78 | Rolling Stone | August 2019
a gun store and buy one in their own name.
“Gunrunners are very well organized,” says
Michael Bouchard, formerly an agent with
the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms
and Explosives and now president of the ATF
Association. “They have specific people who
handle each of these activities. They rely on
anybody they can find to buy guns for them.
They’ll buy three at a time and hold them at
their house for a while to see if anyone comes
knocking. If they get caught selling to some-
one, they can say, ‘I just needed some cash.
I don’t need a license. I’m selling part of my
collection.’ Even if they get stopped on the
way to Mexico, they can say, ‘I wasn’t going
to cross.’ It’s a cat-and-mouse game, and it’s
more than any one agency can handle.”
Smugglers also traffic in military parapher-
nalia of the kind sold in sporting-goods stores
across the Southwest. “Scopes, magazines,
camo uniforms, knee pads, elbow pads,” says
Jerry Robinette, the former special agent in
charge of the Texas border region for the De-
partment of Homeland Security’s investiga-
tive arm, HSI. “All the things you need to arm
these paramilitary cartels.” There’s no end to
the ways gunrunners have of hiding their il-
licit merchandise, he says: “Trucks with an
inside and an outer shell. An inner and an
outer fender. A flatbed with a false bottom,
holding 15 or 20 guns. They’ll hide them in-
side oil pans, inside manifolds, inside tank-
ers, in the bilge — no one wants to look in
there because it’s so fricking nasty.”
Mexico has the primary responsibility of
stopping guns from entering its territory, but
at many ports of entry, vehicles coming from
the U.S. are simply waved through without
even slowing to a stop, owing to the volume
of traffic under the North American Free
Trade Agreement. The personnel that would
be needed to search the hundreds of thou-
sands of cars and trucks and buses and trains
doesn’t exist, especially in northern Mexico,
where unprecedented violence has stretched
state resources thin. The Mexican military
seizes tens of thousands of American weap-
ons, but only after battles and raids, when
the damage has already been done.
American border guards do try to stop
guns from entering Mexico, but U.S. Cus-
toms and Border Protection is primarily fo-
cused on stopping drugs moving north and
with seizing drug money, which the agen-
cy gets to keep. Every year, CBP releases a
report touting its seizures of narcotics and
currency, but conspicuously absent from
the reports are statistics on firearms. “The
structural restriction of information the gun
lobby has been able to achieve at almost
every level of government is unbelievable,”
says Kris Brown, co-president of the Brady
Campaign. “No other industry in the United
States is protected from the facts in the same
way.” Indeed, some agencies, such as the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
are forbidden from even studying the social
and health effects of guns, thanks to indus-
try lobbying. When I finally manage to pry
the border-seizure numbers loose through
a Freedom of Information Act request, I can
see why CBP isn’t bragging. American border
guards seized a paltry 102 of the estimated
quarter-million illegal guns that passed their
checkpoints in 2018. The most confiscated
in recent years was 242, in 2017. In 2016, the
number was 86. In 2015, it was a mere 50.
Peréz laughs when I read him the figures.
“That’s like what the Mexican army can con-
fiscate on a daily basis,” he says.A
T 9:40 p.m. on June 3rd, 2016,
at the Anzalduas International
Bridge south of Mission, Texas,
CBP agents waved a black GMC
Canyon pickup into a secondary screening
area illuminated by powerful halogen lights.Solis was just a student who had been paid
$600 to drive the truck across the bridge,
and knew little about the people who had
hired him. But an informant pointed inves-
tigators to a house in McAllen where the
cache of weapons had been stored prior to
transit. Parked out front was a vehicle be-
longing to a 35-year-old U.S. Army veteran
named Jorge Quintero, described as a big,
tall pelon — Spanish for a man with a shaved
head — whom the informant had identified as
a heavyweight gunrunner.
According to Cottrell, Quintero was the
ringleader of a gunrunning cell centered in
McAllen that reached as far north as Dallas.
“Quintero was the main coordinator,” Cot-
trell says. “The head of the trafficking organi-
zation. He would take purchase orders from
his people in Mexico, who were associates or
members of the Gulf Cartel. He would then
coordinate the purchase of weapons through
straw buyers. Then he would coordinate the
smuggling to Mexico.”
Cottrell says that Quintero admitted,
under interrogation, to selling three mini-
guns to three separate Gulf Cartel captains.
Though now badly fractured, the Gulf
Cartel is the original Mexican crime syndi-
cate, with roots going back to the Prohibi-
tion era. “The company,” as it’s known lo-
cally, is involved in all kinds of illicit activity
but mostly profits from drug trafficking, oil-
and-gas theft, and human smuggling. It’s a
gangster capitalist enterprise with probable
revenues in the hundreds of millions of dol-
lars, equipped with armored vehicles, under-
ground bunkers, its own network of cellular
towers, and a small army of lookouts and
spies, in addition to platoons of assassins.
The Gulf Cartel’s home base is Matamoros,
situated on the mouth of the Rio Grande in
the state of Tamaulipas, a hot, green, muggy
coastal region south of Texas. At the border
crossing with Brownsville, every Mexican
vehicle with commercial cargo has to pay a
tax, or piso, on the goods. “When I first got
into business, I didn’t know about the piso,”
an oilman from Matamoros tells me. “The
company kidnapped four of my drivers and
$500,000 worth of product. They brought
one of the guys to my office with a hood on
his head and his hands bound and threat-
ened to shoot him right there. I paid $15,000
for each employee, $60,000 total, and they
let them go.”
The Gulf Cartel has been at war with the
notoriously violent Los Zetas since the two
organizations split nearly 10 years ago. Re-
cently, both the Gulf Cartel and what’s left
of Los Zetas have badly splintered internal-
ly, warring especially fiercely over Reynosa,
which has become one of the most murder-
ous cities in the world. All criminal factions
are also at war with the Mexican marine
corps, which has been deployed to Tamau-
lipas for nearly a decade. Not surprising-
ly, the state is probably the largest consum-
er market for illegal guns in all of Mexico.The driver, a 21-year-old dual citizen named
Luis Solis, must have known right away that
he was busted. Barely concealed in the back
seat were four semiautomatic pistols, 15 AK-
47s, 4,000 rounds of 7.62 ammunition, and
32 high-capacity magazines. All of the weap-
ons had their serial numbers obliterated. The
border guards also found a big military-style
battery with a heavy-duty electric cable. It
was the power supply for one of the mini-
guns that Fox had built.
“At first we were trying to figure out what
it was,” says Duane Cottrell, the lead HSI offi-
cer on the team of federal agents assigned to
the case. The officers suspected the work of a
major gunrunning cell. They found the mini-
gun parts especially worrisome. “I’ve never
seen anything comparable to miniguns at the
border,” says Mike Weddell, who led ATF’s
side of the investigation. “It’s a mass-casual-
ty weapon.”ARMING THE CARTELS
With the increase in
gun violence, “Mexican
life expectancy is
actually declining,” says
a government official.
“Probably we are the
ones who should
build a wall.”