Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border, Ieva Jusionyte, 2024, University of California Press
Preposterous allegations in January against Mexico’s president that his first electoral campaign in 2006 accepted funds from drug-traffickers have since been seen in the country for what they were—a clumsy US-led effort at character assassination in an election year.
As writer Kurt Hackbarth has shown, this thinly veiled bid to smear Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) and by extension his party, Morena, backfired—and the president and his likely successor and election frontrunner Claudia Sheinbaum have merely gained in the polls.
One reason for this, other than the clumsy nature of the allegations themselves, is that the Mexican electorate—far from being the dumb-ass political zombies that their northern peers so often regard them as—have grown accustomed to biased journalism of such a blunt kind.
It is no surprise that such allegations—in this case published by the media outlets ProPublica, InSight Crime, and Deutsche Welle—originated in the US, nor that they came immediately in the wake of other, similarly weak claims along analogous lines in other American media.
Nor is it a surprise that a subsequent campaign trending on social media portraying AMLO and Sheinbaum as a “narco-president” and “narco-candidate”, respectively, was traced by a Spanish social media analyst to a series of troll centres in Spain, Colombia, and Argentina.
The point here is clear—powerful forces are at work from outside Mexico to meddle in its elections and ensure a Morena defeat under Sheinbaum by creating a groundswell of media outrage without apparent hard evidence on the simple premise that mud sticks.
While we can speculate as much as we like about who these forces are, the usual suspects spring to mind—disgruntled elements of the US securitocracy (not least the DEA, the source of the latest allegations), Republicans in a Faustian pact with Mexico’s opposition PAN, and powerful corporate lobbies irked by AMLO’s policymaking approach.
One such corporate interest with a clear vested interest in the latter’s downfall is the US gun lobby, which has had AMLO’s government in its sights ever since Mexico City filed a $10bn lawsuit against leading manufacturers arguing that they have knowingly encouraged illegal arms trafficking across the southern border, thereby causing thousands of violent deaths.
Such is the traction that this lawsuit has gained internationally that in 2021 the then Mexican foreign minister, Marcelo Ebrard, and its government were named “persons of the year” by the US Arms Control Association, which campaigns for tighter gun laws.
How coincidental is it, then, that just one week after a US appeals court ruled on 22 January this year Mexico’s lawsuit against American gun manufacturers can go ahead (following a lower court’s dismissal of the case in 2022) that the latest allegations against AMLO surfaced?
It is small wonder that Morena is loathed by the American gun lobby. This conservative and aggressive collection of heavy-hitting industry and consumer groups has exercised considerable power to limit regulations and enforce gunmakers’ unique exemptions from liability laws deriving from the cultural and constitutional position of firearms in US history.
A rising star within this lobby, for example, has been the well-funded National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF)—to which a series of legal and policy victories have been attributed—which has had a lot to say about Mexico’s “sick and twisted” lawsuit and pulls few punches in its own hysterical efforts to associate AMLO with narco-corruption.
In an article last month, for example, Larry Keane, NSSF’s senior vice president, stated baldly “there is mounting evidence, even as President López Obrador prepares for a re-election bid, that he is corrupt. He’s been bought-and-paid-for by the Mexican drug cartels to the tune of millions.”
Notwithstanding such slander, the Mexican lawsuit is in keeping with a new policy approach towards gun violence by AMLO that, for all his administration’s flaws, has dramatically challenged the narrative about organised crime after years of stereotyping.
While the president’s strategy of “Abrazos, No Balazos” (“Hugs, Not Bullets”) to demilitarise the “war on drugs”—in dramatic contrast to the blood-soaked policy of his PAN predecessor, Felipe Calderón—has been heavily criticised, branded inconsistent, and has arguably had limited effectiveness, it nonetheless blazes a trail that could ultimately alter the dynamic.
Calderón’s military offensive against drug cartels was a US surrogate policy bolstered by the disastrous Mérida Initiative—a US-Mexico security agreement propped up with $3bn of military aid—which AMLO’s government then declared “dead”. As a result, security relations with the Biden administration have declined markedly.
Ieva Jusionyte’s eloquent Exit Wounds can be set against this backdrop as a well-informed investigation into a key cause of cartel violence in Mexico—gun smuggling from the US, which some estimates put at half a million weapons per year. While Mexican gun laws are, officially, tight, the tragic reality is that the country is awash with millions of US firearms—for which its people have played a very high price.
The author writes: “We often hear that gun violence in the United States has reached alarming levels. This gun violence epidemic doesn’t stop at the border: firearms sold in the United States also threaten and hurt people abroad—in Canada, the Caribbean, Brazil, Central America. But there is one country in particular which has been on the receiving end of American firepower with devastating effects—that’s our southern neighbour, Mexico.”
Through a highly insightful ethnographic method in which she follows and interviews selected participants, Jusionyte reinforces the irrefutable case for a new, bilateral approach to drug violence in which the US takes responsibility for its role in this phenomenon.
A legal and medical anthropologist who studies, teaches and writes about violence and security, her extensive research and journalistic flair for description provides graphic detail about what guns have done to Mexican society as well as to its long-suffering people.
It is a story in which criminal and state violence fuelled by American guns feature prominently, but also about the natural response of ordinary citizens who arm themselves for protection because they have been abandoned by cynical and corrupt authorities.
Jusionyte relates the individual stories of characters such as Samara, a young woman surviving in a harsh, male-dominated world lured by her own instinct for survival into the organised crime that has riven Nuevo León.
She returns frequently to Miguel, a Mexican businessman whose interest in guns and hunting, and distrust of the police, has led him to bypass laws in order to arm himself with US weapons, helped by his cousin across the border in Texas.
She follows the efforts of Jackson and Alex, US federal agents investigating weapons and ammunition trafficking in the wake of a disastrous “gun-walking” scandal by which ATF efforts to trace Kalashnikovs to Mexican cartels merely ended up increasing their firepower.
The plethora of US federal agencies involved in border security are not unlike the Mexican cartels—constantly fighting over turf and jurisdiction, and ferociously protective of their cases.
Alongside these snapshots of lives affected by the trade in guns across the border, the author provides a fascinating history of armed culture since the Spanish conquest of Mexico—a country that is today regarded in popular imagination as synonymous with the shootout.
She examines the superficially progressive nature of Mexican gun control legislation, and how these laws like so many others in this country are minimally enforced or simply ignored by a state that has recurrently failed so many of its citizens.
Every inflection of this issue ultimately has a bearing on key points of tension in the bilateral relationship—from Mexico’s inevitable hostility to US law enforcement incursions into its sovereignty, to inordinately high levels of cross-border migration, to the American drug epidemic itself.
The obvious conclusion then, as the author points out, is for a bilateral approach to tackling not only the illegal weapons trade but the two intimately connected strands of its DNA—the US population’s demand for narcotics, and the associated Mexican cartels demand for guns. Without either of these drivers, things would be very different.
Given this conclusion, in her epilogue Jusionyte makes a case for change—sadly truncated—that places the onus on both countries to take responsibility for resolving this messy, complex issue, by starting with often small steps.
Laws to increase gun safety in the US would by default reduce the number of guns trafficked to Mexico; copying Mexico’s example to limit the types and quantities of firearms that civilians are allowed to buy would have a major impact; making background checks for private gun sales would close the loophole many buyers use to avoid paperwork; and increasing penalties for “straw sales”—guns purchased by buyers hired for the job—could have a far-reaching effect.
Mexico has to change as well, not least by providing alternative sources of jobs to the drug trade, appropriately reforming former jailed cartel footsoldiers, and addressing the sickening levels of state corruption that blight governance at every level.
It’s never going to be easy, but the narrative is slowly shifting—despite the worst efforts of those who profit from this trade on both side of the border.
A clear example of the direction of travel is AMLO’s defiant persistence to confront the gun manufacturers in the north, whose hostile response to Mexico’s lawsuit demonstrates how mindful they are of the huge potential international implications of this case.
For a multibillion dollar export industry, the stakes are high: the US is the world’s largest exporter of arms, eclipsing by more than double even its nearest rivals.
And the writing may be on the wall. In January it was reported that the Biden administration is seeking to reduce the use of US-made guns in foreign crimes and human rights violations by tightening oversight and rules governing commercial exports.
This followed a review by the US Commerce Department of its support for US gunmakers after a Bloomberg investigation linked increasing civilian gun exports to higher rates of global gun crime. Haiti has become the latest failed state where rampant gang violence has been linked to the flow of US firearms.
Jusionyte writes: “The [Mexican] lawsuit raised some uncomfortable questions about the US gun industry. In the public hearing on motion to dismiss the complaint, the judge wanted to know whether there was a ‘logical stopping point’ to accountability for violence.
“US companies have been selling weapons to over one hundred foreign governments, including repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia, and US-made firearms have ended up in the hands of the IRA, the Taliban, and many other groups.”
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Categories: Caribbean, Haiti, Mexico, North America, United States