On the Iron River

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.

The demand for North American guns has shot up since 2006, when President Felipe Calderón announced the Mexican ‘war on drugs’. Though often mischaracterised abroad as a government assault on drug cartels, this war is much more complex. Much of the violence involves state killing and the forced disappearance of people unrelated to the drug trade – the Mexican government uses the ‘war on drugs’ label to explain away the high casualties. In fact, as Jusionyte writes, politicians, army officers and police are knee-deep in the cocaine and fentanyl trade themselves and reluctant to police one another’s crimes. More than 100,000 people have been forcibly disappeared in Mexico, and what is mostly a war over territory and profits rather than a serious attempt to dislodge cartels has taken tens of thousands of lives. Jusionyte provides a few of the gun statistics. Lowest estimated number of US firearms smuggled across the Mexican border each year: 200,000. Percentage of firearms recovered at crime scenes in Mexico originally purchased in the US: 70 per cent.

A Lithuanian anthropologist who attended graduate school in the US and somehow became lodged in border life (she is as surprised as anyone else), Jusionyte first noticed the signs of gunrunning when she was walking south into Mexico. A decade ago, she was living in Nogales, volunteering on both sides of the border as a paramedic – she wrote about this in an earlier book, Threshold (2018). In her new book she describes the hours she spent waiting in line to pass into the US, usually on foot, ready to empty her bag for customs. ‘Going to Mexico, on the contrary, was swift,’ she writes. ‘Took only a minute, if that.’

Large signs on the southbound roads warned in all caps: ‘WEAPONS AND AMMUNITION ILLEGAL IN MEXICO.’ And the same message was conveyed on a plaque with crossed-out pistol and ammo attached to an orange Jersey barrier at the DeConcini port of entry I scurried past all the time. But for many months I didn’t give those signs much thought. The realisation that the people I was encountering in Nogales, Sonora, were fleeing threats enforced with guns sold in the United States came gradually.

Jusionyte was reluctant to start research into guns, but the primary accelerant of the cycle of violence and migration seemed just too obvious, and too little remarked on in the US, to ignore. Guns trafficked south were triggering extortion and kidnapping that were making people flee north. The dynamics of gun trafficking and human migration are the same: if you have a country with higher wages on one side of a border and one with lower wages on the other – never mind violence versus relative safety – the disadvantaged will cross the border. If you have legally obtainable, cheap guns on one side of a border and tightly restricted, expensive guns on the other then the guns will cross. Especially when demand skyrockets, as it did with the ‘war on drugs’.

Given how vociferous the US government is about ‘getting tough’ on the border, how desperate both parties are – whatever you think of the ethics of their converging policies – to decrease immigration, it is astonishing how little is done to attempt to stem the flow of guns. When even well-meaning Democrats bleat ‘why can’t they just all stay in Mexico?’ they betray their ignorance of the iron river. Our demand for drugs and our supply of guns have made it impossible or at least extremely undesirable to ‘remain in Mexico’ – the name of the cynical and illegal policy of pushing asylum seekers back across the border to await their cases being heard, a policy begun during the first Trump presidency and continued under Biden. Remain where a gun to your head might be the beginning of a kidnapping for ransom? Migrants are held at safe houses across Mexico, their families extorted in exchange for their release. Remain where a gun to your head is an invitation to sex trafficking or unpaid labour? Not likely.

The question of where all the guns rattling around Mexico come from is rarely examined, but it hasn’t gone unremarked. In Blood Gun Money (2021), the Mexico-based British journalist Ioan Grillo gives a broad overview, from a primer on gun politics in the US to a study of the flow of guns to Mexico, and down to Central America and Colombia. There was plenty in his book that was news to me: for one, I hadn’t realised that gun companies are often close to being unprofitable. ‘Drugs are consumable,’ Grillo writes. You buy them and then you need to buy them again. Guns last and last, so business isn’t great. Colt filed for bankruptcy in 2015, though it was resuscitated a year later. During the Covid pandemic, gun sellers in the US did booming business. But when demand goes soft their most reliable customers are criminal groups. No other legal business profits so much from illegal trading. And the US government has stringent rules that make it hard for its own agencies to track guns involved in crimes either at home or abroad. Grillo visited the Atlanta division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), the US ‘gun police’. The ATF is not legally permitted to keep a searchable digital database of gun sales, thanks to hysteria that ‘the government will come to take our guns,’ so they only have printouts. When a crime is called in and the ATF is asked to trace a gun’s serial number, it can take a week of rifling through the paperwork to trace the gun. If a gun seller sends in information about sales on a thumb drive, the ATF is required to print out all the data, keep the paper records and destroy the drive.

What are called ‘border’ issues in the US look different from the vantage of countries further south. The cocaine and fentanyl trade looks like an inability on the part of the richer country to address its own public health crises. Seen from Mexico, the most important features of the ‘war on drugs’ are North Americans’ insatiable demand and the US’s refusal to do the bare minimum to ensure its many guns stay out of the hands of criminal gangs. Jusionyte spends time with people who handle guns bought in the US. They’re a varied bunch: a teenage girl who was conscripted into the Zetas, one of Mexico’s best-known criminal gangs; a professional baseball player turned gun smuggler; a wealthy urbanite who shoots at his local gun club, where his friends buy smuggled AR-15s through WhatsApp groups for what they call self-protection. She notes the specialised language of the WhatsApp groups offering merchandise:

Bullets were called ‘frijoles’ (beans) or ‘chicharros’ (small mackerel). Guns were known as ‘juguetes’ (toys). A new gun was referred to as ‘vegana’ (vegan) because it ‘hadn’t eaten meat’ … whereas a used gun was called ‘carnivora’ (carnivore). Sellers would sometimes say they got it ‘from Roberto’ when the gun was ‘robado’ (stolen).

When the US has attempted to control or track guns, its efforts have often gone spectacularly wrong. It may not be much remembered abroad, but many Mexicans recall Operation Fast and Furious. In 2009, ATF agents watched young men buy large numbers of pistols and AK-47-style guns in Arizona. Instead of arresting them, they wanted to see where the guns went when they crossed the border, hoping to catch the bigger fish. They waited and waited. Even gun sellers who were secret informants for the ATF grew frustrated with how little the agency seemed to be doing. Law enforcement calls this ‘gun-walking’. As Grillo notes, ‘it’s like saying that gangsters run guns but governments walk guns.’ Operation Fast and Furious ended in disaster, after the agents lost sight of more than two thousand guns. Some of them ended up being used in crimes like the Zetas’ killing of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jaime Zapata in northern Mexico. Another killing, of the US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in 2010, turned Fast and Furious into a scandal when the gun was traced to a straw purchaser under investigation by the ATF. This disastrous operation spurred conspiracy theories on both sides of the border: in the US, that the Obama administration deliberately created the mess as a justification for tightening gun controls, and in Mexico, that the US was destabilising their country on purpose. When the Mexican army raided the home of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, alias El Chapo, in 2016, one of the firearms they seized was a .50 calibre bought by a gun smuggler linked to Fast and Furious.

In 2021, the Mexican government sued several US gunmakers. Smith & Wesson, Barrett and other companies filed a joint motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that they ‘do not owe any legal duty to protect Mexico from gun violence committed by criminals within its own borders’. The absence of a complete paper trail for any of these guns makes it difficult to establish ‘proximate cause’. On 30 September 2022, the judge dismissed the case, writing that ‘while the court has considerable sympathy for the people of Mexico, and none whatsoever for those who traffic guns to Mexican criminal organisations, it is duty-bound to follow the law.’ Jusionyte glosses it differently: ‘US law protected gun manufacturers from lawsuits that sought to hold them accountable as long as people used firearms for their “intended purpose”. Killing was the gun’s intended purpose.’

North Americans are concerned about people moving north, not guns moving south. More than half the US population thinks the country is ‘experiencing an invasion’. While only Republicans have called with a straight face for a military attack on Mexico, both parties strike a ‘tough on immigration’ pose with ever harsher border security measures, from longer walls to surveillance towers to drones. ‘Rather than stopping trafficking,’ Jusionyte writes, ‘these border policing measures have further raised the prices and hence profits of organised crime groups that find new ways around them. And the groups continue to buy weapons from the United States. And so on and on, like an endless loop: guns and money going south and drugs and people going north.’ Increasingly stringent anti-immigration measures do make it harder for migrants to get to the US, but given the conditions they are fleeing, they will keep on coming. And the walls and drones and towers are less of a deterrent than a boon to another illicit business: people smuggling.

Criminal groups​ in Mexico are often called drug cartels, but it’s a dated term. The gangs profit from so much more than drugs. They diversified their businesses long ago, extorting everyone from migrants to avocado farmers. They aren’t so much cartels as fully integrated criminal organisations. Human smuggling is one of their most lucrative businesses. Even a few decades ago, you could cross the US-Mexico border easily on foot. People lived on one side of the Rio Grande and worked on the other side. They still do, but back then there were no checkpoints, no queues starting at dawn. Two things changed. One was the drug smuggling route. In the 1980s, the pathway connecting the Caribbean to Miami became more heavily policed, and the cocaine trade expanded sideways into Mexico in what drug scholars call the ‘balloon effect’. Mexican traffickers have been running illegal substances up to the US since Prohibition – bottles of rum stuffed up trouser legs, hence ‘bootleggers’ – but the cocaine trade was on a totally new scale. Traffickers wanted more guns to protect their merchandise and soaring profits, and they bought them in the US.

The second change was what is euphemistically called ‘border enforcement’. In a later era of righteous anger over mass incarceration, people cast a critical eye on Bill Clinton’s federal crime bill. But a less frequently recalled, or condemned, part of the Democratic Party’s strategy to move to the centre in the 1990s by appearing ‘tough on crime’ was to lock up immigrants as well.* That’s how we got ‘prevention through deterrence’, which involved policing crossings in populated areas so heavily that migrants were forced into the desert. Anyone who didn’t want to die of exposure had to hire what were called guides, polleros or coyotes.

As Jason de León wrote in The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (2015), ‘prevention through deterrence’ enlisted the harsh natural landscape and its predatory animal population to kill migrants, while providing plausible deniability. These were ‘natural’ deaths. But how natural is it when they are foreseeable and preventable? (An obvious analogue would be the EU’s reliance on the dangers of the Mediterranean to keep out unwanted migrants, even at the cost of mass human death.) What de León, also an anthropologist, calls the ‘hybrid collectif’ – you forgive the theorising because it has explanatory power – does the dirty work for the Border Patrol: starving migrants or letting them die of thirst, vultures in the desert making the bodies unrecognisable. In cases where they can be identified, the families ‘lucky’ enough to receive some remains are unable to stage open-casket funerals as is traditional throughout much of Latin America.

Along with the evidence of a government in cahoots with the natural environment to mass murder migrants, the most memorable parts of de León’s earlier book are interviews with people who are determined to undertake the journey anyway. Hanging around migrant shelters in northern Mexico, he meets Memo and Lucho, who are working there while they save money for the trip. The pair are hilariously funny, trading raunchy jokes and poking fun at each other for their previous experience of deportation. De León’s writing is unusual for its combination of deep sympathy with migrants and – in his new book – with their smugglers. He doesn’t leave out the less seemly aspects of their lives in order to make them more appealing to pious liberals.

When working on The Land of Open Graves, de Léon considered accompanying Memo and Lucho on their journey, but rejected the idea of trekking through the desert with a US passport in his back pocket as the kind of seemingly dangerous but actually safe anthropological cosplay that contributes little. (As someone who is also employed by a US university which reimburses travel expenses for research purposes, I was amused by his invocation of what it would be like to submit an expense report for such a trip.) Instead, he followed his subjects around as they prepared themselves for their journey. De Léon previously trained as an archaeologist, and part of his research involved finding and interpreting cast-off goods found in the desert, including camouflage backpacks and black water bottles. Lucho and Memo didn’t have any of these things: they simply hit a normal grocery store for water, instant refried beans, cans of tuna and sardines, limes, tortillas and bread, garlic and fresh jalapeños, beef jerky and one packet of lemon-flavoured Halls cough drops. That was it: $26 spent ‘shopping for a trip through Hades’. Memo and Lucho disappeared into a tunnel on the edge of town. They had crossed so many times they decided to walk north without a smuggler. There was a very real possibility that they would die. They survived, but were deported. Back at the migrant shelter, they tried to scrape together money to make the trip again.

When​ migrants die in the desert, the US government often blames the smugglers. But this doesn’t make sense: smugglers do rip off customers, or victimise them, but once they are all out in the desert together it doesn’t make much business sense to leave people to die. Smugglers have reputations to protect, new customers to find. Many migrants travel with a fair amount of money and try to choose smuggling rings they can trust. There are no Yelp reviews, but many rely on WhatsApp groups for the information they need. When de León was working on his first book, he used to see smugglers hanging around migrant shelters in southern Mexico, offering their services. One day, in Chiapas, he walked out to sit on the railroad tracks with them and introduced himself.

The resulting book, Soldiers and Kings, illuminates another illegal business that underpins migration but is little understood in destination regions like the US or Europe. Even the language is misleading. Smugglers are often called human traffickers, which is not accurate: trafficking is by definition involuntary, and smugglers are usually moving customers who have paid them for the service. Smuggling does cross over into trafficking when those involved hand over migrants to do forced labour for criminal outfits or send them to work in brothels – abuses that are appallingly common along the migrant trail. Smugglers themselves prefer the term guía, or ‘guide’, with its more positive connotations. De León doesn’t get pernickety about terminology, mostly following the language of the smugglers he accompanied to provide portraits of people as they actually talk. There are a lot of putos (‘male whores’) in the dialogue he quotes, and threats like ‘I just have to make a phone call and that foo is fucking dead.’ The anthropologist is also not afraid to show the ridiculous side of his profession. Once he has gained the trust of some smugglers and access to their safe houses, he quotes himself asking unintentionally funny questions like:

Anthropologist: ‘Do you like doing this work even though people want to kill you sometimes?’

Human smuggler named Flaco, or ‘Skinny’: ‘Hell yeah! Cuz every day it’s weed, coke and beer for me, foo. I fucking love coke! I mean I like this job, but it is dangerous. You just gotta have faith in God to protect you.’

This is the only way to get valuable information about how human smuggling actually works, since, like all illicit businesses, it is very difficult to study from the inside. De León got inside, wants us to sympathise with the smugglers who often grew up poor in Central American and Mexican communities with few jobs, but is also honest about what draws the foot soldiers to the smuggling game: the freedom of the open road after constricted childhoods; the party lifestyle; the infusion of thousands of dollars at a time into their bank accounts.

Smuggling is complex, skilled work. It is essentially a confidence game. Migrants go into very significant debt, often selling off parcels of family land to cross into the US or receiving loans from mothers or aunts or cousins who have already made it across. Paying off these debts takes many months of work, earning in US dollars. Undocumented immigrants can’t pay if they’re caught and deported back to Mexico, where there is no way to make that amount of money. In order to justify the investment, the guide must convince his client that he has the know-how and contacts to get them safely through areas controlled by criminal gangs. Reminders of the stakes are everywhere in high-migration areas in Latin America. Immiserated neighbours who were sent back, or neighbours with lost family members. Cemeteries full of graves painted with North American flags, tributes to countrymen who died as migrants there, or worse, along the way – evidence not just of profound grief but of economic disaster for their families. Again, the view from south of the border is different. As Gilberto Escobar wrote on the Guatemalan investigative news site No Ficción, smugglers are often seen not as criminals but as ‘community leaders’. This is especially true of those who speak one of Guatemala’s 22 Maya Indigenous languages and can safely guide non-Spanish speakers through the first part of their journey.

The business model is internationally integrated: paying for the full trip gets you a series of different guides. Smugglers have expertise in particular parts of the route, and together form a chain. Some specialise in moving people from southern Mexico further north; others are paseadores, taking people on foot on the last leg across the desert. The most organised and well-resourced migrants pay a single fee to a top smuggler, who essentially subcontracts different parts of the route to foot soldiers in his employ. Migrants who are duped or dumped by bad actors or ripped off by smugglers who don’t take them all the way often try to piece together the rest of the chain by themselves, trying to go it alone for a while and hiring a subcontractor for the more dangerous bits. This is a risky bet, since they are not counting on the promise and the good reputation of a top smuggler. When crossing parts of Mexico controlled by criminal organisations, it is essential to pay a smuggler who has ties to the correct gang. De León meets smugglers associated with everyone from the Zetas, to Salvadoran street gangs like MS-13 and Barrio 18, to gangs like the Bloods that connect the Bronx to Honduras.

This is the job of the smuggler: when someone puts a gun to the head of a member of the group and says, ‘¿Quién es el bueno?’ – roughly, ‘Who’s in charge?’ – the smuggler steps forward and vouches that they have paid the toll to the criminal organisation, that they should be let through with no further problems or payments. Without this, migrants can suffer horrible abuses. The Zetas, wielding their US-bought guns, are notorious for kidnapping migrants, holding them in safe houses to extort their families, or murdering them. As de León shows, foot soldiers who work as human smugglers tend to die young. They are profiting from desperate people, but are baseline impoverished themselves – despite the cash they receive after a successful delivery of migrants to the next safe house.

Who in their right mind would do this kind of work, braving criminal hold-ups in Mexico and ‘prevention through deterrence’ in a killer US desert – over and over, trip after trip? Young men without other good options. The harder the US tries to make it to enter, the more money there is to be made.