Iron Rivers Everywhere: How US Arms Smuggling Is Fuelling Violence in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean

Even US-aligned governments in the region are beginning to ask, somewhat naively, which side the US is on in the war on guns, begging the question: which war? 

In the early hours of May 20, Ximena Guzmán, the 42 year-old private secretary of Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada, parked her car in the usual place on the side of Tlalpan Avenue. She was there to pick up José Muñoz, a 52-year old colleague and advisor to Brugada, as she did every morning. When Muñoz got into the car, a hitman lurking just a few metres away drew a nine millimetre handgun and emptied the 12 bullets in the magazine at the two civil servants. Both died almost instantly.

This all took place in broad daylight and amid rush hour traffic. The hitman fled on a black motorcycle, which he ditched a short distance away. There, with the help of at least three other accomplices, he used a blue car to drive to the Iztacalco borough, where they picked up another vehicle, a grey pickup truck, which they drove into the neighbouring State of Mexico where they disappeared. As El País reported, this team of clearly professional assassins left no trace behind (qualifiers in parenthesis my own):

No fingerprints, no [clear] suspects, no [clear] motive… The weapon they used was clean: analysis of the shell casings found at the scene revealed it hadn’t been used in previous crimes.

The reason I added the two qualifiers is that while there may not be clear suspects or motives behind the crime, there are a number of possible suspects, all with their own possible motives.

The most obvious suspect, according to most domestic and international media, would be one of the large Mexican drug cartels such as Jalisco Next Generation, La Familia Michoacan or the Sinaloa cartel, though the latter has been heavily weakened in recent months. The obvious motive: revenge for the Sheinbaum government’s recent security crackdowns, including the capture and extradition to the US of dozens of cartel capos.

While the cartels are perfectly capable of taking such action, and pulling it off with ease, one can’t help but wonder: why target two mid-to-high ranking Mexico City civil servants with no direct involvement in security matters? To sow panic in government ranks? To send a message that nowhere is safe and that anyone can be targeted in broad daylight regardless of whether they have ties to Mexico’s security forces?

Another possible suspect, highlighted by the journalist Jesús Escobar Tobar, is Mexico City’s real estate mafia, whose illegal manipulation of the property market in Mexico City is coming under sustained pressure from Clara Brugada’s municipal government’s policies. These white-collar criminals, presumably with contacts in the police and security services, probably have the means as well as a clear motive for carrying out this crime.

Another possible suspect is the US government and its three-letter agencies. Despite its dramatic decline across most areas of governance, Washington is still ruthlessly efficient at killing innocent people on each and every continent, especially its own.

It also has motives. For a start, the execution-style killing of these two civil servants further destabilises the Sheinbaum government, reinforcing the impression that it cannot guarantee security in any part of Mexico’s territory, including even the (generally safer) capital. This, in turn, strengthens Washington’s case that Mexico needs US intervention to help steady the ship. In recent weeks, President Trump has repeatedly asked Sheinbaum to allow US troops to enter Mexico to combat the drug cartels.

The timing was also curious. The exact morning that Guzmán and Muñoz were executed, Sheinbaum’s government was scheduled to present the latest security figures for Mexico City, which showed a marked improvement. Also, the US’ new Ambassador to Mexico (and former CIA agent and green beret) Ron Johnson had just taken up residence at the US’ new billion-dollar embassy in the Mexico City borough of Polanco.

All of this, of course, amounts to little more than conjecture for there is no proof pointing to any particular suspect — at least not currently in the public domain.

Now, let’s shift our focus 2,800 kilometres to the east, to Haiti. Roughly a week after the double-assassination in Mexico, the New York Times published a story that at first glance seems entirely unrelated to the events in Mexico. Erik Prince, the former Blackwater founder and CEO, arms trafficker, shadow Trump advisor and wannabe colonialist, had just been awarded a contract by Haiti’s Western-controlled government to conduct “lethal operations” against gangs that are, in the Grey Lady’s words, “terrorizing the nation and threatening to take over its capital.”

Arguably the longest-suffering victim of Western colonialism and neo-colonialism on the American continent, Haiti has suffered so many interventions in recent decades that it is now often labelled the “Republic of NGOs”. Many of them are US or UN-led. After a devastating earthquake in 2010 killed an estimated 200,000 people and left many government buildings in rubble, thousands of aid organizations decamped in Haiti and constructed a powerful parallel state accountable to no one but their boards and donors.

As Nation magazine noted, “the international relief effort after the 2010 earthquake excluded Haitians from their own recovery.” The latest attempt to bring order to the country was through the deployment of hundreds of Kenyan troops and police officers. But it has clearly failed — hence the apparent need for a private sector-led military intervention (some reports claim this is really about quashing popular revolt in Haiti once again as ex-policeman Jimmy Cherizier calls for a revolution to topple the government).

From the Times:

With Haiti’s undermanned and underequipped police force struggling to contain the gangs, the government is turning to private military contractors equipped with high-powered weapons, helicopters and sophisticated surveillance and attack drones to take on the well-armed gangs. At least one other American security company is working in Haiti, though details of its role are secret.

Since drone attacks targeting gangs started in March, they have killed more than 200 people, according to Pierre Esperance, who runs a leading human rights organization in Port-au-Prince.

After the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq ended, security firms like those owned by Mr. Prince started seeing big streams of revenues dry up. Private military contractors are looking for new opportunities, and they see possibilities in Latin America.

This is the second time in two months that a government on the American continent has hired Prince’s services. In early April, the former Blackwater CEO visited Ecuador to ostensibly help the country’s security services combat “narco-terrorism” — the term du jour in Washington and its vassal state governments in Latin America. That was just after trying (and failing) to crowdfund a mercenary-led coup against Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela while presumably trousering the funds that were donated.

Iron Rivers Everywhere

One thing that Mexico, Ecuador and Haiti have in common, apart from their relative geographic proximity, is that they are all awash in guns. This is despite the fact that the Central America and Caribbean region neither manufactures such weapons nor plays any significant intermediary role in the global trade in guns.

Meanwhile, Mexico tightly controls firearm sales, making them practically impossible to obtain legally. In recent days, it further toughened its gun control policies, including by banning the 3D printing of guns. In Ecuador, by contrast, the Daniel Noboa government has made it easier to acquire firearms legally over the past year.

Most of the weapons flowing to these countries are coming from the US, of course, and they appear to be coming in ever larger numbers. In a letter sent to US legislators in September last year, New York’s attorney general and 13 other lawmakers across the US called for new measures to stem the outward flow of US-made guns, noting that as many as 90% of weapons used in the Caribbean were bought in the US and smuggled into the region.

In the case of Mexico, the southward flow of weapons, often referred to as the “iron river”, may have increased by as much five fold in volume over the past two decades. According to estimates from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), 90,000 firearms were smuggled into Mexico in 2004. By 2024, some estimates, including the Mexican government’s, put the figure at around half a million.

While it’s impossible to count precisely how many weapons are successfully smuggled, for obvious reasons, US investigators and federal agencies concede that the number of guns illegally pouring into Mexico and the Caribbean has increased in recent years. So, too, has violent crime — and deaths. In Haiti, the number of killings increased by 20% last year alone, to 5,600. Most of the killing was done with US-made and -smuggled guns.

As Bloomberg reported in Jan 2024, even US-aligned governments in the Caribbean are beginning to ask, rather naively perhaps, which side the US is on in the “war on guns” (begging the question: which war?):

Of the 10 countries with the world’s highest homicide rates in 2022, five were in the Caribbean. (This tally doesn’t count Haiti, which doesn’t compile reliable statistics.) Even islands that had been relatively untouched have seen homicide rates soar — in the case of the British territory of Turks & Caicos, by 150% since 2021, according to Insight Crime, a Washington-based research organization that studies organized crime in the Americas.

Island authorities say that supply has only surged since the 2021 assassination of Haiti’s president virtually eliminated that nation’s ability to police gun trafficking. It’s now a hub for smuggling. Many of the firearms are purchased at US retailers by buyers working for smuggling networks based in the islands. Leaders from those countries point out that they’ve spent decades — and diverted millions of dollars from their domestic budgets — to help the US combat drug-trafficking rings.

Now they want the favor returned. “As we have assisted them in the war on drugs, they must assist us in the war on guns,” Andrew Holness, the Jamaican prime minister, said at a regional security summit last year.

A Damning Picture

It is a similar message from Mexico. The hundreds of thousands of weapons pouring into the country each year from licensed gun shops in southern US states such as Texas, Arizona and New Mexico is exacerbating not only violence in Mexico but also drug consumption in the US as well as the northward migration of Mexicans fleeing bloodshed in their local communities.

A recent investigation by Sean Campbell, an economic development professor who has been tracking the illegal arms trade for more than a decade, and Topher McDougal, an investigative journalist, paints a damning picture:

• The increase in gun trafficking from the US is directly related to an increase in the homicide rate in Mexico. By the estimates of both the Mexican and US government, over 70% of all weapons used by the cartels come from the US (another likely source is the Mexican army, most of whose weapons are also US-sourced).
• The most destructive weapons are more likely to come from independent merchants than from large chains.
• These merchants sell 16 times more assault weapons and 60 times more sniper rifles.
• This arms trade fuels an arms race between criminals and Mexican security forces, benefiting the US arms industry, which makes money on both sides of the war.
• Greater oversight of dealers by the ATF would reduce the likelihood that their guns would be resold illegally.

For the sake of comparison, between January 2020 and April 2024 Ukraine, at war with Russia, received 40,000 small arms from the US — the equivalent of 10,000 a year. That represents less than 7% of the total volume of weapons the US illegally exports to Mexico during an average year. 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.

Since Mexico declared war on the cartels in 2006, at US insistence, roughly half a million people have been killed, of whom over 70% died of injuries caused by firearms. That doesn’t include the 125,802 victims of enforced disappearance and missing people registered as of March this year. Even by conservative estimates — for example assuming that most of the missing people are dead and that half of all the deaths resulting from firearm injuries were caused by US-made and smuggled weapons — that’s a death toll of around 250,000 people.

And that’s just in Mexico.

In 2021, Mexico’s 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 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 then, a US appeals court revived the lawsuit.

From US News:

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.”

The case now resides with the US Supreme Court, which is likely to block it. If not, it could 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 on 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.

Supporting Terrorism?

But there is a tiny sliver of hope that things may change. By designating Mexico’s largest drug cartels as terrorist organisations, the Trump administration has, almost certainly unintentionally, upped the stakes in this legal battle. After all, if the cartels are now considered terrorist organisations by US law, then surely the companies that provide them with the vast arsenals of weapons they use to commit their crimes of terror are also complicit in terrorism?

Certainly, Mexico’s Sheinbaum government seems to think so. In a press conference in February, she noted that the US Justice Department itself had acknowledged that 74% of the weapons used by Mexico’s criminal groups come from the US:

“If they declare these criminal groups as terrorists, then we’ll have to expand our US lawsuit… The lawyers are looking at it, but they could be accomplices,” ”

The problem here is that it assumes that the US legal system is still more or less functional. There are, however, tentative signs that the Trump may be shifting its approach to arms smuggling to Mexico. In recent weeks, ATF officials have participated in press conferences in Louisville, Kentucky, Columbus, Ohio and Nogales, Arizona, to “announce achievements in the interdiction of outbound weapons” and “combatting firearms trafficking to Mexico.”

Whether this is purely for show remains to be seen. But even at a symbolic level, this could be important. At the beginning of May, Sheinbaum praised Trump for pledging to take a tougher line on arms smuggling from the US to Mexico.

“That has never been said before by a president of the United States,” Sheinbaum said during her morning press conference. “And it is important for Mexico that arms trafficking stops.”

The president was alluding to statements by an official from the US Agency for the Control of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) who stressed that President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi have given clear orders on how to combat smugglers.

“We work for the President of the United States, Attorney General Bondi, and her directive is to clamp down on firearms trafficking,” Brendan Iber, ATF Special Agent in Charge, said during a press conference in Arizona.

However, given the Trump administration’s close ties to US pro-gun groups as well as his base’s passion for the second amendment, any such statements should be taken with a generous helping of salt. Meanwhile, the iron rivers of guns continue to flow from southern states in the US all the way through Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean, leaving a vast trail of carnage in their wake.