As immigrants flow across border, U.S. guns go south

Among the thousands of immigrants who have been coming across the U.s.-mexico border in recent months, many are seeking to escape gang and drug violence raging in their homelands. The weapon of choice used to intimidate them? Often an American-made gun.

While the flow of drugs and immigrants into the U.S. has been well-documented for decades and become a regular part of the political debate, what is often overlooked is how gangs and drug cartels exploit weaknesses at the border to smuggle guns from the U.S. into Latin America.

A 2013 report by the University of San Diego says the number of firearms smuggled from the United States was so significant that nearly half of American gun dealers rely on that business to stay afloat. On average, an estimated 253,000 firearms each year are purchased in the United States expressly to be sent to Mexico, the report said, with the vast majority of the sales originating in the border states of California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona.

Once in Mexico, the weapons end up in the hands of drug cartels or get shipped to gangs in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — countries that are dealing with an epidemic of gun violence.

Armed holdups on public transportation are a regular occurrence in Honduras, where nearly half of the unregistered weapons originated in the U.S., the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reported in recent years.

Gun violence in El Salvador is so rampant that the country has been averaging more than one shootout a day between police and gangs this year, said Ricardo Sosa, a criminologist specializing in gangs and security in El Salvador.

“In every one of these operations, police are able to seize between two and six firearms at the scene,” he said. “That is one of the indicators that the gangs are armed on many occasions with long guns and short guns for each one of their members.”

Mexico last year recorded its highest number of murders in nearly two decades, with more than 31,000 people killed, higher than during the country’s drug war in 2011. It continues unabated with an average of 88 people killed each day in the first five months of this year.

Matt York The Associated Press file A cache of seized weapons that were to be smuggled into Mexico is displayed in Phoenix. A report says that an estimated 253,000 firearms each year are bought in the United States to be sent to Mexico.