen and soldiers in Guerrero in southwest Mexico hours before Obama’s arrival.

Obama dined at Mexico City’s famed anthropological museum Thursday and was due to leave early Friday for the Americas summit in the Caribbean island of Trinidad.

Obama said Thursday that his new policy lifting restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba for Cuban-Americans was “a first step” and “a good faith effort,” adding that a relationship “that effectively has been frozen for 50 years is not going to thaw overnight.

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