Mexican Drugs for U.S. Guns: A Short History
I have just finished reading Ioan Grillo’s superb new book, Blood Gun Money: How America Arms Gangs and Cartels. It is a worthy follow up to the brilliant El Narco and Gangster Warlords. With the same mix of on-the-ground reportage and thoughtful explanation, this time Grillo turns his attention to the world of gun smuggling. He follows the guns from the factories of the former Soviet Empire to the gun shops and gun shows of Texas, to the projects of Baltimore and the streets of Ciudad Juárez. In doing so, he expertly shows the way in which the power of the NRA and the consequent hodge podge of U.S. laws have opened the doors to the mass arming of criminal groups throughout the Americas. This in turn, has made the continent the most violent on earth. It currently contains 47 of the 50 cities with the highest homicide rates.
Ioan’s book - like all the best works of longform journalism - is putting in simple, readable and comprehensible terms an idea which has been floating around academia for the last decade or so. The drugs wars of the Americas are not so much about drugs or even gangs but about guns. In 2004, President George W. Bush ended the Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act. The act had prevented the sale of semiautomatic assault weapons to civilians. Lifting the ban generated a global boom in gun manufacture and gun sales. Many were sold to U.S. citizens. But many were also smuggled south to arm Mexico’s cartels.
The remarkable upsurge in gun violence is clearly related to these recent changes. But the exchange of U.S. guns for Mexican drugs is nothing new. And there are generations of borderlands arms dealers who have made family fortunes on shipping guns south. George Díaz in his rather excellent Border Contraband lays out one of the most prominent networks based in Laredo. Edward A Beckelhymer, owner of the Buffalo Finance Company, sold weapons and ammo to Mexican purchasers illegally since the late 1940s. Apparently he syphoned off his own supplies of gunpowder and sold them for a better price in Mexico. Edward A Beckelhymer died in 1957 a respected businessman. (Arms dealing, it seems, has none of the social stigma of drug trafficking).
But his son, Edward A Beckelhymer Jr. continued the trade. In November 1963 police raided a warehouse in east Laredo. They found 154,000 rounds, 100 boxes of 30 caliber ammunition, 486 packages of .38 bullets, and various cars and trucks with false compartments. They traced the warehouse to to Beckelhymer Jr’s store manager but couldn’t prove any further connection.
However, nine years later, law enforcement were more fortunate. They managed to make charges of illegal gun sales stick. And Beckelhymer Jr was accused of selling guns to Mexicans and then filling out false forms.
The 1970s, like the mid-2000s were a high point for border arms smuggling. Mexican gun laws had tightened up. Left wing guerrillas wanted weapons; so did right wing paramilitaries and underfunded police forces; and so did drug traffickers. And this is where the exchange of drugs for guns became more common place…
In July 1974 the DFS compiled a report on the drugs-for-guns trade. It was based on over a year and a half of research and started by baldly claiming that “US traffickers had found… [excellent] results handing over arms and munitions in exchange for drugs”. The trade occurred all over the country but there were some particular hot zones.
In Baja California, guns were brought in to the port of Ensenada and often stored in the farms and warehouses to the east of Mexicali. Here they were often exchanged for narcotics, which were then flown over the border.
Another big drugs-for-guns center was the Sonora border town of San Luis Río Colorado. Here Sinaloa drug trafficker, Pedro Avilés Perez, had set up a narcotics wholesaling center. US buyers came in, often with stolen U.S. guns and swapped them for heroin and marijuana. The guns were then taken either by railway to Caborca and then Hermosillo or over backroads from Agua Prieta to Turicachi and on to Ciudad Obregón. Here DFS agents feared that they were sold to Sonora’s own small student guerrilla insurgency.
Three years later, the United States agency, the ATF, did a similar investigation. It examined 36 weapons dealers from Texas. In a seven month period they sold a total of 9.2 million rounds of ammunition of which 8.1 million were sold to people from Mexico. Furthermore according to Tucson cops, thieves stole around 3000 guns per year in the city. Most, they thought were sold by drug dealers to Mexican drug traffickers.
No doubt, then, the drugs-for-guns business has a long history. It has been going on for at least half a century. But what has changed is the meaning of the trade, or at least the way it is portrayed on both sides of the border. In the 1970s the DEA and other US drug hawks were keen on highlighting the drugs-for-guns business. They thought that by doing so they might force the Mexican authorities to take the drug business seriously. Drugs weren’t simply a financial boon for highland peasants, they were arming guerrillas, radicals and communists. In fact, in 1975 the DEA even went so far as to set up the flamboyant drug dealer, Alberto Sicilia Falcón, as a James Bond-style baddie trying to exchange coke for a U.S. made (and as far as I can make out completely imaginary) Morgan“super-gun”.
Nowadays the tables have turned. The Mexican authorities under Andrés Manuel López Obrador are keen to focus on gun-running as one of the key causes of Mexico’s escalating murder rates. And it is the Mexican authorities who are trying use the drugs-for-guns business to put pressure on the U.S. authorities to do something.