Sales of US-Made Guns and Other Weapons, Including US Army-Issued Ones, Are Under Spotlight in Mexico Again

The “iron river” continues to flow. 

Here’s a wee data point you’re unlikely to hear mentioned in the countless Hollywood movies or series about Mexico’s drug cartels: around 70% of the weapons the cartels use come from the United States. That’s according to an estimate by the Mexican government based on the proportion of weapons seized by Mexican law enforcement agencies that have been traced, with the help of the ATF, to US manufacturers or vendors. And according to fresh allegations south of the border, some of those weapons are US army-issued.

On Monday, Mexico’s AMLO government said that weapons (supposedly) exclusively intended for the US armed forces are entering Mexico and finding their way into the hands of the country’s drug cartels. In June last year, the Defence Ministry announced the seizure of 221 fully automatic machine guns, 56 grenade launchers and a dozen rocket launchers from drug cartels since late 2018. Now, Mexico’s chief diplomats are calling for US authorities to investigate how these military-grade weapons are reaching Mexico’s most dangerous gangs.

“The Secretariat of Defence (Sedena) has informed the US government that some of the weapons entering Mexico are for the exclusive use of the US army,” said Foreign Minister Alicia Bárcena, adding that it is “very urgent that an investigation be carried out into the matter.”

Military-grade U.S. weaponry, which cartel members have openly displayed in social media posts, poses an added threat to Mexico’s embattled security forces. They include belt-fed machine guns, rocket launchers and grenades, according to AP News. The sale and possession for civilian use of this type of weaponry is prohibited by law in the United States, meaning these weapons must have found some other way of reaching Mexico.

American Military News claims the weapons “were not identified as sourced directly from the U.S. military.” Other potential sources, it said, “include black-market trading or previous conflicts in the region.”

But how would these weapons get on to the black market? As the Associated Press notes (emphasis my own), “Central America was awash with U.S. weaponry during the conflicts of the 1980s.” Also, “some manufacturers who sell arms to the U.S. military might also have sold some abroad or on the black market.” But here’s the money quote: “military grade weapons sometimes go missing from stocks in the United States.” Just like that.

Of course, Mexico’s drug cartels have been using military-grade equipment for years, if not decades. During the last decade of the Cold War the country was a key conduit for US covert weapon flows to the Contras in Nicaragua as well as paramilitary forces in countries like El Salvador and Guatemala.

What makes this latest development noteworthy, however, is that it is the first time Mexico’s government has acknowledged the issue in public. The insinuation is clear: the US armed forces are, directly or indirectly, complicit in the illegal flow of military-grade weapons to Mexico’s cartels. Indeed, according to the veteran Mexican journalist Raymondo Riva Palacio, this is the first time a senior public servant of any foreign country has denounced the US Pentagon for corruption of this nature. Crates of weapons, he said, are essentially leaving storage sites in the US and finding their way to the drug cartels in Mexico.

What if Mexico is not an anomaly, and US army weapons are finding their way to drug cartels or criminal organisations in other parts of Latin America, or indeed other parts of the world? There is also the issue of all the weapons flowing to Ukraine’s armed forces. How many of those are going “missing”? As an article in Reason magazine reported last year, “two separate Department of Defense inspector general reports revealed poor monitoring when U.S. weapons are transferred to Ukraine.”

One thing that is clear is that the Pentagon is perfectly capable of such corruption and/or incompetence. This is, after all, an organisation that has never passed an audit and until 2018 had never completed one, as documents an article we recently cross-posted here:

In its most recent audit, the Pentagon was able to account for just half of its $3.8 trillion in assets (including equipment, facilities, etc). That means $1.9 trillion is unaccounted for — more than the entire budget Congress agreed to for the current fiscal year.

No other federal agency could get away with this. There would be congressional hearings. There would be demands to remove agency leaders, or to defund those agencies. Every other major federal agency has passed an audit, proving that it knows where taxpayer dollars it is entrusted with are going.

A Highly Charged Issue

Ken Salazar, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, said the US government would work closely with Mexico’s Defence Department to resolve the issue. “We are going to look into it, we are committed to working with Sedena to see what’s going on.”

Naturally, the subject of weapons control is a highly charged issue in the US, especially in an election year. In February 2022, President Joe Biden triggered a storm of protest among second amendment defenders when he said at a Gun Violence Prevention Task Force meeting in New York City that gun manufacturers are “the only industry in America that is exempted from being sued by the public.” Even AP News‘s fact-checking service said the statement was false:

While gun manufacturers have legal protections that shield them from most lawsuits, this does not mean they are exempt from being sued, according to legal experts. Nor are they the only industry with such protections. For example, COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers have legal shields as well.

In June 2022, Biden signed into law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which introduced the first significant changes to US gun safety laws since the federal assault weapons ban of 1994. Since its introduction more than 100 people have been charged under its gun trafficking and straw purchasing provisions.

Meanwhile, controversy continues to swirl around the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, in which ATF agents in the Tuscon and Phoenix area purposely allowed licensed firearms dealers to sell around 2,000 weapons, including semi-automatic guns, to illegal straw buyers, with the ostensible aim of tracking the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders and arresting them. Yet after five years of the program, none of the targeted capos had been arrested while some of the weapons had been found at crime scenes on both sides of the US-Mexican border, including at the scene where United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in December 2010.

In 2012, Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa cartel who was being held in U.S. custody, alleged that the operation was in reality part of an arrangement to finance and arm the Sinaloa cartel in return for information used to eliminate rival cartels.

Ioan Grillo, the Mexico-based British crime journalist and author of Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels, remarked in an interview with Jordan Harbinger that he was initially “hesitant to write a book about [the illegal arms trade between the US and Mexico]  because I was thinking, well, you have the Second Amendment in the United States. And this is such a powerful thing. You know, what difference does it make? You know, people have got the right to bear arms. They’re going to buy guns and bring them to Mexico.”

But when he realised the sheer scale of the problem after meeting a gun trafficker in prison in Ciudad Juárez and learnt how easily and wantonly gun makers, gun shops and gun runners were exploiting glaring loop holes in US law in order to traffic firearms that are legal in many US states, including semi-automatics, to the drug traffickers south of the border, where ownership of firearms is much more stringently controlled, he decided to delve deeper:

[T]here’s a lot of kind of holes in these laws or law enforcement, which is not happening, even beyond the issue of right to bear arms or not. So for example, [the gun runner] was going to Dallas to gun shows and he was buying them and he said, “There’s a black market at gun shows so I can buy them with no paperwork at all, no paper trail. I walk in there, I buy 12 to 15, mainly AR-15s every week, every weekend, and take them down to Mexico.”

…

[O]ne of the biggest ways these cartels are acquiring the firearms is through what they call straw buyers, straw purchases. You’ve got a clean record. I pay you some money. You go there and buy the guns for me. Now, they’re only paying them often things like $100 to buy a rifle, $50 to buy a pistol. And the reason it’s so low is because the recommended punishment is probation… [T]here’s one case where a guy went in, bought 10 AK-47s, identical weapons. So he is buying like 10 of those. Obviously something suspicious, you’re buying 10 Romanian-made AK-47s, buying them for a guy who was working for a Mexican cartel, the Zetas, supplying the cartel. The cartel used them in the murder of an American agent.

The “Iron River”

The Mexican government has repeatedly accused US arms manufacturers and traffickers of fuelling the violence between drug cartels in the country. Just as the flow of fentanyl into the US costs tens of thousands of lives each year, so too does the southward flow of the “iron river” into Mexico. Over 200,000 guns flood across the US’ southern border each year, according to one official estimate — a number that is redolent of a full-scale war zone such as Ukraine.

Some estimates, including those of the Mexican government, are even higher. The death toll has been staggering: in the past six years alone, 134,000 people have been killed by firearms in Mexico.

In 2021, the AMLO government filed a $10 billion suit against seven US gun makers, including Smith & Wesson Brands, Sturm and Ruger & Co, contending that the companies were well aware that their weapons were being resold on the black market, and in fact actively encouraged it. The governments of the Bahamas, Antigua and Barbuda, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize and St. Lucia have also joined the suit.

In 2022, a judge threw out the case on the grounds that a US law — the 2005 Federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) — provides the firearms industry broad immunity from lawsuits over their products’ misuse. But earlier this week, a US appeals court revived the lawsuit. From US News:

Mexico’s lawyers argued the law only bars lawsuits over injuries that occur in the U.S. and does not shield the seven manufacturers and one distributor it sued from liability over the trafficking of guns to Mexican criminals.

U.S. Circuit Judge William Kayatta, writing for the three-judge panel, said that while the law can be applied to lawsuits by foreign governments, Mexico’s lawsuit “plausibly alleges a type of claim that is statutorily exempt from the PLCAA’s general prohibition.”

He said that was because the law was only designed to protect lawful firearms-related commerce, yet Mexico had accused the companies of aiding and abetting illegal gun sales by facilitating the trafficking of firearms into the country.

“The bottom line is that Mexico has plausibly alleged at least some injuries that it has suffered directly from the illegal trafficking of guns into Mexico,” wrote Judge William Kayatta. “Mexico alleges that defendants know that their guns are trafficked into Mexico and make deliberate design, marketing, and distribution choices to retain and grow that illegal market and the substantial profits that it produces.”

Bárcena described the ruling as “great news” while her predecessor as foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, who brought the lawsuit in 2021, wrote in a tweet that “a significant step has been taken that may help us to reduce violence in Mexico.”

It could also hit the profits of US gun makers, shops and runners, as the Mexican journalist and news presenter Denise Maerker notes (translation my own):

There is a huge business in the United States that thrives from organised crime in Mexico, which is the monstrous demand for weapons. You only need to see how many gun shops there are on the US-Mexico border… [T]hey are there simply to satisfy the demand. It’s interesting to see the adverts produced by the companies that manufacture these weapons… and how the laws are designed in such a way that it is easy to violate them, so that anyone can buy a weapon and pass it on to a drug trafficker…

Obviously it’s an enormous business and the United States has not decided or wanted to turn off the taps. We all know the power the arms manufacturers have in the US.

Maerker also makes a key point regarding the Mexican authorities’ responsibility in facilitating, or at least not stemming, the flow of weapons. As she notes, a recent documentary by the N-Mas news agency highlighted how easy it is for the gun traffickers to cross the Mexican border with their contraband. Put simply, Mexican border agents are not stopping and checking vehicles coming in from the US. If the Mexican government wants to seriously tackle the “river of iron” flowing into the country, says Maerker, the law enforcement agencies will have to do a better job policing the border.

Meanwhile, the ruling of the US appeals court resolves only a small part of the broader legal case against the US gun makers, which now must return to the same court in Boston that first rejected the lawsuit. But it does appear to have set an important precedent. From now on, it seems, US gun manufacturers are not immune from prosecution for injuries caused by criminal misuse of their weapons overseas. And that is surely a small step in the right direction.