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How America Arms Gangs and Cartels
by Ioan Grillo
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The prosecutor cut in: "Can you just be clear: All these have been made safe, correct?"
"Yes," Williams replied.
The ATF's next witness, Max Kingery, went further and picked up a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, an RPG-7. El Chapo's defense lawyer William Purpura objected, saying, "It's really big. I'm looking at it."
Judge Brian Cogan overruled but said that Kingery had to be quick. "This is not a weapons show," he said. "This is a trial, okay."
There was another shudder from the jury. El Chapo's wife had brought their young twin daughters to court that day, and at the sight of the rocket launcher, she hustled them out of the courtroom.
In the coverage of the trial, the guns were a footnote, a colorful prop to support the main drama of a billionaire drug trafficker. But they are at the heart of their own momentous story, which I tell here.
This book is about America's "iron river" of guns, the millions of weapons that flow from the legal industry to the black market, feeding criminals across the nation and drug cartels across the continent. It follows this river from the corners of Baltimore to the battlefields on the border, the factories of Transylvania to the gun shows of Texas, and the gun vaults of Arizona to the jungles of the Andes. It delves into the twisted relationship between the illegal drug and gun trades, how they play off each other like angry lovers. It shows how this historic case of gun trafficking came to be and why attempts to stop it have failed so miserably. It looks at how weapons from the black market spill over to some of the terrorists and mass shooters spreading panic. And it asks how we can slow the iron river, or if we really have to face a world where anyone who wants to murder can have all the firepower they desire.
While guns are big in the news, American coverage is dominated by two main themes. On one side are the shootings at schools and nightclubs by "madmen," which have wrenched at the soul of the nation. On the other is the gun lobby's self-declared defense of law-abiding owners, linked to a wider culture war cutting through the country. But the cold fact is that illegal firearms are used in the vast majority of gun homicides in the United States as well as in Latin America.
The firearm black market has been surprisingly understudied considering its importance. Leaked weapons from the legal U.S. gun industry find their way to criminals in every U.S. state and 136 other countries. The guns are fired by killers who make the American continent the most homicidal one on earth, with forty-seven of the fifty most murderous cities, several in the United States. Despite the United States having the world's biggest economy and by far biggest military, cities such as Baltimore and St. Louis suffer homicide rates comparable to those in Latin American hot spots. The gun violence is in turn used to justify militarized policing, and the police murders of African Americans scar the soul of the nation—and threw it into turmoil in 2020. Wherever you stand on these issues, it's important to understand this gun trade.
At the heart of the iron river is the relationship between guns and drugs. The two fit together like a lock and key—boys with Glocks on the corner, inner-city cops kicking down doors to put drugs and guns on the table, and cartel killers carrying Kalashnikovs. But the mechanics of them are inverted. The illegal narcotics trade is huge, worth an estimated $150 billion a year in the United States alone and over $300 billion globally. The gun black market claims a fraction of that worth but provides a tool that allows gangsters to control those drug profits.
The two products are often bartered. And the prices of both go through crazy shifts dictated by the rules of the street. I unravel the "gun-onomics" over these pages by talking to the mobsters who sell them.
Guns from the U.S. retail market are of course not the only weapons in the hands of the continent's killers. I look hard at other sources, especially the "leakage" from corrupt security forces in Latin America, which are supplied by U.S. and European gun companies. I talk to one trafficker who conspires with Mexican soldiers to sell seized guns back to the crooks. But the United States has an estimated 393 million guns in civilian hands, more than the next twenty-five countries combined, and millions more are churned out every year. From this arsenal, weapons pour across the hemisphere.
Excerpted from Blood Gun Money by Ioan Grillo. Copyright © 2021 by Ioan Grillo. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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