by Iain Overton
‘NO MORE WEAPONS’ read the tall metal-lettered sign that stood over the Bridge of the Americas. The road beside it led two ways. One took you deep into the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez, the other lifted you over the Rio Brava and away into the US city of El Paso. The message was not for the Mexicans heading north, it was for the Americans whose guns were trafficked here, deep down Mexico way.
The line of cars was heavy, as there was no toll here, unlike on other bridges, and it caused the cars waiting to cross passport control into the US to trail far back into the haze. Mexican men in blackened smocks cleaned car windows in silence. The Franklin mountains stretched into the American distance, framing a listless Stars and Stripes flag that was pushed by a stubborn desert wind from the south. To the side, two chanate birds, the Quiscalus mexicanus, sparkled in velvet blue and attacked each other viciously.
The sign’s off-silver letters were made from crushed firearms seized by the Mexican authorities. When the billboard was unveiled in February 2012, the then Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, asked the ‘dear people of the United States’ to help end the ‘terrible violence’ in Mexico. There had been 120,000 homicides in Mexico between 2007 and 2012, and most had been with guns.46 And many of these had been US guns.
‘The best way to do this,’ Calderón said, his voice lifting in the wind, ‘is to stop the flow of automatic weapons.’47
You can see why he made the plea. Mexico has virtually no firearms manufacturing industry, they have very restrictive gun laws, and there is just one gun shop in the entire country.48 Yet the numbers of US guns that end up in Mexico is breathtaking – about 253,000 are estimated to be smuggled in annually.49 It’s not hard to see where they come from. On the other side of the 1,951-mile border lie 6,700 licensed US gun shops.50 And there’s good money in this, too – one study found that 47 per cent of US firearms shops were dependent to some degree on Mexican demand.51
The outcome of this was summed up by a US Senate report that concluded about 70 per cent of guns in the hands of Mexican drug cartels came from the US.52 The point was reinforced by some cartel leaders boasting that they buy all their guns from there.53 Clearly firearms have increasingly become the drug lords’ weapon of choice. In the 1990s guns were reportedly used in 20 per cent of all Mexican homicides; today they are implicated in over half of all murders there.54 North of the US border, too, way up in Canada, the same applies: 50 per cent of the guns used in crime there were smuggled into the country.55
In Mexico, there is certainly enough evidence to prove cause and effect between North American gun sales and Mexican gun violence. When an American federal ban on semi-automatic weapons expired in 2004, Mexican gun deaths increased by 35 per cent in the Mexican counties adjacent to Arizona, New Mexico and Texas – all of which had lifted the ban. But the homicide rate stayed about the same in the Mexican counties south of California, where a state ban on semi-automatic weapons had remained in place.56
During the US federal assault weapons ban the number of arms crossing south every year was about 88,000; after the ending of the ban this amount had increased by 187 per cent. It has been estimated the lifting of firearm sale restrictions north of the border resulted in at least 2,684 additional homicides in Mexico.57
It’s not just Mexico where American’s lax gun laws have had an impact. The US government found that 76 per cent of firearms they traced in Costa Rica in 2013 were either manufactured in or imported into the US. It was 61 per cent in Belize.58 And in Jamaica, American guns are said to be dropping into Kingston like mangoes off a tree.59
I looked the length of the spreading line of worn-down cars filing patiently into the US. The other road, the one coming down from the north, was empty – the officials here just waved the cars through into Mexico. The lack of checks on southbound traffic, combined with constant demand for firearms from drug cartels, must have created a perfect storm for smugglers. It begged the question: how did these guns get into smugglers’ hands in the first place?
Court records give us a glimpse of one of the ways it works. In 2008, the American Range & Gun shop in Pembroke Park, Florida, made a hefty sale to a shadowy buyer. A few days before, the purchaser had told the dealer, Victor Needleman, that he didn’t think he could pass a gun background check. The would-be buyer said he had been ‘in some trouble’ when he was younger. No problem, said Needleman, just buy it in another person’s name – an illegal process called a ‘straw purchase’.
The buyer, in fact, had never been in that kind of trouble – rather he was an informant working with the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). He made it clear to Needleman that he wanted to send the guns to Central America.60 Needleman said that wasn’t a problem either – he had already sold guns into Guatemala. He was not bragging: several of his sales were later traced to shootouts between gangs in which a number of people were killed. Needleman even boasted about a customer who had bought twenty-five AK47s at a time.61
Soon afterwards, the informant returned with a ‘friend’ and put down the $2,120 deposit for fourteen semi-automatic pistols. His friend illegally filled out the paperwork. When they returned to pick up the guns, they ordered twenty more Glocks. Then Needleman was arrested. It was an open-and-shut case. Needleman was arrested and sent down for nearly six years.62
Legitimate gun dealers doing crooked deals like this, though, are just a small part of the problem. The issue is much more widespread. In 2012 an investigation found hundreds of civilian gun owners selling tens of thousands of firearms every year on the internet without any background checks.63 Private sellers, meanwhile, make ‘occasional sales’ or sell from a ‘personal collection’ in gun shows all the time. The distinction might seem subjective, but the effect is quite significant. In the US federally licensed dealers are required to perform checks at gun shows, private sellers are not. And those concerned about this have estimated that as many as 40 per cent of gun transactions are conducted without such checks.64 A US government report concluded that gun shows were the second-leading source of guns trafficked into the illegal market.65
Certainly there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that these loopholes should be of concern to the US public. There was Ali Boumelhem, a member of Hezbollah, who was imprisoned for trying to smuggle US guns back to Lebanon. He had been buying weapons at gun shows in Michigan.66 Or Conor Claxton of the IRA, who had gone to South Florida gun shows to buy guns to smuggle back into Northern Ireland.67 Even an Al Qaeda spokesman has remarked on the gun show loophole, encouraging American jihadists to ‘go down to a gun show at the local convention center and come away with a fully automatic assault rifle, without a background check, and most likely without having to show an identification card. So what are you waiting for?’68
The concern of Americans on the Mexican border, though, was not about what was going south. Rather they were upset at what was heading north. I had spent some time with the Minutemen Project in south-eastern Arizona – a group of activists set up in 2005 with a mission to monitor the flow of illegal immigrants across the border. One of them had invited me on a flight low across the border, and as we skimmed across the arid shrub, you could almost feel their paranoia. These men, with names like Chuck and Jim, saw the wave of ‘wetbacks’ – economic migrants from Mexico and beyond – as genuine threats to their safety and liberty. But the occasional ragged figures of illegal migrants that we saw from the air just looked pitiful and furtive, not armed and dangerous.
The Minutemen, and others like them, had intractable and hardline views. In one video posted on YouTube, someone called Commander Chris Davis told militia members ‘to go armed’. ‘It is time that we start taking back our national sovereignty . . . How? You see an illegal. You point your gun right dead at him, right between the eyes, and say, “Get back across the border or you will be shot.”’69
None of them saw the irony in all of this: that being killed by a US firearm south of the border was far more likely than being shot
by an idiot with a rifle north of it. None made the connection that what the Latinos were fleeing from – with over 52,000 unaccompanied Mexican and Central American children seeking to cross this border between October 2013 and June 2014 alone – was the very gun violence that US guns had helped facilitate.70 As Alec MacGillis wrote in the New Republic: ‘The surge of migrants coming to the US from Central America is being fueled in part by the movement of guns heading in the other direction, from US dealerships doing brisk business with the help of porous guns laws and a powerful gun lobby.’71
And it was to this new group – the gun lobby – that I wanted to turn next. These were men who oiled the cogs of commerce for small arms, who spoke both for (and sometimes against) the gun’s place in the world.
14. THE LOBBYISTS
Strange animals in Maputo, Mozambique meeting an anti-gun campaigner and ex-child soldier – sickness in New York as the Arms Trade Treaty comes into force – an American lobbyist and a power breakfast – the National Rifle Association’s rhetoric examined – how the pro-gun lobby hijacked the horror of Sandy Hook, Massachusetts – meeting zombies in Orange County, New York State – an insight into the American gun psyche at the London School of Economics
It was 25 June 2014 and a national holiday. The streets of Maputo, Mozambique’s seaside capital, for the most part lay empty. The solid fin-de-siècle buildings were silent behind their elaborate wooden doors, save for the occasional sound of plates being put down for an early lunch. Men played checkers outside one of the humidity-streaked homes, their game caught in the shade of spreading trees.
There was an air of peace so different from this day in 1975, when the Portuguese had pulled out. Realising that colonialism had had its time, they left, destroying cars and pouring concrete down wells, and in so doing they planted the seeds of anarchy and violence that were to blossom into a bloody civil war less than a decade later.
Fearing the communist ideals that captured the imaginations of Mozambique’s newly liberated leaders, Rhodesia and South Africa set out to destabilise their neighbour. They manufactured a guerilla movement, the Renamo, and packed it with mercenaries and disaffected Mozambicans. But the white South Africans and Rhodesians had no wish to govern. Their intent was destruction. Roads were blown to bits, landmines scattered in their millions, and the country was flooded with guns.1 Atrocities were committed on a horrific scale: children and adults were tortured and murdered, populations were starved, and over a million people were killed.2
I walked past the low-level villas with their balconies and pistachio-green and lime-yellow walls and, passing three unarmed security guards asleep in the languid light, entered a courtyard framed by purple frangipani. Artists were painting to the low sound of soft rock. It was an arts centre, a cooperative, and I had come here to see a certain type of response to gun violence. What I sought was out the back: a room filled with fantastical creatures. One was a cruel, hunched insect, another a pointed, furious dog. But these were no ordinary animals – their bodies were made from the wooden stocks of rifles, their legs the stripped-down parts of an AK47. One had a long tail made from the coiled spring of a semi-automatic rifle. Another had holes pierced into a trigger guard, forming beady eyes.
They were the work of Makulo, a forty-seven-year-old Maputan. It was part of a charity-funded project where old arms left over from the civil war had been collected, and in return the charity had given the gun owners farmyard picks and hoes. ‘Guns for ploughshares’ they called it. And the artists here had turned the tortured gunmetal into hallucinatory sculptures. Shovels and sculptures – a form of gun control you could hold.
Makulo wore a paint-stained overall, a heavy woollen cap, despite the heat, and chains of shells around his neck. ‘I like to make art,’ he said, stumbling on the English words. ‘It relaxes my mind. It makes me forget everything: war, the fighting.’ His vision was the liberal lobbyist’s dream: art used to defeat violence. ‘If you destroy the gun to create something of beauty, it is one way to help stop violence.’
Others had done this, too. Mexican artists had turned guns into musical instruments,3 making shovels with which to plant trees.4 In New York, guns were made into bangles and cufflinks.5 AK47s were turned into watches for the liberal elite, costing $195,000.6 But, as I admired the sculptures, the peace here was coming undone. In central Mozambique Renamo troops had recently began killing, and the spectre of war was rising fast again.7
The next day I met Albino Forquilha. He was, like so many Mozambicans, smartly dressed. A cream-suited, kind-eyed forty-five-year-old, he was, as I was, here as part of a conference promoting the end of landmines. He was a lobbyist for their clearance in Mozambique, but landmines were just part of what he did. His main focus was guns, and he had spent his life working on the destruction of those left over from the war.
We sat down at a creaking table in a restaurant beside the conference hall. In the next room, diplomats from around the world, their country’s nameplate before them, were listening on translator’s headphones, charting the battle to rid the world of landmines and cluster munitions. Nobody here but us was talking about guns, or about what was unfolding in the north. For Albino, though, guns were what he knew. He had once been a child soldier, forced to join a rebel group when just twelve years old. He had had to kill.
‘They were kids who had tried to escape. The commander called us all around and said that every one of them had to die,’ he said, his voice soft. So he had shot seven of them in the head.
He had a low opinion of guns. ‘They are just an indication that I am not correct and they help me force my point,’ he said. Twenty years before, he had dedicated his life to clearing his country of them. A lobbyist seeking a county without guns, his work had been extensive – over the years his charity had collected almost a million of them. For a time he had been funded by the Japanese, Germans, Americans, Norwegians, Swiss and Swedes – and they had destroyed a mountain of steel muzzles and wooden stocks.
‘Most of the guns were Russian. We had South African and American guns, but the most were the Russians.’ So many that the Mozambicans even put the AK47 on their flag. ‘We once arranged a huge explosion to destroy some of them – over 2,000 weapons in one go.’
His work was far from done. ‘The numbers of weapons are still estimated at more than a million – there are still many weapons in Mozambique that need to be collected.’ But he struggles to complete his life’s work. Few countries are supporting him any more.
‘Now we don’t have the funding to restart the project. This is the problem,’ he said. ‘The money that is given to combat landmines is huge, much more than to destroy small arms.’
He was right. In 2012, just over 3,600 people were killed or injured by landmines and explosive remnants of war around the world – the lowest number recorded since the tracking of landmine victims began.8 This was, in part, because $681 million was given in support of mine action that year.9 This was why, in Maputo, the mood was buoyant. Financially supported political will was working – money had been found to tackle the scourge of landmines.
Nothing like it existed in the international attempt to stop small-arms deaths. I once applied to a European government for a grant to do a global count of mass shootings. It was a modest proposal, but my application was rejected. Of course, there are countries funding ways to address the hurt that guns bring, but far, far less money is spent on addressing the pain and suffering they cause than is made selling them.
Despite this, there is still a small group of people – lobbyists against violence – who have dedicated their lives to challenging the guns’ ubiquity. Underfunded and all too aware of the enormity of their task, they labour on, seeking to get gun reform on the agenda. But for them it was often a Sisyphean task. The complexities of what guns can be – a hunter’s tool, a policeman’s power, a soldier’s life – and the vastly differing opinions that exist surrounding them, make them the hardest of all weapons to regulate. Nuclear weapons – sure,
you can see why people can envisage a world without them. A world without guns? That’s a world without people.
Later, outside the Centro Cultural Franco-Moçambicano, a brightly coloured building in blues and oranges and vibrant pink, I saw another statue. This one was built from old European gunmetal collected by Albino’s group. The sculpture was caught in the moment of death – shot in the chest. In the gathering dusk, it cast an ugly, shadowed shape. An obscene piston of an erect penis stood between his legs: hyper-masculinity in death.
The Institute was playing an outdoor film. I peered through the century-old iron railings: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A clipped English voice crackled over the warm twilight air – Captain Nemo.
‘To be of benefit,’ he said, like a warning, ‘goodness must be constant, forever building. It must have strength!’
It sounded hopeless.
I had no strength. The sight of the damp, peeling paint in the upper corners of the room and the slow drip of the tap did not help. Nausea flooded over me, and the ache spreading across my bones felt like a bad blessing. On the twelfth floor of a slowly decaying hotel on 1st Avenue, my hotel was close enough to the United Nation’s building to see it from the windows. But I lay in a foetal position in the dimly lit room and wrapped myself in sweat-soaked sheets, unable even to open the curtains. Malaria or flu, I had no idea what I had, but it sapped me of all will.
Three hundred metres away history was being made, and I did not care.
It was late March 2013, and the UN General Assembly was on the verge of agreeing a new accord: the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). Ever since it was formed, the UN has always been trying to reduce the impact of weapons around the world. Its first resolution, the shock of Hiroshima still clinging to the conscience of the world like an atomic shroud, was about disarmament. Now, teams of delegates and officials, charity workers and lobbyists were engaged in furious last-minute pleas and deals. The wording of the Arms Treaty was crucial, and they had limited time to agree upon them.
