Mexico’s demand to suppress U.S. gun trafficking is unmoored from facts
By Todd Bensman as published February 19, 2025 by The American Mind
AUSTIN, Texas – President Trump’s recent deal with Mexico has Mexico deploying 10,000 troops to the border. But America’s commitments in agreement have gone insufficiently examined.
“For the first time, the U.S. government will work jointly to avoid the entry of guns to Mexico,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced to reporters.
That promise is in response to a years-old narrative that America’s love affair with guns helped create Mexican cartel monsters who poison Americans with fentanyl. This claim has been relentlessly advanced by US Democratic lawmakers and progressive gun-control advocates. Trump’s recent concession to work on the “problem” has added heft to Mexico’s claim that it has nothing to do with its own cartel crisis—as when Mexico recently filed a $10 billion lawsuit against American gun manufacturers for allegedly turning a blind eye to gun smugglers.
“If you want to stop the trafficking of fentanyl to the U.S., if you want to stop the violence that’s leading to a lot of migration across the border, you’re going to need to stop the flow of guns to Mexico because that’s what’s leading to all these problems,” said Jonathan Lowy, an attorney representing the Mexican government in the case.
But this storyline has not aged well with the years. It is so incomplete and devoid of up-to-date context as to qualify as an unproven claim at best, and a flagrant falsehood at worst.
The truth is that Mexico’s drug cartels have, for many years now, equipped themselves with military weaponry stolen or bought from the stores of Mexico’s own corrupted military and similarly from the armories of corrupt officials in Central American and South American nations, which buy large amounts of older, hand-me-down military equipment from foreign nations around the world. That’s the force with which they substantially arm themselves today, after years of arms races to outdo one another.
The equipment recovered after cartel battles, stashed in seized cartel caches, and seen in their profligate online propaganda videos was not—and could not have been—bought from U.S. retail gun stores.
There are 2nd- or 3rd-generation, fully automatic belt-fed .50 caliber machine guns, World War II-era German MG 34 machine guns, rocket-propelled shoulder-fired grenade launchers, 40 mm rifle grenade launchers, and (reputedly) FGM 148 Javelin infrared-guided missile launchers—known as the most sophisticated shoulder-fired missile launcher in the world, with a range of a mile and a half—and Claymore M18A1 land mines. There are retired Israeli-made Galil ACE rifles, manufactured in Colombia as the official weapon for Mexican and Colombian law enforcement. And there are hand grenades made for militaries all over the world.
“That sh*t is not coming from the United States. You can’t get those weapons systems from American gun stores,” said retired Texas Department of Public Safety intelligence Captain Jaeson Jones, a Newsmax border correspondent and longtime student of Mexico’s cartels. “No one will ever talk about this, but those are coming from corruption in the Mexican military from their armories. Blaming the U.S. 24/7/365 isn’t going to cut it anymore today. The cartels are in a new world.”
A Global Arsenal
I know enough about U.S. gun smuggling to Mexico to understand that some of what Mexico and its anti-gun allies in the United States say is true. In 2008, I reported a four-part series for Hearst News about U.S. gunrunning to Mexico, titled “Texas’ Deadliest Export,” which won the National Press Club’s Edwin M. Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence. A cartel hitman once even explained to me the entire process of buying arms and ammo from the United States.
Suppliers in the United States, known as “straw purchasers,” legally buy semi-automatic rifles, handguns, and ammunition from regular retail gun stores in border states. Then they hand them over to criminals who smuggle them south to their syndicates. That does happen quite a lot, still.
But the old narrative no longer reflects the evolution that took place during the intervening 16 years since my series ran. The truth is that nobody, except for probably Mexican officials, really have any idea how many American retail weapons versus military firearms from elsewhere are now in Mexican cartel hands. A 2021 U.S. Government Accountability Office report titled “Firearms Trafficking: U.S. Efforts to Disrupt Gun Smuggling into Mexico Would Benefit from Additional Data and Analysis” explains why.
The part of the report replayed by Mexican and U.S. media lately is that the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) found that 70% of firearms submitted for tracing after recovery in Mexico, from 2014-2018, came from the United States. The same finding comes from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which also works with Mexico to trace and track recovered firearms.
But the part of the GAO report never quoted by media is that neither ICE nor the ATF get any data about thousands of other firearms recovered in Mexico. That’s because Mexico’s federal Attorney General’s office controls the trace requests to them through a database portal connected to US agencies that can determine which U.S. manufacturers made them and which stores sold them, the GAO report says.
That kind of input control means Mexico may choose, for political reasons, only to send the Americans samples they strongly suspect came from U.S. gun stores—and never forward the military-grade weapons it routinely seizes and showcases at news conferences.
As a result of Mexico’s tight control over trace requests, “ATF’s data only shows part of the picture,” the GAO report reveals, because “other Mexican federal agencies and state Attorney Generals’ Offices do not have eTrace accounts, because the Mexican government had restricted eTrace access to the federal Attorney General’s Office.”
Therefore, no reliable evidence undergirds claims that most of the cartel’s firearms come from U.S. gun store retailers.
“Hell, all you have to do is watch them shoot each other with everything under the sun to know they’re not buying any of that in the United States,” said Jones, the Texas lawman-turned-journalist who has witnessed firefights in the Mexican town across the Rio Grande from Roma, Texas several times.
So where might the cartels be getting the .50 caliber machine guns they used in January 2023, for instance, to defeat the Mexican army in pitched battle in the northern city of Culiacan after the arrest of imprisoned drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman’s son? Those military-level engagements forced the detainee’s release after wounding 17 police officers, 35 military personnel, and bringing down two Mexican combat helicopters.
It looks like Central American nations and Mexico itself are the likeliest culprits, unless someone wants to count three dozen nations across the globe that could legitimately sell or give them old and new war-fighting hardware.
A 2022 GAO study of similarly problematic U.S. trace data in four Central American countries to Mexico’s south – Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras –strongly suggests a thriving black market for weapons probably pilfered from old stockpiles.
Unlike Mexico, those four governments do send trace requests for recovered military-grade weapons as well as for retail-sold ones from U.S. gun stores. But in the 2022 GAO report, 60% of all the recovered and submitted weapons from 2015 through 2019 down there came from 39 other countries, along with the United States.
Those four governments have been buying second-hand weapons on the global market since the wars of the 1980s straight through time to more recent years and storing them in armories that news reports say are vulnerable to pilfering.
The GAO report said the weapons came from Austria, Argentina, Brazil, China, and Turkey, the former Czechoslovakia (which split into two countries in 1992) and the former Soviet Union (which dissolved in 1989).
All of which “suggests the firearms are decades old,” concluded the GAO report, which goes on to recommend aggressive support for helping those countries harden up armory security and destroy more of the old stockpiles. “Large quantities of firearms from prior conflicts remain in the region.”
While the 2022 GAO report, requested by U.S. Democratic Party lawmakers, almost studiously avoids details on what kinds of weapons were traced to the 40 countries, one note disclosed that 450 traced between 2015-2019 were “machine guns” and that another 33 fit into a mysterious category called “other.”
All this, together with some media reporting, tells us that plenty of older military-grade weaponry is floating around the black market throughout Central America, forming a major source of exactly the kind of ordnance the Mexican cartels so proudly brandish—and use in combat.
No Excuse
Scattered independent media reports fill in blanks. A 2011 Insight Crime report published WikiLeaks diplomatic cables saying that Guatemala’s military stockpiles were sold to the Zetas cartel and one Defense Intelligence Agency report entitled “Honduras: Military Weapons Fuel Black Arms Market,” which noted that serial numbers of light anti-tank weapons recovered in Juarez, Mexico traced back to stockpiles in Honduras. M433 grenades from Mexican cartels also traced back to the Honduran army.
But those Central American nations are hardly the only source for these weapons anymore. Mexican cartels also are getting their hands on Mexican military weapons bought from countries, stored in armories but then sold into the black market by corrupt military personnel.
Mexican officials and legacy media outlets will bend over backwards to avoid discussing any of this. But plenty of independent media outlets do report on it, especially after hackers stole and released massive volumes of Mexican government email data in 2022.
An October 2022 Vice News report, titled “Leaked Emails Show Mexico’s Military Sold Grenades to the Cartels,” showcased years of high-ranking Mexican military officers negotiating the sale of ammunition, automatic weapons, bulletproof vests, and night-vision binoculars. Also in 2022, the Mexican Navy opened an investigation into a massive theft of military equipment, following the seizure of a “massive amount of high powered weapons and tactical equipment from the Sinaloa cartel,” including more than two million rounds of munitions, 19 machine guns and other combat gear.
None of this activity is exactly new. In 2011, a Mexican officer assigned to guard President Felipe Calderon got caught supplying military-grade weapons of U.S. origin to Mexican drug cartels. This has been going on for years now.
The bottom line here is that no one should ever read Trump’s agreement to address U.S. gun smuggling as some sort of acknowledgement of Mexico’s baseless narrative that American gun stores created the cartel monster killing Americans with fentanyl.
The whole concoction is little more than a deflection from the true blame that Mexico itself deserves.
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