CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — On a sun-scorched prison patio in this sprawling border town, a 23-year-old inmate calmly explained to me how he trafficked hundreds of guns a year from the United States to Mexico. He never bothered paying American citizen straw buyers to purchase the weapons for him, he said. Instead, he would go to one of the many weekend gun shows around Dallas and take advantage of the so-called gun show loophole to buy firearms from private sellers without a background check or proof of citizenship.
He would drive back to Mexico with about a dozen guns hidden in refrigerators and stoves in the back of his truck, and sell the weapons in his hometown, a few hours south of the Rio Grande. His most requested weapon, he told me, was the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, which he could buy for as little as $500 and sell for five times that. He became richer than he had dreamed, buying a house and new trucks and motorbikes.
“At the beginning I felt bad, but you get used to it,” he said. “It’s the way you can have a good time. You sell weapons, you earn money and you have fun.” He got caught only because his cousin informed on him after an argument, he said, and he is now serving a nine-year sentence.
Guns from America inundate Mexico, arming the brutal cartels that have drowned this country in blood, destroyed families and driven people from their homes. Over a six-year period, the Justice Department traced more than 74,500 firearms seized from criminals here to the United States, where they were either manufactured or sold on after being imported from other countries.
Many more weapons are still in the hands of cartel gunmen who commit dozens of murders every day. A 2013 study by the University of San Diego’s Igarape Institute estimated that between 2010 and 2012, some 253,000 firearms were purchased to be trafficked over the southern border. The gaps in regulation, like the gun show loophole, make it impossible to know the true numbers.
In contrast, in Mexico there is only one legal firearms shop in the entire country, run out of a military base in the capital. Buyers have to apply for permits showing at least six forms of identification, including proof they have no criminal record and a letter from their employer, and the process can take months.
As President Trump rages about the dangers of drugs and criminals seeping north from Mexico, he should consider how America exports its own deadly products and the devastation they cause. He announced last week that he would send the military to the Mexican border, and states have begun deploying National Guard troops. If there is going to be a buildup of forces, more resources should be used to stop gun smuggling — operations against the firearms traffickers and searching of southbound vehicles.
In states such as Texas, an undocumented migrant is not allowed to get a driver’s license. But anyone — even a member of the MS-13 gang without papers — can potentially walk into a gun show and buy a semiautomatic rifle. Organized crime groups are taking advantage of this every day.
In turn, criminal death squads use these guns in mass killings across Mexico, a factor driving people to seek refuge across the border. The website Political Asylum USA says, “The biggest reason why some Mexicans are afraid to return to Mexico is because of criminal organizations, mostly drug traffickers.”
Of course, Mexico cannot blame American guns for all of its violence. Corrupt politicians and police officers here often work with gangsters; slums with unpaved roads and a lack of hope provide a stream of willing recruits into the cartel armies.
But the availability of such potent weapons gives Mexican mobsters the ability to overwhelm security forces. Cartels buy .50-caliber sniper rifles, which are amazingly on sale in America, and have repeatedly used them to attack police and military vehicles from a distance. Hitmen wield Kalashnikovs made in China and the Czech Republic and sold in the United States to murder in Mexico. Cartels have workshops where they convert semiautomatic AR-15s into fully automatic weapons.
Reporting on crime in Mexico for over a decade, I have witnessed the devastation these weapons cause more times than I can count. At a stoplight in the city of Culiacán, I saw the corpses of five police officers whom assailants ambushed and sprayed with more than 400 bullets. I’ve been at crime scenes where the assassins killed their targets while firing hundreds of rounds that mowed down innocent bystanders, including children.
Seeing a head torn apart by bullets is traumatic, but the human cost really strikes home with the screams of mothers, brothers and wives crying over the corpses of their loved ones. When young people gathered last month in Washington to denounce gun violence, it was inspiring, but I wished young people had also gathered that day here in Mexico. In the past, hundreds of thousands have marched in Mexico against crime and corruption.
The problems of gun violence, drug trafficking and immigration are international in our interconnected world — and we need to work across borders to solve them. Just as Mexico needs to fight the brutal cartels that drive people to flee north, the United States needs to slow the southward flow of this devastating iron river.
Ioan Grillo (@ioangrillo) is the author of “Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America” and a contributing opinion writer.
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A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: America’s Lethal Export. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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