When President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump visited Texas on the finish of February, every spoke about migration and border safety. Biden known as for proscribing asylum. Trump engaged in fearmongering, blaming migrants for crime. However neither talked about one of many principal causes the border has drawn so many migrants and asylum-seekers — the circulate of weapons from the U.S. into Mexico.
This hyperlink between our weapons and the individuals who search security on the border is especially clear in Texas. Gov. Greg Abbott’s hard-line strategy to stopping migrants from crossing utterly ignores the state’s position as a principal supply of weapons for felony teams and violence in Mexico, which is a results of its unfastened gun laws. It’s no marvel that Mexicans are the most important nationwide group among the many a whole bunch of hundreds who attempt to cross the U.S. southern border every year.
Since I started volunteering in 2015 at a migrant support clinic in Nogales, Mexico, I’ve met the boys, ladies and youngsters who make up these statistics. Varied presidents and Congresses have handed down a hodgepodge of insurance policies supposed to unravel the perpetual disaster on the border, however the causes folks attempt to escape Mexico and the difficulties they encounter on their journeys haven’t modified in any significant manner.
On the clinic, moms and dads informed us why they needed to flee. Any individual’s brother was murdered. Any individual’s cousin was kidnapped. Any individual else might not pay extortion charges. These migrants had been fleeing insecurity slightly than poverty, though the 2 usually overlapped. Prison violence is an issue all through Mexico. In 2023, greater than 110,000 Mexicans had been formally listed as disappeared. Near 90% of all crimes are by no means reported and 9 in 10 homicides go unpunished. In some components of the nation, regulation enforcement works with organized crime teams. The households I met didn’t have an choice to go to the police. They packed what they may carry, hoping to search out security as soon as they crossed the border.
It’s not solely folks which might be affected by the proliferation of weapons. The felony organizations forcing households to flee are sometimes additionally operating the Mexican drug commerce. When fentanyl is smuggled throughout the border, normally by way of ports of entry and usually by U.S. residents, it wreaks havoc in our communities. However the medicine wouldn’t be coming north in such massive numbers if not for our weapons flowing south.
One cause that American weapons have such an outsized position in Mexican crime is as a result of not like the US, Mexico has very strict gun legal guidelines. There are solely two gun shops within the nation the place vetted residents should purchase a restricted variety of comparatively small-caliber weapons. However in Texas and Arizona, states that share the longest border with Mexico, there are greater than 7,000 federally licensed gun sellers and pawnbrokers. And whereas nearly all of weapons recovered in crime scenes round Mexico are traced to shops in these two states, some come from so far as Arkansas, Florida and Massachusetts. It’s estimated that between 200,000 and greater than half 1,000,000 firearms bought in gun shops, at gun reveals or by way of non-public gross sales in the US are trafficked south throughout the border.
In 2021, the Mexican authorities sued U.S. gunmakers, together with Colt, Smith & Wesson and Barrett, for his or her “total destabilizing impact on Mexican society.” A yr later, it filed one other lawsuit towards gun sellers in Arizona who bought firearms that routinely ended up within the fingers of organized crime teams in Mexico. Each instances are nonetheless winding by way of the courts.
The 2005 Safety of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act shields U.S. gun makers and gun sellers from civil legal responsibility for accidents to folks in the US. However the Mexican authorities argues that this exemption doesn’t apply to Mexico. Simply as U.S. corporations “ might not dump poisonous waste or different pollution to poison Mexicans throughout the border,” it insists within the lawsuit, “they could not ship their weapons of struggle into the fingers of the cartels, inflicting repeated and grievous hurt, after which declare immunity from accountability.” The Mexican authorities shares accountability for failing to guard its residents. However its failure to uphold the rule of regulation partly outcomes from the firepower of organized crime teams, armed with American-made military-style weapons.
It’s a vicious circle of violence. With out the river of firearms flowing south, the northbound circulate of medicine would diminish. With out the specter of gun violence, many households wouldn’t danger their lives attempting to succeed in and cross the border, looking for security for themselves and for his or her kids. The exodus of individuals from Mexico and different international locations within the area and the accidents we deal with on the clinic are largely the results of America’s refusal to manage the gun trade, permitting it to wound communities on each side of the wall and perpetuate the unending border disaster.
Ieva Jusionyte is an affiliate professor of worldwide safety and anthropology on the Watson Institute for Worldwide and Public Affairs at Brown College. Her new ebook is “Exit Wounds: How America’s Weapons Gasoline Violence Throughout the Border.”
