For decades, the border between Mexico and the United States was just an imaginary line, a figment of our imagination. The three thousand kilometers that divide both countries saw people, animals and goods pass by. Legal and illegal were then only words, dictionary adjectives, they were not yet linked to the river or the desert. In the second part of the 20th century, fences and barbed wire began to go up. In recent years, the construction of concrete walls began. The passage from the south to the north became complicated. What was previously imaginary became material. Today, bizarre patrols, bird drones and laser sensors, hungry for movement, drugs and people, travel along the border. There are detection towers, huge searchlights and high-definition cameras on every stretch of an increasingly monitored border. From south to north.
The passage from the United States to Mexico is something else. No need to hide. He “Welcome to Mexico” is usually accompanied by a cursory glance from the customs inspector. There are no regular checks on the 150,000 cars that cross the border southbound daily. All infrastructure is made to prevent the flow of unwanted people and goods from the south to the north, not the other way around. And thus, the food of violence that bleeds the country is sneaked in. It is a million-dollar and simple business. Trafficking weapons to Mexico is a child’s thing.
A border that divides a market
The border marks the division of two completely different ways of regulating access to weapons. In 2023, in the United States there were 77,813 points of sale to legally acquire weapons. It is a similar number to the combined number of McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway and Wendy’s locations throughout the United States; or the equivalent of four and a half times the number of Starbucks coffee shops. In Mexico, on the other hand, there are only two centers to legally acquire firearms, both managed by the Secretariat of National Defense (SEDENA).
In several states north of the border, it is enough to pass a short background check process and be 18 years old to purchase an assault rifle. Or two. Or three. Or ten. In Mexico, SEDENA regulates strict and complex procedures to legally acquire a low-caliber revolver. Outside the state lens, however, via WhatsApp, or with dealers small-time, the avid buyer can get a goat horn – as an AK-47 is known colloquially in Mexico – in a few hours. It’s just a matter of knowing how to look for one of the 17 million weapons that, according to the most conservative studies, circulate illegally in Mexico.
The largest arms market in the world
The United States is the largest arms market in the world. In 2022, more than 13,400,000 firearms were manufactured, enough to equip the entire population of countries such as Greece, Portugal or Sweden. And it is an expanding industry. Two decades ago, in 2001, just under three million of these had been manufactured. Or, to look at it another way, in 21 years the population of the United States grew 18%, but the number of weapons produced quadrupled.
But there is an uncomfortable truth among gun lovers in America. This is a truth faced half-heartedly by sellers and buyers alike. It is a truth that questions the americanness From the market. It’s very simple: the world imports weapons to the United States. And it does it more and more. This business ceased to be a long time ago. made in the US. In 2021, the world exported almost seven million weapons to the United States, 392% more than twenty years ago.
Research published in 2024 estimated that around 378 million firearms were in circulation in the United States (not counting 3D printed weapons or automatically produced weapons). We are talking about a country of 332 million people. This means that there are around 114 firearms in circulation for every 100 inhabitants. It is a proportion similar to the estimate of cell phones per inhabitant in the United States (116 per 100) and greater than that of automobiles per inhabitant in that country (90 per 100).
In comparative terms, the number of guns in the United States is out of all proportion. The country that follows on the list with the highest rate of gun ownership is Yemen, which has 52.8 guns per hundred inhabitants. And Yemen has been in civil war since 2014.
Of course, weapons are not distributed equally among citizens. The trend in the United States is uneven: fewer and fewer Americans own more and more guns. According to the most reliable surveys, only 3% of the adult population in the United States owns about half of the guns in circulation in that country and 8% of gun owners have ten or more guns in their possession.
The river of steel: trafficked weapons
The little regulation for acquiring weapons in the United States, the enormous demand for them in Mexico and the porosity on the border are the three factors that enable a market that is impossible to contain. They generate a river of steel without pause and without respite.
A study by the University of San Diego and the Igarapé Institute estimated in 2013 that about 253,000 weapons were trafficked to Mexico each year. Or, what is the same, about 693 weapons per day, 28 per hour. In another exercise, the Mexican Foreign Ministry estimated two million weapons trafficked in the last decade. The real figures are impossible to know.
A central source for approaching the issue is data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) based on traceability examinations of weapons found at crime scenes in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America. Consistently, these studies demonstrate that approximately 70% of the weapons found at crime scenes in Mexico were manufactured in the United States before being illegally trafficked to Mexico. In the period 2017-2021, the majority of these weapons were purchased in gun stores in Texas (43%), Arizona (17%) and California (13%).
Networks of all sizes participate in arms trafficking from the United States to Mexico. In some cases, it is the Mexican cartels themselves that manage to maintain their own and constant source of weapons. In other cases, those responsible for illegal trafficking are independent networks that serve as weapons suppliers to several different cartels. A recent ATF publication showed that traffickers who directly or indirectly facilitated the movement of firearms into illegal markets tended to be white (53%), male (84%), and U.S. citizens (95%). It is false that the main perpetrators are foreigners.
In recent years it has become very common a new modus operandi: sending weapon parts by parcel to Mexico to later be assembled there. In 2023, the Prosecutor’s Office for the Western District of Texas accused an individual named Chandler Britain Bradford of trafficking from 2018 to 2022 parts and components of AR-15 rifles from the United States to Mexico. According to the indictment, Bradford sent by parcel or took directly to Monterrey, Nuevo León, Mexico, seventy parts and components that make up an AR-15. His partners in Mexico were in charge of the assembly work. According to the Prosecutor’s indictment, in four years of operation, Bradford received $3.5 million as a result of the operations. In exchange, Bradford’s partners in Mexico would have been able to assemble, in four years, at least 4,800 semi-automatic rifles.
Bradford’s is one of hundreds of investigations that the ATF opens each year into illegal arms trafficking in the United States. A needle in a haystack.
First there were weapons, then diversification and finally violence
Guns in Mexico have not only been used to kill. Their deepest impact is in having functioned as vectors for the expansion of criminal networks in the region. Firearms have allowed criminal circuits limited in size and power to challenge state authority to previously unimaginable dimensions. They have been the factor that enables the growth of small networks to large armies with the capacity to dominate cities. Without firearms, territorial expansion would not have been possible.
Access to firearms allowed the diversification of the criminal market in countries like Mexico. For decades, dozens of groups dedicated themselves to drug trafficking without intervening in other crimes. After the relaxation of laws in the United States in the period 2004-2005 this changed. Easy access to weapons allowed them to build a large enough dispensary that made it easy to enter other businesses. The logic was very simple: If we already have the weapons, why not take advantage of them and use them for other businesses?
Under this premise, the groups ventured into new niches: human trafficking, rent collection, extortion, business robbery, hitmen. Every crime imaginable. They acted like what they are: capitalists looking for opportunities. Entrepreneurs. They besieged entire cities and challenged (or ended up challenging) the poor local police who could do little in the face of the firepower of the weapons coming from the north.
Today, the Mexican State faces a very different criminal problem than it faced fifteen years ago. It’s another bug, another animal. Firearms have empowered criminal organizations and called into question the State’s ability to confront them.
There will be no possible solution for Mexico as long as the river of steel continues to flow. There is no judicial or police reform that can withstand the fury of too many weapons. There will be no desirable demilitarization or democratic normality. As long as the river continues to carry steel and the border remains porous, Mexico will continue to be condemned to its epidemic of violence. There is the problem. There is also the solution.
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