August 2019 | Rolling Stone | 79
“Ta-ta-ta-Tamaulipas,” people call it, imitat-
ing the sound of an assault rifle. It’s all made
possible by a steady supply of military-grade
guns and ammo from Texas.
To the agents investigating him, Quinte-
ro fit the profile of a cartel-connected gun-
runner. He was born and raised in Reynosa,
and became an American citizen by serv-
ing 10 years in the U.S. military. Cottrell and
Weddell say they didn’t profile him for being
a veteran, but there is evidence that Mexi-
can drug-trafficking organizations actively
recruit American servicemen, and several
ex-soldiers have been arrested for gunrun-
ning in recent years, including two California
National Guardsmen who were caught steal-
ing from an armory, and an Army recruiter in
San Antonio who funneled dozens of assault
rifles to the Gulf Cartel.
It had been three months since Solis’ ar-
rest, and the feds were still keeping an eye on
Quintero when ATF got a tip: A Mexican na-
tional known as Saul was set to buy a sniper
rifle from Quintero’s 51-year-old uncle, Alfre-
do Arguelles. Unbeknownst to Saul and Ar-
guelles, their go-between was an informant.
ATF set up a sting operation for the morn-
ing of September 7th. As a team of federal
agents watched from a distance, Arguelles
pulled his white Ford Expedition into a park-
ing lot on the corner of Daffodil and Ware in
McAllen, where the informant was waiting
for him. A large black parcel changed hands.
Inside was a Barrett sniper rifle, an extreme-
ly powerful weapon that fires a .50-caliber
round the size of a carrot. “I personally made
sure it was clean,” Arguelles said. “I put
gloves on and wiped it down with oil myself.”
Invented by a Tennessee businessman
named Ronnie Barrett in the 1980s and made
exclusively by his company, Barrett Firearms
Manufacturing, the .50-caliber is one of the
most popular weapons among Mexican car-
tel fighters, surpassed only by the ere quince,
or AR-15, and the cuerno de chivo, or AK-47.
In the U.S. military, the awesome power of
the Barrett is the stuff of legend. It can shoot
through a wall of concrete block as if it were
made of sheetrock, and has a range of more
than a mile. Incredibly, this weapon is unre-
stricted for civilian ownership in the United
States. You can buy one in cash, with no pa-
perwork whatsoever, without breaking any
laws. You can own as many as you like.
Arguelles, however, was a Mexican citi-
zen who had overstayed a visa, and foreign-
ers, like felons, are banned from owning fire-
arms in the U.S. Arguelles was arrested, and
the ATF agents were able to trace the Bar-
rett to a local gun store, where Quintero had
purchased it in his own name. It was enough
to arrest him too. He was led away in hand-
cuffs the next time he tried to cross the bor-
der. He would plead guilty to “unlawful-
ly disposing of a firearm to an alien under a
non immigrant visa.”
When I reach Quintero by phone at the
federal penitentiary in Beaumont, where
he’s serving a nearly six-year sentence, he
denies being the major gunrunner depicted
by Cottrell. “I didn’t even know there was a
ring,” he says. “Now I’m supposed to be the
leader? I didn’t know I had, like, subjects and
shit.” He won’t say anything specific about
his case because the call is being record-
ed, but he tells me he did tours in Iraq and
Afghanistan as a Black Hawk crew chief. That
is precisely the military occupational special-
ty that would have given him maximum train-
ing on the M-134 minigun. Still, he insinuates
a police conspiracy against him. “The fed-
eral government is corrupt as shit,” he says
before hanging up. “These motherfuckers
are dirty.”
Weddell says that cases like these are
more complicated and time-consuming for
law enforcement than they should be. “A fire-
arms-trafficking bill is what we need more
than anything else,” he says. “It would nar-
row things down to where we’re not look-
ing for technicalities, paperwork violations,
that don’t go to the merit of what we’re ac-
tually investigating. Not hanging cases on
pieces of other statutes that we patch togeth-
er.” Indeed, neither Solis nor Arguelles nor
Quintero was convicted of smuggling, though
that’s the activity that brought them to the
attention of police. Solis was convicted for
the essentially regulatory crime of not hav-
ing a State Department export license and
sentenced to two years in prison (contrary
to what Carlson told Fox, he was not killed in
Mexico). Arguelles pleaded guilty to an im-
migration-based offense, being an “alien in
possession of a firearm,” and sentenced to
26 months in prison. The best prosecutors
did was to oblige Quintero to sign an “accep-
tance of responsibility,” in which he acknowl-
edged, “I knew the weapons were going out
of the USA to Mexico.”
“The current laws against gun trafficking
are absolutely worthless,” says Rep. Carolyn
Maloney (D-N.Y.), who recently introduced
an anti-trafficking bill in the House of Rep-
resentatives. The proposed law, H.R. 1670,
would increase the penalty for straw pur-
chasing and make it a federal crime to buy a
firearm with the intent to deliver it to some-
one prohibited from owning one. The cru-
cial word there is “intent.” Under current
law, there is no statute under which police
can take action, such as obtaining a war-
rant, if people are merely stockpiling guns
and ammo, even if there are clear indications
that they intend to smuggle them to Mexico.
“Say an informant tells you people are
going into Mike’s Gun Shop and buying 10
AR-15s at a time, and you see a fair amount
of them turning up in Mexico,” the ATF’s
Bouchard says. “You can follow people
back to their house and watch them un-
load 10 long guns into the garage, but then
what? Do you go knock on their door? If you
don’t have a warrant, they’ll tell you to hit
the road. If you want to sit and wait and see
what they do, you’re going to have to sit onMADE IN THE USA
While U.S. politicians have raged about the
drugs coming north from Mexico, American
guns have been flowing south, enabling the
carnage of the cartel wars11,497,741
The number of guns produced in the United States in 2016,
which has climbed from 3 million in 1986, according to the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives250,000
The estimated number of guns smuggled into Mexico each year0.04 8%
The approximate percentage of the illegal
firearms trafficked from the U.S. to Mexico that Customs
and Border Protection seizes47%
The percentage of American gun dealers whose
stores depend on the U.S.-Mexico arms trade, according
to a study by the University of San Diego70%
The percentage of guns recovered from crime scenes
in Mexico and sent to the U.S. for tracing that are determined
to be American in origin30,000
The number of illegal firearms recovered between
2000 and 2015 in Tamaulipas — more than any other
Mexican state121,035
The number of Mexicans murdered by a firearm
between 2006 and 201833,000
The number of homicides registered in Mexico in 2018,
the highest number since record-keeping began