Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap
Galatians 6:7
Fact: The United States government spends more tax payer $$$ on the military than the next ten countries in the world (most of whom are ostensibly its allies).
Fact: The United States is the largest contributor of military aid to foreign countries in the world, with its Department of Defense providing funding and/or American military hardware aid to over 150 countries annually for “defense” purposes, most of whom don’t even have the draping’s of democracy.
Fact: American “culture” is permeated with violence (too many examples to even begin an exhaustive list, but you can try to come up with a minimum of 10).
Fact: US history is replete with extreme violence from genocide of the native inhabitants, which until recently was celebrated with gusto, to the enslavement of Africans, to a system of policing which relies on military hardware and acts like an occupying army.
Fact: United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, 716 per 100,000 of the national population.
Enough you say? The article below documents how the US exports violence to our neighbor south of the border through “unofficial” channels. Just like on the children in Gaza, these weapons extract the ultimate price and the accessory before the fact not only goes free, but gets rich.
The next time someone accuses migrants of bringing violence to the US, you might counter that it was the US which brought violence to their country, not the other way around.
From the London Review of Books, via Adam Tooze’s Chartbook
Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border by Ieva Jusionyte.
There are only two gun stores in Mexico. Throughout the enormous country, which takes three full days to cross by car from top to bottom if you don’t stop, the only places you can legally buy a gun are a shop on a military base in the capital and a shop on another military base in the large northern city of Monterrey. It’s not advisable to drive straight through Mexico any more, even if you don’t stop. The country is awash with guns, which are often in the hands of criminal outfits. Locals know which spots or people to skirt. Migrants and asylum seekers trying to reach the US-Mexico border from further south can’t avoid traversing the area more or less blind. It’s not wise to do this, and people wouldn’t if they felt they had another choice. Few migrants now travel alone: their best option is to pay human smugglers who carry illegally bought guns to protect themselves from other people with illegally bought guns. The going rate for safe passage across Mexico and through the desert into the US is more than $10,000 and rising. Trump drove up prices last time and will again. Routes and business models keep changing, and, for obvious reasons, the rates and terms are hard to keep tabs on. But I have always been told that the fee buys three attempts, unless the customer is killed by a gun held by someone they haven’t paid to protect them. Death might cancel the second or third attempt, but it doesn’t cancel the debt. The bereaved family must still pay the smuggler.
Where did all those guns come from? The two legal gun stores are heavily guarded, expensive and long on red tape in the form of background checks by the Mexican army. So almost all of the guns come straight from the US: Walmart, Dick’s Sporting Goods, gun shows, private sales. Mexicans, or North Americans who work for them, cross into Texas, New Mexico or Arizona to visit the vast array of stores selling guns on the US side. Background checks and controls are sparse, and it’s easy to smuggle the guns back across the border into Mexico. Border agents are mostly trying to catch people coming north, not guns going south. This is NAFTA, flipped. The idea of the free-trade agreement was to open markets and close borders: goods would move freely, people would not. Three decades later, goods do flow freely, including illegal goods. But so do people. Now there is illicit business in both directions: drugs and people smuggled up, guns smuggled down. The flow of guns south is so relentless that it is called the ‘iron river’.
Damage to another human body is slower and harder with a knife or machete. Manual labour. Killing another person with a gun is so easy that a child can do it (and does). Mexico can pass as many gun control laws as it likes, but it is unlucky to sit just south of a much more powerful country over which it has little leverage, a country with more guns than anywhere else in the world. In the US, a lavishly paid lobby and Second Amendment culture war hysteria ensure that nearly anyone who wants a gun can buy one. The iron river created by what the anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte calls the ‘asymmetry between gun laws in the US and Mexico’ is not new: in the early 20th century US guns were smuggled to fighters in the Mexican Revolution. In 1971, Mexico tightened gun controls, passing a law stating that only the Ministry of National Defence can import and sell arms. That is why the only two legal gun stores are on military bases.
In 1994, the presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was shot dead at a campaign rally in Tijuana. This is Mexico’s equivalent of the JFK assassination, both for political import and for the conspiracy theories that continue to swirl around the event. The assassin’s gun was traced to the Bob Chow Gun Shop in San Francisco. How the .38-calibre Taurus revolver, which was bought legally, got into the hands of the killer south of the border is unclear. This is the case with most guns used for crimes in Mexico: bought in the US, their paper trail becomes vague at some point before the fatal shot. The mushy paperwork is easy to explain. Under US federal law, guns sold between private parties don’t need to be reported. This is still the way many criminals, or those paid to shop for them (known as ‘straw purchasers’), acquire guns at shows and private homes before taking them south. It’s all perfectly legal until the guns cross the border.
Yes, perfectly legal. What’s not legal is poor Mexicans crossing the border in the other direction to escape the violence perpetrated by the guns so generously supplied by the US. Crossing the border into the rich lands that had been stolen from Mexico, their homeland, as the result of a war. And then being accused of bringing violence to the US.
No, violence is as American as cherry pie, as H Rap Brown noted. And it’s one of the USA’s major exports.