Arming the Cartels

Big Business for Too Many Americans

It no secret that Mexico hovers on the brink of a civil war, well-armed gangsters with massive numbers of government officials on their payroll, pretty much overwhelming what legitimate police/military operations can mount, brazen assaults are thrown at authorities with greater manpower and better weapons. Most of these operations succeed because of the unchecked demand in the United States for narcotics. Drugs to soften hard lives. Addiction responding to hopelessness or medical treatments gone awry.  There’s no question that the Mexican people hate these dangerous times and the dangerous people who seem to supersede government control. But it is only possible with massive importation of specialized guns from the United States. And US demand for drugs.

“Mexico experienced a record number of murders for the second year in a row in 2018, with official statistics logging 33% more killings than in 2017, Reuters reports… Mexican authorities opened 33,341 murder investigations in 2018, the highest number ever, the country’s Interior Ministry reported Sunday. The figure outpaced even last year’s toll [2017]of over 25,000, which was then the highest number since the record began in 1997.” Time Magazine, January 23^rd. 

A recent incident, involving the capture and release of Sinaloa cartel leader Ovidio Guzman Lopez, son of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman who is himself incarcerated in a supermax federal prison in the United States, illustrates how desperate times have become… and how powerless the Mexican government is to stop the violence. It happened in a recent raid by Mexican federales against Ovidio at his home in the northern Mexican town of Culiacan. A video assembled by the Mexican government tells this horrific story. Kate Linthicum and Steve Fisher, writing for the October 31^st Los Angeles Times, present this summary:

“It is an extraordinary video — a behind-the-scenes look at what happened this month when Mexican security forces briefly captured one of the world’s most-wanted cartel leaders… In the clip, which was released Wednesday [10/30] by Mexico’s defense secretary, Ovidio Guzman Lopez is shown surrendering to soldiers who had trapped him in a home in the northern city of Culiacan… Instead of putting Guzman in handcuffs and immediately taking him into custody, the soldiers instead waited while he made a phone call.

Outside, fighters from Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel were seizing control of the city, taking hostages, blocking intersections with burning vehicles and laying siege to a housing complex for the families of military personnel. The soldiers, who at that point probably knew they had no clear way out, asked Guzman to order his men to stand down… ‘Tell them to leave now!’ a soldier is heard shouting at the 28-year-old Guzman…

“The video shows the desperation of authorities during the failed operation to capture the younger Guzman, who is wanted in the United States on drug trafficking charges… Eventually, the soldiers freed Guzman and retreated, a decision that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has defended as necessary to save lives.

“The video was part of a detailed presentation by Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval, who used maps, diagrams and photographs to explain to reporters how cartel gunmen overpowered elite security forces with paramilitary tactics and an arsenal of machine guns and homemade tanks… He showed a graphic video of one soldier who had part of his leg blown off by bullets and a photograph of another who had been taken hostage, his eyes shielded with a blindfold.

“The presentation seemed designed to suggest that authorities had no option other than to release Guzman. ‘The most important thing is the protection of citizens, the protection of lives,’ Lopez Obrador said.”

If Mexico bordered Canada, without that intervening body called the United States, none of this would have happened. Not only would the demand for narcotics have been commercially insufficient to create the dollar volume that makes the cartels viable, but Canada does not have a virtually unrestricted open gun market, especially one that condones rather easy access to military-grade semiautomatic assault rifles with oversized magazines and bullets intended to kill large numbers of human beings even with off-center hits.

The American radical right, dramatically misinterpreting the Second Amendment (intended to allow authorized militia members to keep their weapons), has effectively empowered and armed those cartels, well-beyond any minority of specialized and armed cartel “soldiers.” There are so many assault weapons smuggled south across our border with Mexico that such weapons are ubiquitous across a wide spectrum of cartel functionaries. All the gangsters have them. According to a list compiled by Wikipedia, the United States has the largest body of private gun ownership on earth (120 guns per 100 inhabitants), with Serbia clinging to a distant second place (38/100).

Without adequate background checks, loopholes that enable “private sellers” to market dozens of assault weapons at a time at so-called “gun shows” across the United States, it is so easy for cartel representatives to load up on these weapons and ship them south. Not to mention the roughly 70,000 licensed gun-sellers in this country. American Border Patrol agents are so focused on undocumented immigrants and drug traffickers heading into the United States that they give pretty short shrift to the illegal weapons smuggling heading in the opposite direction. And Mexican authorities are simple understaffed and overwhelmed. Estimates suggest that an average of 2-3,000 guns leave the United States for Mexico, illegally of course, every day.

There is a parallel right in Mexico supporting private gun ownership. Article 10 of the Mexican Constitution reads: “Article 10 - The inhabitants of the United Mexican States have the right to possess arms in their residences for their security and legitimate defense with the exception of those prohibited by federal law, and those reserved for the exclusive use of the military.  Federal law will determine the cases, conditions, requisites, and places in which the bearing of arms by inhabitants will be authorized.” In practice, there are some pretty strong requirements. Testing. Training. Background checks that can take years. Retesting to retain a license. And only one legal gun store (with nothing on display) in the country… in Mexico City. 

“Mexico’s lone gun store sold 52,147 firearms in 2009-14, a figure dwarfed by the black market trade that’s largely fueled by illegal American imports. Mexican law bars guns from entering without an ‘extraordinary import authorization,’ but enforcement is spotty: 73,684 of the 104,850 guns confiscated in Mexico during the same period were traced to the U.S., according to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.” CBSNews.com, 8/17/16

“From 2009 to 2014, more than 73,000 guns that were seized in Mexico were traced to the U.S., according to a new update on the effort to fight weapons trafficking along the U.S.-Mexico border… The figure, based on data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, represents about 70 percent of the 104,850 firearms seized by Mexican authorities that were also submitted to U.S. authorities for tracing… The data was analyzed by the Government Accountability Office, which notes in its report that U.S. police agencies have acknowledged firearms smuggling is fueling violent crime in Mexico.

“‘Most of the firearms seized in Mexico that were traced and found to be of U.S. origin from 2009 to 2014 came from U.S. Southwest border states,’ the GAO report says. ‘While guns seized in Mexico of U.S. origin were traced to all of the 50 states, most came from Texas, California, and Arizona.’… Many of those guns were bought legally in the U.S. and then smuggled over the border, according to the GAO.” NPR.com, 1/12/16. Today, two-thirds of homicides in Mexico are by shooting, well more than double the rate from 1997. Mexico estimates that they intercept only about 14% of smuggled guns.

If Trump’s wall would stop the flow of military assault rifles and other guns into Mexico, perhaps Mexico would pay for it. But the proliferation of all sorts of guns, with the most lax civilian gun laws in the world, make that tsunami of gun availability in the United States an unstoppable flood, based on raw American greed, Mexico’s greatest nightmare. Americans want their illicit drugs. Wonder why Central Americans and Mexicans want to leave their violent homelands to a safer United States? Based on a danger that was created and continues to be fueled by us?! Could American gunmakers even survive without this illegal traffic?

            I’m Peter Dekom, and just everything related to undocumented immigration across our southern border, the instability in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico, and the violent drug trade is basically born, bred and sustained by the United States of America and its hypocritical and inane gun laws and uncontrolled addiction rates.