Bite the bala
Bite the bala
Mexico has put the US in the dock over gun running that fuels cartel violence, writes Gavin O’Toole
Hypocrisy has many faces but countries that profit from violent crime on an industrial scale in a friendly neighbour while ordering it to get its house in order win the ugly pageant.
For decades the US has been lecturing Mexico in a whining drawl about the threat its drug-trafficking cartels pose to American society—indeed, to Western civilisation itself—but in recent years its criticisms have turned to threats.
As opioid overdose deaths spiral out of control, US politicians have cranked up militaristic rhetoric that although easy to dismiss as bluster poses real risks, threatening to conduct missile strikes on Mexican drug labs or to send in the marines.
For right-wing Republicans, this is no posturing—last year two congressmen from Texas and Florida championed the “AUMF [Authorisation for the Use of Military Force] Cartel Influence Resolution” that would empower a president to launch wars against Mexican cartels.
A string of senior US politicians have endorsed such measures and the frontrunners in the race for the presidency, Donald Trump, Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, all indicated a willingness to use force in or against Mexico—even to impose a naval blockade of its ports.
But the target of this reckless abuse may finally have the last laugh, because Mexico has dropped a bombshell on a substrate of Republican support in the legal equivalent of a bunker-busting guided missile.
The Palacio Nacional is putting in the dock the main source of the bloody violence that has empowered the cartels to become multibillion-dollar transnationals—US capitalism itself—after a court cleared the way for it to sue firearms manufacturers that trade in death.
Imperial hectoring
The obvious fault-line in the imperial hectoring that passes for US drugs policy is, first, that it ignores America’s own addiction to narcotics—the only market driver for organised crime, which would traffic plastic ducks if they were more profitable.
Addiction is an existential social problem in the US: the National Centre for Drug Abuse Statistics said 59m people (21.4% of the population) aged 12 or over used illegal drugs or misused prescription drugs in 2020, and 138.5m (50.0%) had done so in their lifetime.
Overdose deaths in the US exceeded 90,000 in 2020 and the White House projected the drug control budget to hit an $41bn in 2022. One in five people in US prisons has been jailed for a drug offence, swelling the annual $182bn cost to America of incarcerating its own citizens.
Secondly, and far more significantly, US bullying ignores a concealed but explosive reality about Mexican drug violence that is profoundly hard for its own society to swallow—it is being carried out with American guns.
Observers brainwashed by the endless coverage in the compliant US media of barbaric trigger-happy hordes competing in weekend shootouts for macho sport will almost certainly be unaware of the reality: owning a gun legally is extremely difficult in Mexico.
The country has had strict gun laws since the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, and although the constitution guarantees citizens a right to possess weapons with a permit, in practice a range of laws and wide police discretion makes this difficult.
Gun ownership is limited to small-calibre weapons kept at home, and the right to carry arms openly or concealed is restricted to federal jurisdiction. A gun owner must obtain a one-year permit from the National Defence Secretariat—only about 50 are issued per year—and fulfil a range of criteria in terms of suitability. Ammunition sales are strictly regulated.
There are just two stores where guns can legally be bought, both of which are state controlled: the Dirección de Comercialización de Armamento y Municiones (DCAM) in the State of Mexico, and the Oficinas para Trámites de Comercialización de Artículos Regulados por la Ley Federal de Armas de Fuego y Explosivos (OTCA) in Nuevo León.
Armed and dangerous
Yet Mexico, nonetheless, is awash with guns—the country is armed to the teeth.
The Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland (IHEID) estimated in 2017 that there were 17 million guns in civilian possession in Mexico—putting the country in seventh place globally in terms of ownership—and the vast majority were unregistered. For every legal gun, IHEID said, there were four more that were not, suggesting there were 15 times the number of illegal guns in the hands of civilians than members of Mexico’s security services. More recent estimates are not available, but they are likely to be significantly higher.
So where do most of these guns come from? You guessed it: El Norte.
Although the precise number of weapons smuggled across the border is unknown, the US Department of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) found that 70% of firearms reported to have been recovered in Mexico from 2014 to 2018 and submitted for tracing had come from the US.
The Mexican government frequently cites research by the University of San Diego Trans-Border Institute from 2013 that estimated 2.2% of the 40 million firearms sales every year in the US will make their way into Mexico—a staggering half a million smuggled guns per annum. A large proportion of these are coming from Texas alone—43% during 2017–2021.
The San Diego study suggested that the then value of firearms sales destined for Mexico are significant and growing appreciably, amounting to annual revenues of up to $214m, and that up to 52% of US firearm dealers were dependent on some amount of demand from the illegal US-Mexico firearms trade to stay in business.
According to the ATF, about 59% of all US guns recovered from crimes traced by authorities in foreign countries were found in Mexico—by far the largest international destination for American guns that are used for criminal purposes.
Available figures on US gun smuggling are up to a decade old—a fact that has not gone unnoticed by its own Government Accountability Office (GAO)—which benefits Washington’s efforts to whitewash its deadly arms trade and blame Mexico for the problems it creates.
In particular, Mexican officials have recently demanded that US authorities explain how the cartels that Washington finds so valuable for deriding its neighbour with can end up in possession of US Army weapons that are not even available to American citizens.
Gun violence in Mexico
Mexico has paid a huge price to line the pockets of US gunmakers.
The Stop US Arms to Mexico initiative says that from 2010 to 2022, Mexico experienced more than 214,000 gun homicides, comprising more than two out of three murders in the country.
The group has calculated that if 70% of the gun homicides in Mexico are committed with US-sourced firearms, this would mean there are more murders committed with American guns in Mexico than in the US itself.
Most guns used in crimes in Mexico are handguns but Stop US Arms to Mexico notes that of 66,011 firearms recovered by the military between 2006 and March 2018 for which the calibre and make were recorded, more than 12,000 were assault weapons—even though civilian possession of these is prohibited in Mexican law.
In the US the possession of assault weapons was unbanned when federal prohibitions expired in 2004, and most states have no assault weapons ban either. The lifting of this prohibition was later linked by academics to a spike in gun homicides in Mexican municipalities that border Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.
The problem of armed cartel violence in Mexico, and the government’s bloody response to it under US pressure, is well known—a large proportion of the 350,000 murders and more than 72,000 disappearances between 2006 and 2021 officially recorded can be attributed to this. The discovery of mass graves has become common, and cartel activity is again driving Mexican violence, which is on the rise once more, thereby fuelling migration to the US.
US arms supply
The US has a long and dirty history of supplying guns to Mexico since long before the Revolution, and even agencies such as the ATF have been implicated in smuggling in ill-conceived efforts to track the movement of weapons, preferring to call this “gunwalking”.
The firearms industry is a major economic and political player able to shake off responsibility for high levels of gun crime and recurrent mass shootings that have become emblematic of US social malaise.
It enjoys unique immunity from legal accountability through the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) and the Tiahrt Amendment, which limits how data about guns used in crimes is shared, keeping the ways criminals obtain firearms in the shadows.
Gun-control campaigners say the industry rakes in $9bn annually while gun violence kills more than 40,000 people in the US and wounds twice as many. Estimates put the economic cost of gun violence at roughly $557bn each year.
Moreover, it is not as if the US is unaware that weapons are being smuggled en masse across their southern border. The ATF has had a standing programme called Project Gunrunner since 2005 aiming to stem the flow of illegal arms to the Mexican cartels, and there are occasional prosecutions.
In November last year, two Texans were jailed for 10 and five years respectively for their roles in firearms trafficking to Mexico. In a statement about the case, Attorney General Merrick Garland acknowledged the living contradiction of the US trade in weapons to Mexico that then empowers drug smuggling.
He said: “Traffickers in fully automatic firearms from the United States to Mexico aid in the cartels’ efforts to manufacture dangerous drugs and smuggle them into our country. The Justice Department will do everything in its power to find and hold accountable the gun traffickers who are arming the cartels.”
It would be easy to claim that the smugglers are Mexicans themselves, allowing US authorities to dismiss this problem as not of their making—but many smugglers appear to have dual citizenship or to be Americans recruited by cartels. Mexican citizens face far stiffer penalties in their own country for gun-running than American citizens do in the US.
Mexico’s court case
The decision by an appeals panel in Boston to remove obstacles to a $10bn lawsuit by Mexico’s government against US-based gun manufacturers is one of the most significant setbacks for these merchants of death in years. The case is the first brought by a foreign state against the gun industry in US courts.
Mexico has accused a suite of manufacturers—including Smith & Wesson, Sturm, Ruger, Beretta, Barrett, Colt and Glock—of aiding and abetting illegal gun sales by facilitating the trafficking of firearms into the country. It says that more than 68% of the guns smuggled into Mexico from the US annually are made by these companies.
It aims to demonstrate that they have been negligent in how their products are distributed and is seeking reparations for the economic harm this has caused in a host of ways—from higher policing costs to medical attention.
This was summed up by Mexico’s US lawyer, Steve Shadowen, who said after the Boston ruling: “It should now be clear that those who contribute to gun violence must face legal consequences, regardless of borders.”
An earlier decision by a lower court to dismiss Mexico’s lawsuit—reversed in Boston—was on the basis of the protections afforded the gun industry by the PLCAA.
However, Mexico’s main objective is political: to galvanise action against gun trafficking by forcing US manufacturers to change their business practices and prompting tighter controls on firearms’ distribution.
Blank cartridge
Like a blank cartridge, the US gun industry has fired off empty denials about wrongdoing in their response to Mexico’s accusations—but there is little doubt that on this occasion they face a serious risk of being outgunned.
For a start, Mexico has precedent on its side.
Legal scholars have drawn parallels between the Mexican lawsuit and the $73m settlement in 2022 between Remington and the families of people killed in 2012 at Sandy Hook School, where a gunman armed with an assault rifle murdered 20 children and six adults.
As in the case of Mexico’s lawsuit, the accusation centred on the firm’s marketing strategy which the plaintiffs argued targeted individuals who pose a higher threat of gun violence.
Moreover, Mexico also appears to enjoy considerable international support for its innovative action—payback for the extra-territorial reach claimed so often by the US in its dealings with the rest of the world.
Success in holding the gun industry accountable could set a major precedent for cross-border litigation, strengthen global efforts to tackle the illicit arms trade, and have positive implications for US society itself.
This explains why Mexico has received the backing of several Caribbean countries as well as the support of some senior US officials. The illicit flow of weapons is a significant problem in Latin America and is fuelling the violence of organised crime across the region. If Mexico wins its case, it could pave the way for other foreign governments to hold the US gun makers accountable for violence in their own countries.
Mexican foreign ministry officials have also smartly linked cooperation in fighting drug trafficking with the prospect of a bilateral deal by which the ATF would launch a much more credible crackdown on firearms heading south.
This international dimension of Mexico’s action will be deeply frustrating for US politicians used to having things their own way.
Indeed, there are signs that once in court the case will pivot on extra-territoriality—application of the PLCAA, and the sheer affront of allowing a foreign victim of American greed to sue a bloody emblem of its national identity in its very own courts.