A Review of Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border

Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border by Ieva Jusionyte (University of California Press, 2024)

Of the millions of firearms produced in the United States annually, tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands are smuggled south to Mexico, Brown University professor Ieva Jusionyte writes in Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border. In the seven years she spent researching and writing the book, Jusionyte calculates that more than a million guns may have been trafficked into Mexico from the United States. The U.S.-Mexico border is the busiest in the world for legal commercial traffic and, despite myriad safeguards—automobile inspections, walls, barbed wire, sensors, drones and armed patrols—it is as porous as ever for illegal traffic. 

Some of those firearms illegally passing through the border went to collectors, hunters and gun enthusiasts who turn to the black market in a country that tightly regulates legal gun sales from just two authorized stores. But many of the weapons were imported by criminal organizations that use them to dominate drug and human trafficking routes to the United States with extortion, kidnapping and murder in Mexico. 

Mexico’s crisis of violence is fueled by turf battles among rival crime organizations, as well as by police and government corruption, judicial impunity and the weapons, which take an estimated 30,000 lives a year, many of them among a civilian population trying to survive in the midst of mayhem. These seemingly intractable problems are interlocking and mutually reinforcing.  

That U.S. guns and ammunition flow south into Mexico is as well-chronicled as the fact that drugs and migrants move north into the United States. But it bears continuous examination, and Jusionyte emphasizes the circular nature of the binational problems: the U.S. demand for drugs enriches Mexican smugglers who buy weapons to control regions that send frightened migrants north to the United States.   

She focuses her narrative overview largely on guns based on multiple interviews with people on every side of gun smuggling, from those trying to prevent illegal exports from the United States to those using the weapons for sport or murder in Mexico. The book reflects her background as an anthropologist and ethnographer and employs the skills of a journalist. 

Jusionyte first became interested in guns as a paramedic on the border working with migrants, many of whom said they were fleeing violence. “The realization that the people I was encountering in Nogales, Sonora, were fleeing threats enforced with guns sold in the United States came gradually,” she writes. As an EMT and paramedic, she had been trained to look for the exit wound of a bullet to determine its trajectory through the body and consequent damage. 

In researching her book, she says she was looking for another kind of exit wound—the degree to which U.S. weapons not only kill individuals but mangle the social fabric of families and communities in Mexico. “To tell the story of US complicity…in producing the violence that has made so many Mexicans into refugees from a wounded state, I had to follow the guns south,” she writes. 

Jusionyte walks us through the history of guns in Mexico beginning with their arrival in the hands of the Spanish conquistadores who invaded in the 16th century and ruled for about 300 years. The Mexicans used British weapons to fight U.S. expansion in 1846, but lost nearly half their territory, so when the French invaded shortly after, then-President Benito Juarez turned to American-made Winchester rifles to beat them back. The purchases helped to fuel large-scale gun manufacturing in the United States and set the stage for the provision of U.S. arms and ammunition during the Mexican Revolution.  

Mexico eventually began to manufacture its own weapons and, in response to political protests in the 1970s, to severely restrict civilian access to firearms. The clandestine import of weapons was made a federal crime, but illegal gun trafficking has continued unabated for decades, made easy by the thousands of legal gun dealerships and pawn shops in U.S. states along the Mexican border that sell many firearms prohibited for civilian use in Mexico, including military-style weapons such as AR-15s, semi-automatic AK-47 variants and .50 caliber rifles 

In 2019, Jusyonite reports, Mexico’s federal gun registry recorded 3.5 million firearms in the country, but experts estimate the number of illegal weapons in Mexico is likely more than four times that. (High, but still nothing compared to U.S. rates of gun ownership.) 

A majority of guns recovered at Mexican crime scenes can be traced back to U.S. sales, Jusionyte tells us. Straw buyers purchase them legally, hide them in cars and trucks, and drive through border crossings that are relatively loosely monitored for southbound traffic. In recent years, many weapons discovered in Mexico have been traced to U.S. programs that aimed to reign in gun trafficking, the most famous being Operation Fast and Furious. From September 2009 to December 2010, a federal task force allowed gunrunners to move more than 2,000 weapons into Mexico in the hopes the low-level smugglers would lead to high-level gangsters. Instead, they lost track of hundreds of the weapons. Others turned up in violent attacks in the United States and Mexico, including the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent, and one .50 caliber weapon was found in the home of former drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, she writes. 

None of the weapons led to the arrest of a kingpin. 

In 2021, the Mexican government filed suit against U.S. gun manufacturers in federal court in Massachusetts alleging that the companies knew their products were sold to traffickers and that they fueled violence in Mexico. A U.S. federal judge dismissed the case on the grounds that the gun manufacturers were covered by the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. But the Mexican government appealed and earlier this year an appeals court ruled the case could go forward against the companies, including Smith & Wesson, Glock and Barrett. 

Jusionyte addresses another important factor in Mexico’s crisis of violence, the blurring of lines between police and gangsters. Her reporting here is more anecdotal than deeply reported, and the book could have used more of the latter given the importance of this issue. She describes the involvement of government, police and military officials with cartels, or what one of her journalist sources calls “institutionalized organized crime.”

One of the most powerful crime syndicates, the Zetas, was founded around the turn of the millennium by deserters from an elite unit of the Mexican army who became bodyguards and hitmen for the Gulf Cartel and later split, she writes. Organized crime groups train their weapons on each other and on security forces, whom they may kill or coopt. 

Jusionyte introduces us to a variety of her sources, including U.S. federal agents investigating weapons and ammunition trafficking, a gun smuggler and members of the business elite who distrust police and arm themselves with U.S.-made weapons. She describes how the businessmen adapt to the presence of violence, for example, by avoiding luxury cars that might make them a target for kidnapping and setting up a private GPS warning system to alert each other of dangers on the highways. 

The most interesting character in Jusionyte’s book is a young woman called Samara who was recruited into the Zetas at the age of 14, trained as an assassin in the border state of Tamaulipas and turned into a Zeta soldier ordered to “shoot to kill” competitors. She describes how they ran a network of taxi drivers, delivery men and police who informed the Zetas when their rivals were in town. When Zeta soldiers hid out in the woods, sometimes they’d even get police to deliver takeout. “The police went and bought us food, enough for forty or fifty, then came up to the hills,” Samara tells Jusionyte. 

By the time she was 15, Samara ran her own armed crew in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. She wore camouflage pants and black boots, an AK-47 across her chest and was responsible for bribing local authorities to get permission for the Zetas to sell their drugs at bars and nightclubs. “To do that, she arranged meetings with police in various neighborhoods,” Jusionyte writes. 

They kept track of officials on their payroll, a list of which was discovered in 2009 along with deposit slips, mostly for state and municipal police. 

“Everyone had a price,” Samara tells Jusionyte. “When you arrived in a municipality, you had to speak with the mayor and threaten him, tell him, ‘You do your job and I will do mine… You write them a check with many zeroes and that’s it, the municipio is yours,’ ” Samara tells her. 

Too often it was impossible to say which side professionals worked for, Jusionyte writes. “Some of them worked for both.” 

At the end of her book, Jusionyte acknowledges the reader may be wondering what can be done. In the United States, any laws to increase gun safety could reduce the number of weapons trafficked to Mexico, she writes. She goes once lightly over a series of options such as limiting the types and quantities of firearms an individual is allowed to buy at a given time, even banning the sale of military-grade weapons. She suggests mandating gun manufacturers to adopt smart technology based on biometric recognition that would personalize weapons and limit their use to owners. 

What Jusionyte doesn’t address, however, is the lack of political will for any such changes to address gun violence in the United States, let alone the brutality in Mexico. 

Marjorie Miller is the administrator for the Pulitzer Prizes at Columbia University. Formerly vice president and global enterprise editor at The Associated Press, she spent many years in Mexico running the AP’s Latin America and Caribbean coverage from Mexico City and prior to that as bureau chief in Mexico for the Los Angeles Times.