Gun violence in Mexico tears apart families, lives and futures.
Over recent decades, Mexicans have experienced indescribable violence from increasingly militarized and well-funded drug cartels and a growing domestic military. How does this happen in a country where it’s a constitutional right to own firearms but with only two gun stores that are operated by the federal government?
Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University, untangles the individual threads from this complex and cross-border situation where guns manufactured, distributed and essentially available over the counter to anyone with an identification card in the United States are smuggled into Mexico. Jusionyte carefully delves into the lives of women like Samara who is forced to enter the drug world as a teenager, Miguel, whose passion for hunting and increasing concern for his family’s safety is intertwined with firearms, and Alex and Jackson, US federal agents whose painstakingly slow but detailed work is demonstrative of the on-the-ground actions against a overwhelming flow of guns south of the border.
Jusionyte, whose work as a paramedic gives the reader a real insight into the devastating effects of guns on human beings, explores the history of gun manufacturing in the two countries, the processes by which individuals and their guns contribute to the violence in Mexico and the toll this inflicts in communities on both sides of the border.
I have lived and passed through many of the cities that Jusionyte mentions in ‘Exit Wounds’, having grown up in both Mexico and the US. I spoke with Jusionyte last year to talk more about the power of language and narratives, the editorial choices when tackling a subject like guns and the war on drugs and, ultimately, the audience she wants to reach.
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Humberto J. Rocha: Something that really fascinated me was your focus on language: the language of narco violencia, how language is used to refer to violence in Mexico, whether it's a Mexican in the country trying to distance himself from the violence and reality. You also mentioned that you use language as protective personal equipment, insulating you from brutal reality, and that you hesitated to take it off. What does this mean? And why did you think this was important to include?
Ieva Jusyonite: I wish more people paid attention to that.
I’m coming to this topic as a public anthropologist; I was previously a journalist, so I know how the media covers organized crime and gun violence. I'm also a scholar, which means I also know how to research papers [use the] kind of language and concepts they employ to analyze the situation. I thought that - in order for, primarily, in this case, for US readers to understand the seriousness of the issue - it's important to find the right language to tell the story.
So, focusing on the narrative was important because not many people just walk into the bookstore and, out of everything that's available there, pick up a book about gun trafficking and gun violence in Mexico. So, if the language can draw people in, that was important.
On the other hand, a lot of it is at the level of story, stories or narrative. It's also complicated when it comes to the selection of words, and one of my big influences about thinking about this is Mexican writer and now US-based Yuri Herrera who has written and talked about how the kinds of language, the kinds of words, the kinds of concepts we use, and how we are thinking about a topic.
In his novels, it's all about border migration and organized crime, he never uses cartel or migrant, and other concepts. I found inspiration in his work, and so that was important.
But then I think the third level is, what you, you're kind of hinting at with this language as a “personal protective equipment”. When you're witnessing traumatic events, when you're witnessing violence, it's very immediate and it might not be always immediate for you as a researcher or a storyteller, but it has been immediate for the people you are interviewing.
You use language to write about those experiences, and once, they appear in this written – there is a distance from that raw experience that happens through these translations, first through narration, and then through writing it out into a story that goes into the book. For me, actually writing this book, putting it all in language was almost therapeutic, because it allowed me to make sense of a lot of things that didn't make sense before. Also putting that into a narrative form.
HJR: So, that kind of leads into my other question. One, I'm curious what the challenges were in relating or having these people open up to you. Two - with your past as a journalist and as someone who's worked in very traumatic situations - how did that help? But what were also some of the challenges and just being able to speak frankly and engage with the people whose stories you tell in this book?
IJ: So, I think the main thing to note is that a lot of people didn't talk to me.
I was very open when I did this project. I said ‘I want to understand what US guns are doing in Mexico’ and in Mexico I wanted to talk to anyone and everyone about their experiences with guns. Because I wanted to write a book and I wanted to understand, I was telling people this. I never pretended to be someone who I am not. For an ethnographer, I think one benefit or advantage [over] being a journalist covering current events, is that we have the luxury of time.
I began this research in 2018 and I did most of the interviews with members of organized crime. I think I started in early 2019 only, and it continued through 2019 and then the pandemic hit. [It was a process of] coming back to the same people and saying, ‘I want to hear your story, and I'm still here a month later, and I'm still here, and I don't want to know your name, I don't want to know your last name, I just want to hear about your experiences.’
I took a lot of precautions. I gave people pseudonyms, even in my notes when I was talking to them, out of fear that the Mexican government [would confiscate] my notes and [I tried] to protect them that way.
But then again, a lot of people knew that what they were doing was illegal and then could get them into trouble and they never agreed to talk to me, so the ones that agreed, I would say, are a minority.
HJR: Of all the people or the people who did talk to you, why did you choose these individuals?
IJ: Well, it’s hard.
There were some other candidates, some other people whose stories I wanted to include, but I didn't have much background material on them. It was also the understanding that readers can only follow that many characters and identify with them, so I had to limit the number of people I wanted to portray, and I wanted to choose individuals that represent this issue from various angles.
Choosing Samara was a no-brainer for me, because there were very few women I talked to in the scope of this research. She was a member of an organized crime group, and not not just a foot soldier, but sort of more like a leader of a small cell. She just had a really fascinating story, and I interviewed her over many months. So I could have chosen some other members of organized crime groups, and they, I include some quotes from them here and there and kind of mentioned several of them by name, but I thought having one person represent that victim-turned-perpetrator storyline would be sufficient.
In a similar way, Juan was the journalist I worked with the most, I could have chosen others.
I met people in Miguel’s circle, so owners who were not members of organized crime, but who bought illegal weapons and sometimes smuggled [weapons] themselves, and who were businessmen and doctors and lawyers and politicians. Those I interviewed and they were the ones that I, if you look at numerical numbers, that's the biggest group of people I talked to throughout the years.
But Miguel stood out from them because of how enthusiastic he was. His story also kind of covers two sides of this. Because, on the one hand, yes, he's a gun collector, he's a hunter and he goes to the shooting range, like many others.
At the same time, he smuggles the guns himself, and he's really concerned about personal protection, so not everyone kind of embodies or internalizes the need to be their own security [force] because they cannot, or do not always trust or rely on government security forces. So, that's how I chose him and then I think it was important for me to – although this came later, much later in my research – to also include the US side of the story, especially in the aftermath of these failed and horrible gun walking operations.
Who are the US federal agents who are trying to stop [gun smuggling]? What are they doing? And getting US agents to talk was also extremely difficult and eventually I went for this big case that I write about from Arizona because I was able to talk to the people.
[But also] because – and this is a bit off topic – but because I was working both with perpetrators of violence and people who engage in illicit activities, and then with the US government agents who are trying to stop gun traffickers, I needed to break the links between them. That's why I only talked to law enforcement in Arizona, because they were following the guns that were being smuggled to Sonora and to Sinaloa and to the organized crime in that region, the Sinaloa cartel mostly and other factions, whereas people in organized crime groups that I interviewed were mostly in Nuevo Leon and in Coahuila, the agents from Texas were covering that area. So, even if accidentally, some information was leaked, it wasn't actionable for either group, and that's why I geographically split it that way as well.
HJR: This was a project five years in the making, there was research in various different cities… I was going to ask: what was the original concept of this project? Can you talk a bit about what the initial scope was, and why you thought about bringing in the US agents?
IJ: So, I began this project when I was at the border. I was doing research and working as an emergency responder, and then I realized that these guns are going south and the migrants are coming north. And then I said, ‘okay, I need to follow the guns south, so how do I do that?’
In the beginning, I didn't even know what region of Mexico I would focus on because I was very open minded about this project. The first place I went to in Mexico was Mexico City, because I thought if in Mexico there was the government control [weapons store] with SEDENA importing all the guns and is the only institution that sells them, and then they license the guns – if I wanted to later talk to people who are engaging gun trafficking, I should first talk to the government, because I will never go back to them once they begin working. That's why my first day was in Mexico City.
I was invited to give a talk in Monterrey at the [Technological Institute of Monterrey] and it kind of snowballed from there because I met people who had guns and who wanted to talk about guns. In the beginning, I was considering Guerrero, Michoacan, Sonora… so it was following the lead, what took me to northeast Mexico
[As for the] US side of the story, it was not in my initial drafts but then the pandemic started and I couldn’t go to Mexico. How did I spend the pandemic? I spent the pandemic reading these cases of trial transcripts, thousands of pages from the very few cases where gun traffickers were charged. There were some out of Texas and some out of Arizona and that's how I spent the pandemic. I got so interested in [the question of] how these gun trafficking networks work in the US.
Once I read those cases, my initial idea was to contact gun smugglers so I reached out to a number of lawyers, I did a lot of social media sleuthing to find those gun smugglers, some of whom are mentioned in the book, but they were not very willing to talk to me, or they wanted money.
Then I talked to the agents, and they were very enthusiastic, because they were very happy about how it all turned out, but it's also kind of a very limited scope of what they can do. In the end, it was interesting to me too because both Juan’s story as a journalist and then the federal agents’ story – they are doing something parallel to what I was doing as an anthropologist. They are also trying to find out the truth and then build a story about it for various reasons, whether it is like, you know, public knowledge in Juan’s case or whether it is justice in the case of [the federal agents].
But we are all storytellers, and we are all following the guns in different ways.
HJR: I think you have the numbers of people seized in 2019 - it’s an embarrassingly low number. I’ve crossed the border countless times and it seems like such a small number to me given how much security there is. I think the agents’ story shows how much work there goes into prosecuting this but could you tell us why these numbers are so low?
IJ: That's a big and complicated story.
So, if you look at how the US government approaches border security, the priority is on controlling northbound flows. So yes, there is very sophisticated infrastructure and scanners and dogs, and everyone who enters the USis being inspected for drug contraband, primarily, and for papers so that they can enter the country legally.
However, outbound inspections are not so intense. [For] people who leave the US, the inspection is random, sometimes [customs agents] get a tip from other agents to look out for such a vehicle. Sometimes they just stand there and see that someone acts suspiciously, but normally they don't.
Normally, that's not the priority, and it's not the agent's fault.
The thing is that advertising how many guns [are seized by the US government] is, politically, very problematic for various agencies involved like the the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), they are the most attacked agencies from from the right and even the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – they don't want to advertise their work on guns that much because counterintuitively, the more guns they seize, the bigger the public profile they get, the less finances, the less resources the agency gets.
So, it's just a very strange way of how US politics works.
On the Mexican side of things, the inspections are random. You press the button if you get the red button, you might get inspected unless you actually pay someone so you don’t get inspected. But the numbers are very similar on both sides. Even those few hundreds that are in the data, it very often just means that there were a couple of big operations when they seized a lot of guns. Sometimes they seize just one gun, but often they seize just [over a dozen] guns and that's a big difference if they only catch 200 in a year.
During the pandemic [the number of guns seized] increased because those agents didn't have to check [as many people] coming into the US, so they checked more [stringently]. More recently, like last year, [agents seized] almost 800 guns on the border. So the question is, are there more guns going south, or are they just catching more guns?
But the agents I interviewed throughout said that it's impossible, that it’s like finding a needle in a haystack, the same way that drugs get to the US, you can't stop every vehicle and inspect it.
HJR: I found the book very accessible and that anyone with an interest in this, can read it and learn about it. For a US audience, what is something you wish a reader would take from this and think about thoroughly?
IJ: What I want [the reader] to think and what I want us to think, is that gun violence is definitely a big problem and serious issue in the US, but it does not stop at the border, and because of [US] gun laws and the strength of [the US] gun industry are doing south of the border in Mexico, how it impacts, how it affects people's lives, turning some victims into perpetrators, or making so many people flee their homes and asking for refuge in the US, how the US is implicating in making Mexico this dangerous place that we then want to build a wall against.
The main thing is really connecting [these factors] – that the drugs coming here and the people running away from violence, that US guns are responsible for a lot of that.
But the book itself is not an agenda. It focuses more on the history of how it came to be that Mexico has such different gun laws and that US guns play such an important role in Mexican politics and society and seeing the lives of people who are one way or another impacted by these guns, either because they smuggle them or because they are recruited into organized crime or how they are threatened while they are pursuing these stories for the media. What do these guns do to the lives of very specific people in Mexico, and why we should care.