August 2019 | Rolling Stone | 77
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According to Fox, it was the first he had
heard anything about the guns being smug-
gled to Mexico. He calls drug traffickers “evil
sons of bitches,” and says “never in a million
years” would he have built the guns had he
known they were being transported across
the border. His family has “paid the price on
drugs,” he says. When I ask the Foxes how
Carlson could have gotten mixed up with
such dangerous people, they both give me
the same look. “Have you seen Ty?” Diane
says. “Nobody messes with Ty,” says Fox.
Carlson, who was drunk when he showed
up at the house, wanted Fox to keep his
mouth shut about his role in the minigun
scheme, and didn’t hesitate to threaten the
older man. “Ty let it be known to me that
with a couple of phone calls, there’d be two
guys on an airplane,” Fox says. “Profession-
al killers.” Carlson mentioned darkly that the
driver of the vehicle “had been ratting every-
one out like an idiot,” and had since turned
up dead south of the Rio Grande.
Fox says he wasn’t intimidated. Both he and
Diane had been police officers, and he had a
vault full of semiautomatic weapons in the ga-
rage. He cut off all contact with Carlson, and
says he has not spoken to him since. “He’s a
con man,” says Fox. He and Diane didn’t let
the boys out of the house for a while, and
kept watch for strange cars. At the time, they
were still hoping it would all blow over.T
HOUGH IT GETS far less attention
than undocumented immigration
or drug smuggling, running guns
to Mexico is big business, a south-
bound black market worth hundreds of mil-
lions of dollars. According to the best esti-
mates, gunrunners move 700 to 800 guns
into Mexico every day — about a quarter-
million guns every year.
“It’s a booming industry,” says Jack Riley,
a retired DEA agent who tracked cartel boss
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán for 20 years.
“To the cartels, smuggling guns and ammo
across the border is just as important as cash
coming back from the dope they sell. It’s
something no one’s really talked about, and
certainly the American people don’t know.”
The most striking thing about this black
market is how few gunrunners are caught.
Most of them are U.S. citizens, and in America
there is no comprehensive federal law against
firearms trafficking, making investigations
difficult and the penalties relatively light,
especially compared with smuggling drugs.
Lawmakers have repeatedly introduced an-
ti-trafficking bills in Congress, only to see
them torpedoed by gun-industry lobbying.
More generally, the National Rifle Association
has spent decades successfully pushing for a
legal environment in which gun owners are
almost untouchable, giving hundreds of mil-
lions of dollars in campaign contributions to
Republican politicians, and more than a few
Democrats, who can be counted on to vote
against any and all gun restrictions. As a re-Peréz Esparza, Mexico’s newly appointed
information minister. “Probably we are the
ones who should build a wall.”
Peréz tells me that in 2004 Mexico had the
lowest number of homicides in its recorded
history. In those days, the cartels were un-
derground smuggling syndicates in the mold
of the Italian Mafia, content to bribe offi-
cials and carry out hits on rivals while most-
ly leaving innocent people in peace. But
the increased availability of military-grade
guns coincided with the rise of a new breed
of paramilitary cartel, led by Los Zetas, a
group of special- forces veterans who used
their elite training to take over all forms of
crime in northeastern Mexico. “To do what
these criminal organizations do, you need
high-powered, lethal weapons,” Peréz says.
The number of homicides committed with
a firearm doubled, then tripled, and had qua-
drupled by 2012, as the military failed to beat
back the insurgent criminal militias that de-
veloped in the Zetas’ mold. The bloody cycle
of street battles and executions has left a
staggering number of innocent people dead,
the countryside pitted with mass graves. The
overall death toll is in the realm of 200,000,
making the ongoing cartel wars the sec-
ond-deadliest conflict of the 21st century,
and one of the most traumatic eras in Mex-
ican history. Peréz, who studied the illegal-
arms trade at University College London be-
fore joining Mexico’s government, doesn’t
deny that other factors, including the failed
War on Drugs and the notorious corrup-
tion of the Mexican police, have contribut-
ed to the crisis. Still, “it would be impossible
to imagine this scenario without American
guns,” he says.
Peréz’s office collects detailed confisca-
tion data from every city and state in Mexi-
co. “More interesting than the numbers,” he
says, “is that when you ask traffickers why
they are not using the ports, why they are
not using the border with Guatemala, their
response is basically, ‘Because I’m not stupid.
Why will I buy a Chinese gun that is more ex-
pensive and not as good as the American
ones, or why will I buy a gun from Central
America that is 40 years old, when I can go to
Walmart, or I can go to a gun show in McAl-
len, and buy as many guns as I want, new
guns, the best, with no questions asked?’ ”
The estimated 250,000 guns smuggled
into Mexico every year are only a fraction of
the millions sold annually in America, but
the black market has an outsize impact on
the southern border, where gun stores are
concentrated. A 2013 University of San Diego
study found that nearly half of all gun stores
in the United States would go out of business
were it not for the sales boost provided by
the carnage in Mexico. “It gives you some
idea of the gravitational pull,” says Topher
McDougal, the study’s lead author.
Smugglers usually farm out the acquisition
of firearms to “straw buyers,” who get paid
something like a hundred bucks to go intosult, there are more firearms in this country
than there are people. Nearly 40,000 Amer-
icans died from gunshot wounds in 2017, the
highest number since record-keeping began
50 years ago. A mass shooting takes place in
America, on average, once a day.What is less well known is that U.S. gun
laws have also been a catastrophe for Mexi-
co. Until relatively recently, Mexico had one
of the lowest rates of gun ownership in the
world. Very few firearms are manufactured
in Mexico, and in general private citizens
aren’t allowed to possess them. But since
2004, when the George W. Bush administra-
tion allowed the federal ban on assault rifles
to expire, a flood of military-style weapons
from Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona has
equipped Mexico’s criminal class with fire-
power equivalent or superior to the army
and police. The rate of gun ownership per
capita in Mexico has increased by a factor of
10 over the past 15 years, and murders have
surged in proportion. The deadliest year in
Mexico’s recorded history was 2018, with
33,000 killings, almost all of them perpetrat-
ed by government security forces armed by
U.S. weapons manufacturers, or by cartels
armed by American gun smugglers. “For the
first time in the last century, Mexican life ex-
pectancy is actually declining,” says DavidBORDER BUST
Law enforcement
seized parts from
one of Fox’s miniguns
(top) at the
Anzalduas bridge
border crossing
(above).