Armed with Reason: The Podcast - Episode 21
The complex Mexican "arms race" spurred on by the influx of American-made guns.
This week, GVPedia founder Devin Hughes speaks with anthropologist, author, and Brown University associate professor, Ieva Jusionyte, and human rights activist and researcher, John Lindsay-Poland. In this sweeping discussion, the three delve into the long-standing epidemic of U.S. guns crossing the Mexican border, the complex, often intertwined “arms race” between the cartels and law enforcement, and how it’s all been fed by the U.S. firearms industry.
You can listen to the podcast via our channel on Spotify as well as watch on YouTube, or read the transcription below.
We hope you’ll tune in and let us know not only what you think, but what you’d like to hear more about in the future. And if you are interested in recommending a guest, or even being one yourself, please let us know!
Given the abundance of gun violence in our country, it is critical to have the ability to discuss and advocate for a safer community. This podcast is one more way for the movement to do just that.
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION:
Devin: Hi everyone, I'm Devin Hughes with GVPedia, and as you've probably already noticed by the mere fact that I'm doing the intro, it's going to be slightly different today. Caitlin is off fighting fires so was unable to make it today, so it's just going to be me with our two wonderful guests, and let me go ahead and introduce them. So we have Ieva Jusionyte and John Lindsay-Poland. John has written about research and organized action for human rights and the militarization of U.S. Policy in Latin America for 30 years. He coordinated Stop U.S. Arms to Mexico, a project of global change, and has been doing a lot of very recent work that we'll be getting into.
Ieva is a legal and medical anthropologist who studies, teaches, and writes about violence and security at Brown University. She is the author of the recently released book, Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fueled Violence Across the Border, which we will be going into much more detail. And I will have to say this, given that you've appeared on Fareed Zakaria's CNN program, NPR, and had an excerpt of your book published in Rolling Stone, I'm honored to have you on our humble podcast. So thank you both for being here.
John: Just saying it's great to be with you. Thanks.
Devin: So Ieva before reading the book and doing a little bit of background research, I was unaware that you are a firefighter and EMT, just like Caitlin, our executive director. She's in Connecticut, so the two of you will have to find a way to meet sometime. Tell us a little bit about your story and how you came to study gun violence, and in particular, the flood of guns pouring over the southern border.
Ieva: Well, thank you so much for for having me, having us on your show. Devin. I am really, upset that Caitlin is not joining us, but she's clearly doing very important work. So I was a firefighter EMT since my last year of graduate school. And then, at some point when I was doing research for my second book, which was about emergency responders on the U.S.-Mexico border, I was both volunteering as an EMT paramedic and writing the book, doing anthropological research. I was meeting migrants who got injured when they were either trying to get over the border wall, or they were walking in the desert and would get dehydrated and get other kinds of, in other kinds of emergency situations.
So, and I was crossing the border almost every day because I was volunteering on both sides, and northern Mexico in Sonora, and in southern Arizona. And at some point I began paying attention to the signs that if you leave U.S. For Mexico, there are signs on the roads and there are signs in like border crossings, pedestrian, at ports of entry that say, "Guns and Ammunition Prohibited or Illegal in Mexico." And at that point, I began asking these questions. I didn't know that Mexico had very different gun laws that, guns are very severely regulated there. At the same time, I knew that a lot of people I was meeting were fleeing gun violence, either direct survivors of gun violence, or very often people who had family members who were killed, or kidnaped, or who experienced extortion or other kinds of threats. So they were just packing to leave.
And at that point, I thought, well, I knew some, some excellent journalistic work. I knew what John was doing with Stop U.S. Arms to Mexico. But I thought, as an ethnographer I would like to find out, to follow these guns south, and to see who are these people who are buying them; what are they using it for; what is the social life of American guns on the Mexican side of the border?
Devin: Awesome. So, John, just to take a moment to center this conversation on some core statistics from Ieva's book and academic studies on the topic. Approximately 70% of crime guns recovered in Mexico originate in the U.S. This has been rather consistent over the past decade, from my understanding, and it could potentially be more than 70%, but it's most likely at the very least 70%. Further, an estimated 250,000 firearms annually are trafficked to Mexico from the U.S. Yet only a few hundred are caught at the border, coming south. And so, John, it basically sounds like we need to build a wall and have the United States pay for it. But in all seriousness, what are some of your current efforts to try to stop this tide? And relatedly, what is the PLCAA, and why does it matter when it comes to Mexican gun violence?
John: Well. Thanks, Devin. It's really great to be on this show, and with Ieva, whose book is just a great contribution to all of our understanding. We've been working on a number of levels. One is to bring the stories of people who are directly impacted in Mexico by guns that are coming from the United States. You know, there's a massive movement in this country and around the world — Black Lives Matter. And, in the conversation about U.S. guns or about migration across the border, very rarely is the calculus is the value of the lives that are impacted, that are lost, that are disappeared in Mexico become part of the conversation. So for us, it's really important that those voices be present, and that they be part of the policymaking discussion in our our discussion about what U.S. guns do.
And so we've been organizing Mexicans to come to the U.S., people from the U.S. to go to Mexico, from other countries as well, to really meet each other and understand kind of what Ieva did at the border. But, how how these lives are actually being impacted. So that's one level. Another level is on data. And data is so important for driving policy and driving our understanding. And as we know, the gun lobby has been fairly successful in suppressing a lot of publicly sponsored research on data. So the Tiahrt Amendment that restricts disclosure of tracing data on crime guns in the U.S. is also impacting our understanding of the flow of guns from the U.S. Into Mexico. So we've been digging for that on both sides of the border.
And then, you know, you mentioned PLCAA, or the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which was instituted almost 20 years ago now, protects the industry from litigation about how firearms are used. And that has been a major obstacle in being able to hold an industry accountable for the impacts, the terrible destructive impacts that its products are having. And so we're we're part of the overall U.S. gun violence prevention movement. But it does have a particular impact in Mexico, because Mexico is also challenging the gun industry, and the gun industry is using PLCCA as a defense against that.
Devin: Yeah. And so was that mention of the gun industry as one of the interesting beginning parts of the book that I found was that guns moving south from the U.S. to Mexico is a pastime older than baseball. Like oftentimes when you see a, like the current surge of firearms, like in a very recent perspective, something that's really picked up over the past couple decades, but there's been this longer trend that goes for basically centuries. So could you provide us with some historical context for the cross-border firearms trade?
Ieva: Absolutely. And, I think it's, it's a very important, like aspect of this problem, and also kind of thinking about the fact that firearms that end up in Mexico, a lot of them are smuggled across the border. But also Mexican government has been buying a lot of guns from the U.S. from the 19th century on into the 20th. So Mexico doesn't really have a firearms industry like we have in the United States, which means that since the independence — or if we're thinking about 19th century wars and Mexico for independence from Spain against invasions from the United States, from French intervention — all of those battles were fought with foreign firearms. Some of them were European, some of them came from the United States. When U.S. emerged as a major firearms manufacturer, like starting with the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th. So, even more of them came to Mexico, across the border from the United States. We are thinking like the Mexican Revolution, for example, various factions were getting firearms from the United States — Winchesters, and Colts, and Remingtons. And so that part is important when after the Mexican Revolution, the government thought that, well actually they would like to have their own firearms industry because as well as Tiano Carranza, who was this winning general in the revolution, said that unless we could manufacture our own firearms, our kind of a lot of our internal affairs will have to be decided by these foreign governments who decide when to sell us firearms and when not. During the Mexican Revolution, U.S. government created this firearms embargo because they didn't want the guns to go to certain factions they were not supporting. And this kind of changed during the revolution because US.. changed alliances with various generals in Mexico. So that has been happening for a long time. I think what we are seeing in more recent decades is like, well, there was an expansion of organized crime in Mexico in the past several decades.
There is also the the fact that the kinds of guns U.S. manufacturers are producing or importing have become much more powerful. And a lot of them, kind of a lot of gun stores in southern states like Texas and Arizona are basically catering to Mexican consumers since the early 1970s when Mexico passed this pretty strict federal firearms law, which says that normal Mexican law, under normal circumstances, Mexican civilians can have up to ten guns, only one handgun, and some rifles or shotguns of smaller calibers if they belong to hunting clubs or if they like, are recreational shooters. So they have to pass a lot of requirements to get those guns. And then as it happens, because for people, especially people in border states, but not necessarily it is much easier to get guns from the United States. This is where they turn to for for the supplies.
Devin: Yeah. And to kind of hop on that point, and I'll put it to either of you, like one of the things or one of the more hotly debated parts of statistics in the U.S. is like just how much of an impact the assault weapons ban had, largely because, like a lot of other important criminological things that were happening in the U.S. at the same time, such as the crack cocaine epidemic, where you had massive spike and then decrease that didn't have all that much to do with firearm laws, but greatly impacted the data. And you have competing studies indicating that the assault weapons ban portion did reduce mass shootings. You have others suggesting that it really didn't have much of an impact on the overall rate. But one thing that's often left out of these conversations is the massive surge of assault style weapons to Mexico, where they definitely have been used in a substantial number of incidents. Whereas in the U.S. you'd have maybe 300 to 400 known cases where like each year, where long guns are used in some form of homicide, when it comes to Mexico, it's thousands. And so I'm curious if either of you could speak to that.
John: Well, I can say something about that. You know, the dynamics of firearms violence in Mexico are very different. Partly as a result of organized crime and the war against organized crime. And so instead of having these individuals who commit mass shootings, you have organizations that are trying to control territory, because if they control territory, they get profits from what moves through that territory — whether it's drugs or whether it's migrants or even legal things like petroleum. And so in order to control territory, they are looking for assets that are military in nature. And that's where the assault rifles come in, which are so plentiful and easily accessible just over the border.
And I should say that in northern Mexico, that is where control of territory is especially, acute, the competition for it, because once any of those products go over the border into the United States, its value increases enormously. So the the number of assault weapons, for example, that are recovered in the state of Tamaulipas, just over the border from Texas in the Rio Grande Valley, outpaces anywhere else, probably in the world. And so I think often we have this idea of assault weapons, as you say, as something that are used in mass shootings in the U.S. when the role in Mexico is at least as important as it is in the United States, and probably more so.
There was a pair of studies about the impact of the expiration of the assault weapons ban in 2004, which was just a couple of years before the drug war was declared. And when that federal ban expired, the state of California maintained the bid. And the Mexican states on the other side of the border from California did not see nearly the increase in gun homicides as the Mexican states on the other side of the border from Arizona and Texas, which suddenly had an influx of assault weapons after the federal ban expired. So that's one very concrete indicator of how the ban had an impact. And one of our contentions is that the single most important measure that the United States could do to reduce gun violence in Mexico and all of the associated ills, is to ban assault rifles in the United States for sale.
Devin: Yeah. Which is quite interesting because the research, when you just look at the U.S., kind of changes the assault rifles discussion to, while politically prominent, I hate to say like an afterthought, but it almost is when compared to policy such as permit to purchase or child's access prevention, just in terms of the sheer number of fatalities that could be prevented. But once you include Mexico into your analysis, that script really does change.
And Ieva, one of the other constant themes in your book is the sheer amount of firepower that the Zetas and other cartels have access to. With frequent mention to AK 47s. And one of the data points in your book points to data from companies that bulletproof cars — which is apparently a booming industry in Mexico, unfortunately — that many of these or probably the most common weapon are 9mm handguns, but AK-47s are fairly frequent, as you know as well. Yet I've heard arguments from pro-gun commentators that use the AK-47 point to say, like, See, these guns aren't actually coming from the United States; they're coming from former Soviet proxies across South America and Central America. Because oftentimes it's seen that many, or there's the perception that many of these firearms are automatic firearms which aren't easily accessible in the U.S., whereas the semiautomatic versions are.
So a question that I kind of had from that is, are the cartels using the semiautomatic versions that are available from the U.S. and modifying them to automatic; or are they keeping them as semi-autos, or are these specific firearms some of the ones are coming from elsewhere than the U.S.?
Ieva: So some of the AK-47s that are coming to Mexico clearly do come from Central America because of there is just like a large arsenal that accumulated there during the civil wars and so on and so forth. This is a little more prevalent in southern Mexican states. However, the majority of them, and especially when we're talking about all the northern part of Mexico — so Tamaulipas and Chihuahua and Sonora and Baja California — were also kind of sort of towards the middle of Mexico -- most of them do come from the United States. They are a lot of them are from Eastern Europe. They are from Serbia, and they are from Romania, and some are from Egypt and other parts of the world. But how do they get into Mexico? They're first imported to the United States. So there are gun importers here who import them now because of the bans on fully automatic against, they are importing them some and like some functioning semiautomatic. There are some more sophisticated gun trafficking groups who have former military vets working for them who know how to convert these into fully automatic. And then they smuggle those across the border to Mexico.
However, from from my research, from reading a lot of court documents, and from from talking to two ATF agents who were tracing these, and from what I've seen in Mexico, the majority are they are working in semi-automatic mode. They come from the United States. Some of them are actually now made in the United States. The majority are, though, imported the ones that are made in the United States, well, yeah, so those are the AK-47. They also buying a lot of AR-15s, I think kind of the percentage of AK-47 say are 15s. This is very, they're very close. They are getting very close these days.
Devin: Okay. Quite interesting. And speaking of firearms, so the Barrett M82 which is a 50-caliber sniper rifle and the state gun of Tennessee. So Ieva, if you could please explain to us why such guns are absolutely essential for home defense — for those merely reading the transcript, that's sarcasm — what their capabilities are, and where many of them are going and why? Because when preparing for this, I actually looked at the Gun Violence Archive to see if there's many 50-caliber sniper rifle incidents in the United States, and there really weren't. But from your book, they seem to be a weapon of choice for the cartels.
Ieva: Yes. So Barrett 50-calibers, they were kind of developed for the civilian market only in the 1980s. The U.S. took them to like the U.S. Army, and the Marines took them to the Middle East. They are not guns used against people. These are the kind of weapons where the cartridge is like the size of a Sharpie marker. They are used against armored vehicles, against helicopters, against concrete walls of houses. So in Mexico they are very expensive too. They cost like $10,000 without fancy accessories. And every year Mexican security forces now are recovering at least like several dozen and more, especially in border states. Tamaulipas is above above other states. The organized crime groups want them because they give them a tactical advantage against other groups they are competing against, but also against military and police forces. They have shot down military helicopters in Mexico, and things like that. So they just kind of symbolize power, even when they are not necessarily used, that powerful weapon.
John: If I could add something there. I visited a gun dealer in southern Arizona where they were selling 50-caliber Barretts, and I asked him about trafficking, and he clearly knew that some of the buyers were taking these — the Barretts as well as ammo for them, like buying big amounts of ammo, it was clear, and he knew. But as I talked more with him, he also said, Well, you know, if somebody was coming for me, I would be able to get at them a mile away, you know, like that. There was a kind of a conspiracy piece to it as well, or, you know, we're going to deal with government tyranny. So that discourse, even though they are not used within the United States, very infrequently, that discourse is still feeding the sellers. And they're selling to people who're trafficking in them over the border.
Devin: Yeah. And back when I was at the NRA convention in 2018, like there was actually a booth, like draped in American flags, and there was like a 50 caliber just screaming freedom all over the place. And it's like, yeah, what sort of law abiding purposes do you have for this? And it's just kind of like blank looks. Yeah.
Ieva: Even in these magazines that we're reviewing, you know, various types of 50-caliber guns, and that I write in the book that the the thing is that they can shoot accurately at something 1000 yards away, which is like ten football fields. So the problem was not whether you can hit a target that far away, but the problem was where can you find a safe space to actually practice such "sport" in the United States?
Devin: Yeah. In Oklahoma, I'm sure there's a range or a creek bed somewhere that may have that. So, John, one of the things I kind of want to talk about because our probably biggest focus at GVPedia is countering the gun lobby's firehose of falsehood, which is a coordinated, decades long disinformation campaign to generally promote the false narrative that firearms have kept people safer. And a fundamental tenet of this campaign is that gun laws don't work. And sometimes gun lobby spokespeople will even point to Mexico and say, like, See how hard it is to get guns there, there's only one or two stores there, and there's all these restrictions. And yet Mexican gun homicides on a per capita basis are much higher than the U.S. So, like, clearly gun laws aren't working there, according to them. And then they kind of ignore or downplay the role that U.S. firearms play.
So what are some of the other myths that you've seen in this space, and what are the facts? And I'd also add one of the myths that I see, like along with the gun laws don't work is like, oh, well, criminals don't follow laws anyway. And you have these cartels. So if you were to somehow shut down the entire cross-border trade with the U.S. Tomorrow, they'd simply get their firearms from elsewhere, and it wouldn't have an impact on the violence there. So I'm curious if you can address some of that.
John: Well, I think one of the myths — and it's it's not peculiar to the pro-gun lobby — is that violence is coming from Mexicans. Violence is coming from Mexico into the U.S. And that myth feeds the idea that we have to stop migrants coming over the border. And so all of the infrastructure at the border is really focused on flows going from south to north and not north to south, because there's this idea that, of course, in the United States — we're the good guys, right — anything that's coming from us going into Mexico is going to be a good influence on those terribly violent Mexicans. And that myth underlays so much infrastructure, so much policymaking, so much investment, so much political discourse — and we're constantly trying to counter it.
So that's one. I think another is that more guns equals more safety. So you touched on this, that somehow gun laws will mean that there will be fewer U.S. guns. And it is true that that trafficking is supplying a majority of firearms in Mexico, and it is not making Mexico safer. But I would add that kind of a parallel or companion myth is, well, Okay, if we arm the military and the police, then they can fight the bad guys with the guns; and that if only the Mexicans have the political will, then, you know, they can get rid of the bad guys with the guns. It's the good guy with a gun against a bad guy with a gun myth. And what we've seen is that that is not helped either. Only in March, Mexico bought more than 14,000 military rifles. But it's also, it's been an ongoing piece that since the drug war was declared in 2007, Mexico is the major importer of U.S. legally exported firearms in all of Latin America. And, it has not reduced violence at all. It has, in fact, contributed to the fragmentation of organized crime groups, to human rights violations, and to a kind of arms race between illegal organizations and the state.
And to add some complexity to it is that sometimes the state organizations — the police or the military — are allied with criminal organizations that themselves are competing for territory. So you might see the police or the army fighting a criminal organization because they are protecting their competitors with whom they are allied for that territory. And that just increases the violence without addressing the flow of fentanyl, without addressing the flow of migrants. And in fact, a lot of state forces that are armed by the United States are not going after organized crime. They're going after migrants, at the at the behest of the United States. So there's it's kind of a cocktail of things that we're constantly trying to unpack in terms of those myths about guns in Mexico.
Devin: Yeah. And to kind of jump off the point where it's like the line between cartel and government can frighteningly be very blurry. At times, I kind of wanted to turn to some of the personal stories that were in this book. And two of the most compelling ones I found, who were people who you couldn't actually name for reasons that are quite clear once you read the book, who you call Samara and Miguel. And Samara was a child/teenage soldier and then rose to be a low-level leader for the Zetas before the age of 15, when she was then captured by government forces, and then underwent a lot of horrific stuff then as well.
And then on the flip side, Miguel is kind of the quintessential good guy with a gun. He kind of has that sort of vibe, although based off the information in the book, he's also an un-indicted felon due to the gun trafficking that he's engaged in.And with Samara, her story reminded me of how in the U.S., like quote-unquote, "gang violence" is often used to dismiss large swaths of gun violence. And oftentimes this is using highly inflated percentages in the U.S. and in the U.S., gang violence is approximately anywhere from 10-20% of gun homicides annually, although you'll see some pro-gun sources say that actually like 80%, which just is not realistic in the United States.
And with Samara, it was clear that she didn't choose to become a member of one of the most loathsome organizations in the world. The gun was literally put to her head, and it was either join us or die. And this kind of brought me back to the thought of gang members like in the U.S., or even people who are just part of crews that are not quite gangs but engage in some similar activities, where I don't think most of these members choose to become such either. It's something that circumstances forced on them, although like the circumstances with Samara were far more direct and extreme. And then with Miguel, with his kind of attitude of being law abiding until the law really doesn't work for him; and then he finds a way around the law when it's inconvenient.
It reminded me of a lot of attitudes in the U.S. where you will have law abiding gun owners, like, proudly say they're law abiding, and then they will never follow any sort of gun law that's passed in the future, like in the same breath. And with Miguel, it was slightly more justifiable because oftentimes the law enforcement in Mexico and the cartels, like it's hard to tell the difference. And there's just entire sociological breakdown there. So with that kind of rambling introduction to them, I'm curious if you can tell us more about these two people in particular whose stories are quite nuanced and complicated.
Ieva: Thank you for zooming into their stories, because I do think that they are, well, they are two of the main protagonists of this book, and they are not very easily, they don't fall into into these categories, as you said, they kind of upset a lot of categories. Or some other story was very interesting to me because she, when we when we think about gun violence victims, we often think or a lot of people are just they pack up and leave or they seek justice in Mexico in whatever ways they can. But some of them — and in this case Samara, in her case, it was a forced, kind of not really choice, but you she had to do it, but then she went she kind of repeated that decision again and again — the picked up the gun herself. Right? So a victim who became a perpetrator.
In a way, Miguel's story is like almost a mirror image because Miguel, they're both from the same city. They're both from Monterrey, which is Mexico's second largest city. It's a quite prosperous city, but it has different areas, right? And Miguel grew up in this wealthy, protected community in the city. And he was always interested in guns. He inherited his grandfather's rifle collection, and he liked hunting, but he became a real kind of gun buff and started violating the laws when the situation around Monterrey changed.
When the Zetas split from the Gulf Cartel, when violence kind of came to the city, when a lot of businessmen were being kidnaped, when there was extortion. And he thought, well, the government, although he had these very direct links to the local military commanders, but he thought the government can't protect me. I definitely don't trust the police, because police forces were one of the first ones that were targeted and recruited by organized crime groups in this part of Mexico. So he said, well, the only way I can do is like, learn how to defend myself, right? So very much kind of individual sovereignty idea that we are familiar in the United States. And he said, well, the best guns I can get, whether it is a 9mm handgun or whether it is like a Smith and Wesson rifle. Well, that or ammunition like, especially these, like expanding rounds, well, that you can only get in the United States. So that's against the Mexican law. But because of kind of legal inequality that exists in Mexico, that law affects some people that have some like higher social status in a different way, that it affects people who kind of are beyond the the threshold of state's care.
So when when the government caught Samara when she was 15 years old and working for this, with the Zetas, they caught her with a gun, and having a gun that was of a military restrict of a caliber that's restricted for military use, that was enough to kind of lock her up. They didn't have to do an investigation of her involvement in organized crime, or whether she had committed any killings or kidnapping. Just having been caught with a gun was enough to lock her up. For Miguel, he kind of knew, because there were other people in his circles, like even if he got caught with a gun and he was carrying a gun in his car, which is very, very few people in Mexico have a permit to do that, and he definitely was not of those people who have a permit to do that. But he thought that it would be safer for him to have it if the government, if the police stopped him, would probably pay a bribe and get away with it. And if not, and he had this encounter with some people who, who knows what would have happened in that situation if he didn't have a gun. So I thought that it was important to kind of, because we are, I mean, when we're talking about guns in Mexico, yes, there are these numbers that you cited in the beginning from the book, but as John also mentioned, like we don't really have very solid numbers of a lot of things. Like, we know kind of something and we don't know other things. So, so it's very important to kind of understand who are these people who are directly engaged in gun violence in this case.
Devin: Yeah. And like with the point with the numbers, I think that's one of the reasons other than just the U.S. only caring about the U.S., which is a tale as old as time, is that people tend to care about things more when like the numbers are solid or there's identifiable key examples, which is like one of the reasons why fatalities get so much more attention in the U.S. Than, say, injuries, because we still to this day do not have solid numbers where the number of firearm injuries in the U.S. We have estimates from a sample of hospitals, but those numbers widely differ and fluctuate. And just because we don't have a handle on that problem, it's like, oh well, we can't pinpoint it, so who cares? We're moving on to the things we can pinpoint.
I do think that's kind of one of the issues with like Mexican gun violence as well, where one it's in a different country, so it's like it's their problem, not our problem. And then two, like just the lack of solid numbers. And then even once you get past that, just the complicated facts on the ground where it's like, yeah, you don't have the laws being enforced justly or fairly quite often. It's hard to tell who the good guys and the bad guys are in a particular case, and it's just in our mess, that of a whirlwind of sorts, where the U.S. just keeps pumping in guns and thinking something will change because of that.
So to kind of pivot from that, one of the points that I kind of came away with unintentionally from the book — and both of you can feel free to respond to this — is that the book points out there's a sizable portion of the cartel business that isn't just drugs, but it's more private security where it's like, Hey, your life is in danger, we'll protect you; and if you don't accept our protection, your life definitely will be in danger. And I can't help but feel there is something of a parallel to the gun industry, as in both are offering a promise of security for the very problem that it created. And for the cartel, obviously, this is much more direct extortion, but one of the main selling points for the gun lobby is that, because you have all these bad guys with guns in the country, and those are guns that the gun lobby has supplied over the past several decades, that you too need a gun for protection from all the people with guns who might harm you. And so you're basically creating a problem with widespread guns everywhere and then feeding off of it. And so I'm just curious about your thoughts on the kind of fairness of that comparison.
Ieva: I think it's a great point. It's the same as kind of, an arms race or an escalation of getting arms. So in Mexico, this works on various levels. It is both like what we talked about before, that organized crime groups are getting these guns from the United States. But then the government forces, the police and the military who have to face that all, they also need stronger guns from the United States. So they they buy, they import more. And then you have civilians who do not trust the government,\ and are afraid of organized crime.
And then that's what kind of gave rise to this private security industry. Some of the people who work in private security, they do come from the military because just the pay is better, and it's kind of often a safer working environment. But I kind of agree that it's kind of a loop. There is no way how to get out of it if we're in this logic and the very idea of protection. So the organized crime groups in Mexico, yes, they bought these initial arsenals and they became powerful from trafficking drugs. But trafficking drugs has become more difficult in the United States. And also the types of drugs we are now buying have shifted somewhat, and then the groups have fractured. So for them, for a lot of them, it is actually easier.
What John was pointing to earlier sort of, use other forms of profiteering in the territory that they control. And one of them is, as you say, like offer protection. But they, what basically they do through extortion is they offer protection from themselves. And then the problem is that if they're working together with the police — as in many areas of Mexico that happens, where organized crime and the police are kind of on the same — then the people who are being threatened and have to pay to organized crime for protection, they cannot turn to the police for protection. It's like they have these, they have threats coming from two sides. And then what solution do you have? Well, then you pack up and leave for the United States to seek safety here, or if you are like very maybe kind of stubborn, you arm yourself and you create your own self-defense group, and say, Well, we will we will protect ourselves against both the government and the criminal groups.
Devin: Yeah. And then oftentimes probably breaking the law there, and then maybe sliding into the same cycle that you're trying to prevent. And it just seems like once you have this cycle and you throw in guns, it seems very hard to kind of prevent. And to slowly start wrapping up here, like, John, you look like you're going to say something there, but like, how do you kind of break that cycle, given that, like, guns are a main part of it, but there's also a boatload of corruption and just very bad dynamics on the ground that it it's hard to see a way out of it.
John: Well, I was going to add that that dynamic is not just exclusive to Mexico, because the firearms industry, they want to grow their market. And... it's not so important to them where the guns are going, who the end users are. So a couple examples. One is Haiti, where guns that are sold, especially in Florida, get very easily by ship to Haiti. And we can see what has happened there. And so you have this thing where there's an enormous amount of gang violence in Mexico, and then the United Nations, with U.S. support and some other countries, planned to send in an armed force who will be armed again by the gun industry, will sell weapons to governments. Or in the case of Ecuador, where citizen security has become more difficult, more dangerous. And last spring, the right wing government liberalized the gun market. And in June and July, the U.S. industry sold 18 million bullets to Ecuador. And we've seen in both countries, Haiti and Ecuador, the number of people who are fleeing increased violence grow enormously.
So whether we're talking about, like Ieva said, you know, individual citizens or criminal groups or private security groups or government agencies -- the industry is profiting from all of that, even as they struggle to compete with each other. So what do we do about it? Well, one thing that's happening right now is that the U.S. Department of Commerce has issued a new rule for firearms exports that it oversees, which is not fully automatic weapons, but does include semi-automatic, pistols, and long guns. And, it would restrict some of those exports for non-governmental end users. Doesn't have much restriction on exports that are going to government agencies. So human rights violations and collusion with criminal organizations is kind of not on the radar. But we know that the right wing and the gun industry and Republicans and the gun industry are going to attack and are already introducing legislation to repeal that rule. We also think that, as I said earlier, a ban on assault weapons would be a very important move; but something that doesn't require congressional approval, which is very difficult in this very polarized environment, is a ban on imports of assault weapons.
You know, Ieva was talking earlier about these Romanian and Yugoslavian, you know, other imports of assault weapons that are popular and are being trafficked over the border into Mexico. The Biden administration could ban the imports of those as an executive action because they don't have a sporting purpose. And then the one other thing I would say right now is that there's legislation, introduced by Joaquin Castro, called the ARMAS Act, which addresses both illicit trafficking, by mandating a U.S. government-wide strategy for addressing illicit trafficking of firearms, which doesn't exist right now. But it also puts some additional restrictions on exports, particularly in the Americas and Mexico would be, you know, a very important part of that. In order to really identify and restrict who were the end users of those exports, whether they are government agencies or private entities, because that really doesn't exist right now. So those are some things that we're supporting and looking for other people to support.
Devin: And to kind of go off of that with a brief GVPedia plug. So with those sort of laws that you mentioned, I think it highlights the importance of, particularly in the U.S., having a comprehensive approach to reducing gun violence, recognizing that it's not just going to be one law or policy or program that's going to fix things, because you have stuff like the assault weapons ban where, like it might not have as much of a major impact in the U.S. outside of mass shootings, but it could have a massive impact in Mexico. Or the importance that you're talking about might not do much for the U.S., but it could certainly do a lot for Mexico and other Central and South American countries.
And then you also have things that are more like U.S.-focused, like permit to purchase laws, which I view as essential. Same with like child access prevention laws and extreme risk protection orders (ERPO). But if you narrow your focus to one, like, you might fix at least a small part of the problem. But the problem is so major and all encompassing, that it does require a tapestry of various laws and programs.
Which is why, for example, GVPedia compiled the Denver Accord, which has those policies. And you can look at those policies and on the Denver Accord, which you can access through GVPedia as well. And then another thing I kind of wanted to highlight here is like kind of the direct path, as it were, between myth and then actual results on the ground. And you were mentioning the gun lobby like outreach to countries like Ecuador, Haiti, and others. And particularly with Ecuador, pro-gun commentators/former researcher, John Lott, who GVPedia has covered extensively in the past, has visited Ecuador, has done tours around Brazil and other South American countries directly promoting this whole "more guns, less crime" philosophy, which is then used by the gun lobby as evidence ,like, See you need more guns there, which allows them to sell more guns, which then results in an uptick in violence, which you need more guns to solve, and basically creates that spiral.
So there, in my view, is definitely a direct link between like these academic debates even that might seem like, oh, it's just in the ivory tower, who else cares, to actual real world impact where it's impacting individual lives through the policies that those ideas are causing. And so those are just a couple points there. And to wrap up, Ieva, what do you feel are some of the few key takeaways that we might not have touched on here with your book and messages that you want people to gain from the book? And so that you have the last words, I'll just tell you that thank you both for joining us. This has been an excellent conversation. And the book is once again, Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border. And I can wholeheartedly recommend it. I believe you can get it on an Amazon internet near you, but I'm sure there's other places as well. So yeah, Ieva you have the last words here.
Ieva: It's a huge responsibility, especially when we are talking about such a complex issue.... It's really that U.S. gun violence problem is not only U.S. gun violence problem, it is a problem of the entire region. So Mexico in this case, but also Central America and the Caribbean. And we kind of need to think how our gun laws and how our gun lobby and how our gun industry is affecting the lives in these other countries; and how what our guns are doing there then comes back and affects us. Because we are seeing the migrants and refugees coming here, and we are suddenly surprised. Well, how come so many people are coming here and what should we do with them? Well, all of that starts with our guns and talking about solutions. Also, anything that would make guns, that would increase gun safety in the United States would also — not one thing, but like a lot of these small things — would eventually reduce gun violence south of the border.
Devin: Awesome. I think that's perfect. Note to end on, and thank you both so much for being here.
John: Thank you.