The War We Finance
The High Cost of American Gluttony
38 billion dollars in revenue a year.
That is what America pays to the cartels for their drugs. It has become the single largest industry in Mexico. It has become almost 4% of Mexico’s annual GDP. That means 4 cents of every peso in Mexico comes from Americans buying drugs. This is a failure. Not of American law enforcement. I’m sure they are doing fine jobs combating these traffickers. But they fight an unwinnable war.
—The mexican army closing in on a marijuana plantation.
“In the United States, the War on Drugs is a political slogan for a policy disaster that has cost taxpayers at least $500 billion over the past 35 years. In Mexico, it is a brutal and bewildering conflict.”
“Prohibition didn’t work in the Garden of Eden.
Adam ate the apple.”
Our lawmakers, our congressmen our senators, and our presidents have been pushing our war on drugs for the past 40 years. In that time, American drug usage has remained fairly constant. While the violence around the drug trade and spending on enforcing these laws has exploded.
1.3% of the United States has remained addicted to narcotics since 1971 when Nixon declared his war on drugs to the present day 42 years later. In that time law enforcement has expended over 1.5 trillion dollars to combat narcotics sales.
This has caused numerous problems internally for the United States as it does externally. These policies have increased the United States incarceration rates four fold while doing nothing to dent the flow of drugs and the addiction rates of American citizens. This has only caused more criminal activity and more violent criminals.
—The Mexican army destroying an industrial size marijuana plantation in Sinaloa.
“It is ultimately the great shame of the last decade that we’ve made all this effort, we’ve lost all of these lives, and at the end of the day, we’ve made no real substantive progress in reducing the availability of drugs, and the cost is extraordinary violence.”
—the mexican army burning an entire crop of cartel marijuana.
The other side of this coin is the American people, the addicts and the casual drug user. Their role in this is just as paramount as the lawmakers. It is the money of the American citizens that fund the terror that the Mexican cartels have unleashed. Every gram of cocaine, every bag of marijuana that the cartels sell in the United States is paid for not only with our wealth but with the blood of Mexico, and its citizens.
Every year American citizens give the cartels 38 billion dollars for their drugs. As much as 70% of the marijuana and 95% of the cocaine Americans consume comes from Mexico. It is our addiction that is killing innocents in Mexico.
“We, as a nation, have been fighting terrorism and insurgencies a world away, shunning nations that support such acts. Yet, we have been bankrolling the cartels in Mexico for decades.”
Money is not the only contraband that American citizens are sending south to Mexico. We are also sending the tools of death themselves, guns and lots of them.
Straw buyers or “straw men” are regular US citizens with no criminal history. They can easily pass any background check at a US gun shop, gun show or pawnshop. These men have a connection with the cartels and are paid to go to gun dealers and buy weapons under the pretense that they intend the weapon for personal use. They lie on all the mandatory paper work and then give these weapons to their cartel contact for a profit. The cartel men then smuggle these weapons into Mexico. They are then used by the cartel in their war, their assassinations and their terror.
This process of straw purchasing is by far the cheapest, easiest, and lowest risk way for cartels to acquire weapons. The only other source of firearms for the cartels is the black market. This is where they get their more high-powered weaponry. These weapons are not widely used and are extremely expensive. The standard pistols and rifles, that the cartels have a huge demand for, are cheaper and easier to get from American gun shops. Crossing the border into Mexico is extremely low risk. Mexican border officials are normally under trained, bribed and threatened. Smuggling contraband into Mexico is normally a cakewalk.
“Nobody blinks an eye when we talk about the amount of drugs coming into the United States from Mexico. You don’t see a debate over exactly how many tons of Mexican-source marijuana is coming across the border. We hear roughly fifty percent of drugs from Mexico come through Arizona, and people say ‘that sounds about right.’ But then someone says that Arizona is the number-two source of guns for the cartels, and the same people say ‘Oh that can’t be true.’”
“Oh that can’t be true.”
The Path of Gun Smuggling
1. Straw men
Straw men are average US Citizens with no criminal recored to speek of. Their job is to buy guns, weapons, and ammo from a legitimate businesses then resell them for a profit to gun smugglers.
2. Smugglers
Gun Smugglers are in reality no different from the drug smugglers, the only change is what they carry and what they carry, and what direction they are heading in. They buy the fire arms from the straw men and take them into Mexico. Crossing into Mexico is much less tricky the coming the other way, so most gun smuggling goes unnoticed.
George Ikandosian looks like a pretty unassuming guy. With his salt-and-pepper hair, full beard, receding hairline, and glasses, he doesn’t seem like the kind of person who would want to contribute to murder and mayhem a few hundred miles away. He had been the owner of the X-Caliber gun shop in Phoenix, Arizona for several years. Business seemed good enough to keep the doors open.
Then in may 2008, Ikandosian was arrested and accused of knowingly selling more than 650 AK-47 assault rifles to at least two straw purchasers from Mexico. He also gave the smugglers tips on how to evade the police, according to the ATF case supervisor. One of the guns traced back to Ikandosian—a Colt .38-caliber pistol—was actually found in the waist band of Beltrán Leyva Cartel Boss Alfredo Beltrán Leyva when he was arrested by Mexican authorities in 2008. The chief of the Sonora state anti-drug unit, Juan Manuel Pavón, was murdered by cartel hit men. This occurred just hours after he attended a US seminar on how to resist the tide of American firearms flooding into Mexico. Several weapons linked to hate crimes were traced back to X-caliber Guns.
“One of the guns traced back to Ikandosian—a Colt .38-caliber pistol—was actually found in the waist band of a Beltrán Leyva Cartel Boss when he was arrested by Mexican authorities.”
What seemed like a successful, open-and-shut case for the ATF didn’t turn out as prosecutors predicted. In March 2009, an Arizona court dismissed the case after the judge ruled that the evidence prosecutors presented wasn’t “material” and therefore didn’t support the charges against the defendant. Because the straw men buying process involves people with clean backgrounds, the prosecution failed to prove that the guns sold by Ikandosian to the straw buyers ended up in the hands of someone who wasn’t supposed to have them. This was despite the fact that several additional guns found at crime scenes in Mexico and in the possession of cartel members were traced back to Iknadosian. In addition, several straw buyers testified against Ikandosian in the case as a part of a plea deal. “There is no proof whatsoever that any prohibited possessor ended up with the firearms,” the judge said. What made legal matters more difficult was the difference between federal law and Arizona state law regarding straw purchasing. Arizona State has no statues against it.
“Several additional guns found at crime scenes in Mexico and in the possession of cartel members were traced back to Iknadosian.”
Federal agents and prosecutors worked eleven months of extensive undercover operations and investigative activity to put this case together, only to have it dismissed. This case serves as a prime example of not only how difficult it is to detect straw purchases, but also how challenging it is to successfully prosecute such cases in court in an attempt to stem the southbound flow of weapons.
In an ironic twist, Ikandosian filed a lawsuit in March 2010 against the state of Arizona, the city of Phoenix, and the Arizona attorney General Terry Goddard for malicious prosecution. He claimed that the arrest and trial devastated him emotionally and financially. He also accused Phoenix police officers of conspiring with ATF agents to make a wrongful arrest and conduct a wrongful search of his property.
“There are so many confiscated weapons, and tracing them back to American sellers is such a long unrewarding process, that Mexican officials have simply stopped trying to track them.”
“They have simply stopped trying to track them.”
It is cases like this that allow Mexican cartels to thrive off America’s ineptitude to deal with its own problems. Guns are such a hot bed issue that any talk of legitimate policing tactics to curb the flow of guns into Mexico is shot down by fiery defenders of 2nd amendment rights. Americans are more afraid that policing gun shops is the first step to losing the right to bear arms that they are willing to allow cartels to abuse those same rights to cause countless deaths south of the border.
—Mexican officials use a steamroller to destroy confiscated cartel weapons at an industrial scale.
Mexico didn’t create the cartels we did. It wasn’t Mexico’s money that funded these past few years of war, it was ours. We reap in all the luxury’s of the cartels while Mexico has taken almost all the burden. We are paying for our drugs in cash; Mexico is paying for them in blood.