How Republicans keep U.S. guns and ammo flowing to Latin American drug cartels
When Mexicans are shot dead, the last thing they see are the barrels of American guns.
The same could be said for thousands of Hondurans, Bahamians, Colombians, Haitians, Dominicans and Jamaicans murdered every year.
The GOP is cool with that.
Republicans in Congress get 95% of the gun rights lobby’s campaign donations, and they aggressively run interference for their base’s business — selling as many guns as possible to whoever wants to buy them wherever they are.
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The Second Amendment isn’t just an American right for gun manufacturers. It’s a human right, maybe even worth putting in the UN Charter. For the U.S. weapons industry, everyone everywhere needs a gun, preferably at least one per hand — or even digit.
Welcome to the Western Hemisphere.
North America’s users want drugs.
Caribbean and Central and South America’s narco-traffickers want guns.
America’s weapons makers want to supply them.
And Republican leaders want to help — all while campaigning off the chaos their actions are amplifying.
While Donald Trump has incessantly and successfully railed against immigrants — aping Adolf Hitler and literally comparing refugees to serial killer cannibals —his and the GOP’s pro-gun policies have undoubtedly armed the homicidal gangs terrorizing the hemisphere, pushing innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire toward the U.S.-Mexico border.
Consider:
In January 2020, then-President Trump gave a gift to the gun lobby — and a middle finger to the rest of the world — when he eased federal rules regulating firearm exports.
The move, which transferred oversight from the State Department to the Commerce Department, was, as CNBC then reported, “aimed at boosting the sale of U.S. firearms and ammunition abroad… [because] American manufacturers will have fewer registration requirements in order to obtain an export license.”
As intended, civilian gun exports rose during Trump’s administration to the highest-ever levels. In 2020, the year Trump eased those regulations, American-made firearm exports grew 66% over 2019. The gun lobby bet on the right horse when they gave their dollars to Trump & Co. During his four-year term, more guns were sold abroad — nearly 1.9 million — than during any administration in at least three decades, data shows.
And as American guns exports have grown, so too have murders committed with American guns in the rest of the Americas.
In Mexico, whose homicide rate is four times greater than America’s, 68% of the guns found at crime scenes between 2017 and 2022 originated from the U.S., per ATF data.
In Jamaica, where people are killed eight times more often than here, over 80% of murders are committed with guns, nearly all of which, reportedly, come from the U.S.
In Central American countries, such as Honduras, whose homicide rate is nearly six times America’s, more than half the guns found at crime scenes come from the U.S., per ATF data.
In the Bahamas, Dominican Republic and Haiti, between 80 and 90% of the weapons, which were seized by local law enforcement agencies in 2021 and were traced by the ATF, originated in the U.S., per federal data.
Lax gun export policies, which began under Trump, have outlasted his administration, in part because of President Joe Biden’s foot-dragging and Congressional Republicans fiercely pushing back against Democrats’ attempts to rein in gun exports.
In 2022, Reuters reported, income from legal firearm shipments to Latin America increased 8%, with most sales going to Brazil, Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia — aka countries overrun by drug cartels and home to some of the highest murder rates in the world.
That same year, as Just Security reported, “Exports of semi-automatic rifles — including assault weapons like the AR-15 rifle — hit the highest number since the federal government began specifically reporting on the export of semi-automatic firearms in 2005.”
The American gun industry has made a killing selling ammo to Ecuador, where the murder rate rose 694% between 2016 and 2023. The country had been importing less than 100,000 bullets between 2020 through 2022. But that changed the following year, when — in a two-month period —Ecuadorians, reportedly, bought 18 million bullets from American munitions makers.
To his credit, President Biden has leveraged the long arm of the federal government — specifically, the DOJ, DHS and ATF — to aggressively reduce illegal firearms trafficking south of the border.
But Republicans just can’t abide. The GOP’s sugar daddies need markets, and they’re sure as hell going to keep the “iron river” flowing south by hook or by crook.
One of the main ways drug cartels obtain weapons is from American citizens who legally buy them. To combat this, among other priorities, House Democrats have pushed for tightening background checks on gun sales, including closing loopholes in the system, by writing and passing the Enhanced Background Checks Act in March of 2021. But later that year, the Senate GOP killed the House bill, ensuring that shady American buyers could keep smuggling weapons south.
Last October, following a Bloomberg News expose of U.S. gun exports’ impact on global crime rates, Biden’s Commerce Department temporarily paused legal civilian arms exports. Predictably, Republicans erupted. In November, nearly their entire Senate caucus signed a letter bemoaning the rules’ impact on civilian weapons makers’ precious profits. Then in February, a month after that 90-day pause was over, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer threatened to subpoena the Commerce Department into submission.
Apparently, Republican threats didn’t work because, in late April, Biden’s Commerce Department released an interim final rule, restricting “exports of all firearms to non-government entities in high-risk countries.”
“The new regulations not only narrow the potential market, they require more screening of customers and more expense,” explains Bloomberg’s David Kocieniewski. “Exporters must renew export licenses every year … They also must collect copies of passports or national ID cards from gun dealers and other customers who are overseas.”
And per Bloomberg, “The new rules also aim to make it easier for federal regulators to scrutinize exports of the most dangerous weapons by creating distinct trade categories for semiautomatic firearms and the components used to create them.”
But of the 36 “high-risk” countries the new rules apply to, Mexico — of all places — is not on the list.
After all, according to the ATF, 59% of U.S. guns used to commit crimes outside the country between 2017 and 2021 were found in Mexico. And given the fact that, in 2021, the U.S. government’s own watchdog — the Government Accountability Office — called the “trafficking of U.S.-sourced firearms into Mexico … a national security threat,” the Biden Commerce Department’s omission of Mexico is surprising, if not outright bizarre.
For its part, Mexico hasn’t been waiting around for American politicians to act. It’s sought relief in our courts.
In 2021, awash in American guns and fed up with being killed with them, Mexico filed suit against six American gun manufacturers, including Smith & Wesson, Barret Firearms, Beretta, Glock, Sturm and Ruger & Co.
That $10-billion suit — Estados Unidos Mexicanos v. Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc., et. al. — alleges over 340,000 of these gun makers’ weapons are smuggled across the border annually and that American gun makers “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.”
Mexico accuses American weapons manufacturers of “deliberately facilitate[ing] gun trafficking into Mexico … designing their guns as military-style weapons, knowing that such weapons are particularly sought after by the drug cartels in Mexico.”
Mexico’s lawsuit appeared dead in late 2022 after a Federal District Judge in Boston threw out the suit, ruling gun makers were exempt because of the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) — gun makers’ favorite federal law. Written and passed in 2005 when Republicans controlled the House, the Senate and the White House, the PLCAA, as intended, has shielded gun makers from liability when their products are used in crimes.
But the First Circuit Court of Appeal disagreed, handing a major win to Mexico when it wrote that the PLCAA isn’t applicable to Mexico’s claims in the case.
Now, Mexico vs. Smith & Wesson et al is moving forward.
On April 5, the District Court rejected the gun makers’ motion to stay proceedings, Nick Shadowen, Mexico’s attorney, told DCReport. “The Government of Mexico now looks forward to an expeditious discovery process, and to presenting compelling evidence at trial to prove the allegations in its Complaint.”
But Mexico’s win might be short-lived.
The fate of Mexicans killed by American guns, ultimately, lies in the hands of the Supreme Court, where six Republicans in robes rule.
Chances are, Mexicans and the rest of the hemisphere’s citizens will be staring down the barrels of American guns for years to come.
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Former U.S. President Donald Trump sits with his attorneys Emil Bove (L) and Todd Blanche (R) as he attends his trial for allegedly covering up hush money payments at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 3, 2024 in New York City. Trump was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records last year, which prosecutors say was an effort to hide a potential sex scandal, both before and after the 2016 presidential election. Trump is the first former U.S. president to face trial on criminal charges. (Photo by Mark Peterson - Pool/Getty Images)
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