Midday in a middle-class area,
and Mexico’s federal police fight seven gunmen from a drug cartel.
Sixty people die here every week
in a war that makes Baghdad and Kabul seem tame.
Over 34,000 people were murdered in Mexico in 2020.
The vast majority were murdered using guns.
In Mexico, drug cartels have come to resemble paramilitary organizations,
armed with military-grade equipment and able to overpower army units
and take over entire cities when they need to.
But where do these guns come from?
How are the cartels able to amass this sort of firepower?
The answer lies north of the border.
This is where the flood of drugs washes north
and an arsenal of guns that are bought in the US are smuggled south.
The Americans need to really understand
that any policies that are implemented in the United States
impact our country.
In this episode, we’re looking at how gun laws in the United States
allow criminals to supply the weapons
which are killing tens of thousands of people in Mexico every year.
Every war needs weapons,
and these are the weapons being used to fight the war on drugs.
[The War on Drugs Show]
[American Guns, Mexican Blood]
This is a .50 caliber sniper rifle.
It’s a powerful weapon that the CJNG loves to show off.
.50 caliber bullets are huge.
They can kill from over a mile away and even take down helicopters.
For a country so riddled with violence,
Mexico itself actually has fairly restrictive gun laws.
In fact, there’s only one legal gun store in the entire country,
which is run by the government.
But those laws aren’t much protection
when the world’s most heavily armed society
is just north of the Rio Grande.
The US has over 393 million firearms in civilian hands,
more than the next 25 countries combined.
And millions more are churned out every year
by the American arms industry.
And it’s those guns that are flowing into Mexico.
This is a .30 caliber Browning,
which shoots super fast and can shoot through armored cars.
And then they have this anti-aircraft, .50 cal.
These are all related to different crimes,
mainly homicide.
These look like they’re from America,
America, America, America.
All the guns are from America.
And they’ve tested them out?
Yes, all of them.
Just point it to the ground, please.
Oh, sorry.
So the smuggling from Mexico to the United States
is a two-way street.
You see drugs being taken from Mexico to the United States.
You see money and guns coming south.
Sometimes it could be in the very same trap cars
that are used to take drugs up north and used to take guns down south.
And traffickers are business people.
The main thing is to increase profits,
so why go somewhere with an empty compartment
when you can put products in it and make money out of it?
Between 2007 and 2018, over 150,000 guns
were definitively traced from Mexican crime scenes to the US,
and those are just the ones we know about.
Most murders in Mexico go unsolved and most guns go untraced.
This constant flow of guns from the US to Mexico
has become known as the “Iron River,”
and its source is in the $30 billion a year American arms industry
and the laws that support it.
The scale of trafficking of firearms from the United States to Mexico
is undeniable.
What’s really made it resemble an armed conflict
is the use of rifles, AK-47s, and AR-15s.
They buy those semi-automatic in the United States
and convert them to fully automatic.
So you’ll see these scenes where there’s been 500 bullets sprayed,
and that won’t only kill the targets,
but it might kill the woman driving in the car behind,
the guy selling tacos on the side of the street.
This is a clear case of massive firearms trafficking
to a very, very violent conflict in Mexico.
There are almost 65,000 gun dealerships in the US,
which is more than supermarkets, McDonalds, and Starbucks combined.
And these are disproportionately centered
in states on the Mexican border,
like Texas, Arizona, and California.
Texas alone had over 10,000.
Cartels will often recruit US citizens with a clean record
to buy guns for them,
a type of fraud called straw buying.
When you go and buy a gun in the United States,
you have to fill out a Form 4473.
And you have to answer the fact you’re not using drugs,
you’re not a convicted felon.
So the idea is that if you’re a criminal,
you can’t legally go and buy guns.
But I could pay you some money to go into a shop,
and you lie on the forms, saying the gun is for you,
but really you’re buying it for a drug cartel or for gangsters,
for gun traffickers.
As unbelievable as it may sound,
America currently has no federal law against gun trafficking.
Straw buyers are rarely prosecuted for lying on a 4473 form.
And even when they are,
the sentences are usually relatively light,
certainly in contrast to, say, drug dealing.
So people regularly get more prison time
for selling weed or coke
than for supplying weapons to drug cartels.
And that’s before we even get to gun shows and private sales,
where buyers aren’t required to have a background check,
making transactions such as this perfectly legal.
How much would you let these go for?
I would take, for that one right there, I’d take $250 out the door.
-Can I get that one?
You guys do background checks or anything like that?
No, you legal to buy a gun though?
Yeah, I got cash...
-You’re legal though?
$250? I’ll count it out for you.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you, buddy. I hope you enjoy it.
So you have this private sale loophole
in which supposed gun collectors, hobbyists
don’t have to ask for background checks
or any ID whatsoever.
These private sales can be in gun shows
or it can be on online sales—
there’s a whole bunch of websites where guns are bought and sold—
and this gives massive opportunity for cartels to get hold of weapons.
You can really just go online and find so many listings
of private sellers.
This is a never-ending list.
This guy right here really has a full package
of everything you need for an AR-15.
It’s fairly cheap also for what he’s selling. $1,400 is really not bad.
This guy right here has a Ruger for sale.
He’s asking for $350.
You could probably even get that for a little bit cheaper.
S’up, man, you alright?
How you doing?
-Alright, just been in traffic, you know?
I hear you, man.
Do you have to make sure when you’re selling to these people
that you’re giving background checks and all that?
Legally? In the State of Georgia, no.
In the State of Georgia, you really don’t have to check anything.
Thanks, man, appreciate it.
It’s these guns that are being smuggled to Mexico
for the cartels to fight their drug wars.
And it’s a bleak irony of American politics
that many of the same voices that are hardest on drug enforcement
and immigration
are those that insist on keeping US gun laws
the weakest in the developed world.
From my cold, dead hands.
The left has their rigid, radical anti-gun agenda,
and they have been wanting to disarm
millions of law abiding American citizens.
You think that you now have the right
to strip me of my God-given right to self-defense?
They think they can tell you you can't defend yourself
because something did something mean on a school.
Hitler took the guns. Stalin took the guns.
Mao took the guns. Fidel Castro took the guns.
-How many-- -Hugo Chavez took the guns.
And I'm here to tell you,
1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms.
The majority of gun owners likely support sensible rules on firearms
and things like universal background checks.
But you have a very vocal
and very powerful, influential minority.
The National Rifle Association has really been a case study
in having influence in Washington
that was so effective at grading politicians
and saying, “If you’re weak on guns from our point of view,
then we’re going to hurt you electorally.”
This political fear of the gun lobby doesn’t just make guns easier to buy;
it also makes them harder to trace.
The federal agency that’s meant to stop gun trafficking, the ATF,
has been consistently and intentionally weakened
by gun rights legislation.
In 2019, the FBI received a budget of $8.9 billion.
The DEA received $3.1 billion.
The ATF got just $1.3 billion.
And, as crazy as it sounds, in 2021, the ATF still uses paper records.
Currently, there’s more than 10,000 boxes in process here.
Once we cross the 10,000 box mark,
GSA, who owns the building, says the floor will collapse,
so we actually have seven shipping containers
in a parking lot in the back filled with records.
Ten, 20, 30, 40, 50...
60,000 pages have to be reviewed until you find the right gun.
I mean, I know it looks a little bit primitive,
but that’s how it works.
The more you get into the kind of mosaic of rules
around guns in America,
the more you find these kind of crazy things.
If you see a car that’s in a hit and run,
you get the number plates, you can simply phone up,
and you can find out exactly who the car belongs to.
If you find a smoking gun at a crime scene
and you phone up the ATF and say, “Give me a trace,”
and they say, “Well, we can’t do that.
It’s illegal for us to do a digiital trace on this.”
The ATF is obviously aware of this cross-border smuggling,
but all these legal restrictions,
combined with the sheer economic logic of the war on drugs,
makes preventing it almost impossible.
And it was these competing pressures
which led to probably the biggest scandal in the agency’s history:
Operation Fast and Furious.
There are shocking charges emerging tonight
that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms
permitted, encouraged, in fact,
the trafficking of thousands of assault rifles into Mexico.
This morning, the highly criticized ATF gunwalking operation
known as Fast and Furious is being linked to another murder.
The Arizona office of the ATF launched an operation
to monitor a group suspected of working as straw buyers,
supplying guns to Mexican narcos.
Because several of the suspects belonged to a car club,
they named the operation Fast and Furious.
But instead of busting the ring immediately,
the ATF agents decided to watch them,
hoping to follow the guns
and arrest people higher up the chain.
In all, the ATF watched as the group amassed over 2,000 guns
with the idea that they would follow the weapons into Mexico
and use them to track down drug lords.
He’s out again.
Carrying another, appears to be five boxes.
Hard case pelican that would hold a pistol.
The only problem was that as soon as the guns got to Mexico,
most of them immediately and somewhat predictably disappeared.
And then one was used to murder a US Border Patrol agent.
On the night of December 14th, 2010,
a group of US Border Patrol agents was ambushed by drug traffickers
in the Arizona desert.
Agent Brian Terry was shot with an AK-47-style assault rifle
and died of his wounds.
And that gun was eventually traced back
as one of the missing weapons from Operation Fast and Furious.
Author of the new book just out today,
Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest Scandal
and Its Shameless Cover-Up.
Their political agenda behind this entire thing
was to blame American gun shops for cartel violence in America
in order to push an anti- Second Amendment more regulation.
The right-wing press used the scandal that erupted around Terry’s death
to further attack and weaken the ATF—
and by extension, the Obama administration—
conveniently forgetting that almost identical operations
had also been carried out under President George W. Bush.
Fast and Furious was a terrible, botched operation.
One of the tragedies is, since then,
the issue of gun trafficking to Mexico was off the agenda.
And over the last decade, we’ve seen maybe 2 million guns go to Mexico.
We’ve seen 300,000 murders in Mexico.
But it’s still, you know, nothing’s really being done about it.
Unfortunately, the long-term effects of the Fast and Furious scandal
were probably just to make the ATF even less likely to go anywhere near
investigations into cartel smuggling.
Meanwhile, the drug war in Mexico has become ever more intense.
The murder rate continues to climb,
and the firepower of the cartels gets ever more powerful.
Between 2010 and 2018,
Mexican police seized 554 .50 caliber rifles.
All but one was traced back to the US.
The police caught these guys
trying to smuggle in 268,000 rounds of ammunition
in a truck with Oklahoma plates.
It was driven by a guy from Dallas.
Over a quarter of a million rounds of ammunition.
This is the kind of firepower that they have.
These are American bullets, fired from American guns,
killing Mexican people
who are fighting over the trade routes
to supply America with drugs.
The old formula was the drugs flow north,
and the cash flows south.
But along with that flow of money comes the Iron River of guns.
It’s the war on drugs that makes those guns necessary.
And as long as the war on drugs continues,
those guns are going to keep on killing.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.