Even US-aligned governments in the region are beginning to ask, somewhat naively, which side the US is on in the war on guns, begging the question: which war?
In the early hours of May 20, Ximena Guzmán, the 42 year-old private secretary of Mexico City Mayor Clara Brugada, parked her car in the usual place on the side of Tlalpan Avenue. She was there to pick up José Muñoz, a 52-year old colleague and advisor to Brugada, as she did every morning. When Muñoz got into the car, a hitman lurking just a few metres away drew a nine millimetre handgun and emptied the 12 bullets in the magazine at the two civil servants. Both died almost instantly.
This all took place in broad daylight and amid rush hour traffic. The hitman fled on a black motorcycle, which he ditched a short distance away. There, with the help of at least three other accomplices, he used a blue car to drive to the Iztacalco borough, where they picked up another vehicle, a grey pickup truck, which they drove into the neighbouring State of Mexico where they disappeared. As El País reported, this team of clearly professional assassins left no trace behind (qualifiers in parenthesis my own):
No fingerprints, no [clear] suspects, no [clear] motive… The weapon they used was clean: analysis of the shell casings found at the scene revealed it hadn’t been used in previous crimes.
The reason I added the two qualifiers is that while there may not be clear suspects or motives behind the crime, there are a number of possible suspects, all with their own possible motives.
The most obvious suspect, according to most domestic and international media, would be one of the large Mexican drug cartels such as Jalisco Next Generation, La Familia Michoacan or the Sinaloa cartel, though the latter has been heavily weakened in recent months. The obvious motive: revenge for the Sheinbaum government’s recent security crackdowns, including the capture and extradition to the US of dozens of cartel capos.
While the cartels are perfectly capable of taking such action, and pulling it off with ease, one can’t help but wonder: why target two mid-to-high ranking Mexico City civil servants with no direct involvement in security matters? To sow panic in government ranks? To send a message that nowhere is safe and that anyone can be targeted in broad daylight regardless of whether they have ties to Mexico’s security forces?
Another possible suspect, highlighted by the journalist Jesús Escobar Tobar, is Mexico City’s real estate mafia, whose illegal manipulation of the property market in Mexico City is coming under sustained pressure from Clara Brugada’s municipal government’s policies. These white-collar criminals, presumably with contacts in the police and security services, probably have the means as well as a clear motive for carrying out this crime.
Another possible suspect is the US government and its three-letter agencies. Despite its dramatic decline across most areas of governance, Washington is still ruthlessly efficient at killing innocent people on each and every continent, especially its own.
It also has motives. For a start, the execution-style killing of these two civil servants further destabilises the Sheinbaum government, reinforcing the impression that it cannot guarantee security in any part of Mexico’s territory, including even the (generally safer) capital. This, in turn, strengthens Washington’s case that Mexico needs US intervention to help steady the ship. In recent weeks, President Trump has repeatedly asked Sheinbaum to allow US troops to enter Mexico to combat the drug cartels.
The timing was also curious. The exact morning that Guzmán and Muñoz were executed, Sheinbaum’s government was scheduled to present the latest security figures for Mexico City, which showed a marked improvement. Also, the US’ new Ambassador to Mexico (and former CIA agent and green beret) Ron Johnson had just taken up residence at the US’ new billion-dollar embassy in the Mexico City borough of Polanco.
All of this, of course, amounts to little more than conjecture for there is no proof pointing to any particular suspect — at least not currently in the public domain.
Now, let’s shift our focus 2,800 kilometres to the east, to Haiti. Roughly a week after the double-assassination in Mexico, the New York Times published a story that at first glance seems entirely unrelated to the events in Mexico. Erik Prince, the former Blackwater founder and CEO, arms trafficker, shadow Trump advisor and wannabe colonialist, had just been awarded a contract by Haiti’s Western-controlled government to conduct “lethal operations” against gangs that are, in the Grey Lady’s words, “terrorizing the nation and threatening to take over its capital.”
Arguably the longest-suffering victim of Western colonialism and neo-colonialism on the American continent, Haiti has suffered so many interventions in recent decades that it is now often referred to as the “Republic of NGOs”, many of them US or UN-led. After a devastating earthquake in 2010 killed an estimated 200,000 people and left many government buildings in rubble, thousands of aid organizations decamped in Haiti and built a powerful parallel state accountable to no one but their boards and donors.
As the Nation magazine noted, “the international relief effort after the 2010 earthquake excluded Haitians from their own recovery.” The latest attempt to bring order to the country was through the deployment of hundreds of Kenyan troops and police officers. But it has clearly failed — hence the need for a private sector-led military intervention (some reports in alternative media claim this is really about quashing popular revolt again as ex-policeman Jimmy Cherizier calls for a revolution to topple embattled government).
From the Times:
With Haiti’s undermanned and underequipped police force struggling to contain the gangs, the government is turning to private military contractors equipped with high-powered weapons, helicopters and sophisticated surveillance and attack drones to take on the well-armed gangs. At least one other American security company is working in Haiti, though details of its role are secret.
Since drone attacks targeting gangs started in March, they have killed more than 200 people, according to Pierre Esperance, who runs a leading human rights organization in Port-au-Prince.
After the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq ended, security firms like those owned by Mr. Prince started seeing big streams of revenues dry up. Private military contractors are looking for new opportunities, and they see possibilities in Latin America.
This is the second time in two months that a government on the American continent has hired Prince’s services. In early April, the former Blackwater CEO visited Ecuador to ostensibly help the country’s security services combat “narco-terrorism” — the term du jour in Washington and its vassal state governments in Latin America. That was just after trying (and failing) to crowdfund a mercenary-led coup against Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela while presumably trousering the funds that were donated.
Iron Rivers Everywhere
One thing that Mexico, Ecuador and Haiti have in common, apart from their relative geographic proximity, is that they are all awash in guns. This is despite the fact that the Central America and Caribbean region neither manufactures such weapons nor plays any significant intermediary role in the global trade in guns. Meanwhile, Mexico tightly controls firearm sales, making them practically impossible to obtain legally. In Ecuador, by contrast, the Daniel Noboa government has made it easier to acquire firearms legally over the past year.
Most of the weapons flowing to these countries are coming from the US, of course, and they appear to be coming in ever larger numbers. In a letter sent to US legislators in September last year, New York’s attorney general and 13 other lawmakers across the US called for new measures to stem the outward flow of US-made guns, noting that as many as 90% of weapons used in the Caribbean were bought in the US and smuggled into the region.
In the case of Mexico, the southward flow of weapons, often referred to as the “iron river”, may have increased by as much five fold in volume over the past two decades. According to estimates from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), 90,000 firearms were smuggled into Mexico in 2004. By 2024, some estimates, including the Mexican government’s, put the figure at around half a million.
While it’s impossible to count precisely how many weapons are successfully smuggled, for obvious reasons, US investigators and federal agencies concede that the number of guns illegally pouring into Mexico and the Caribbean has increased in recent years. So, too, has violent crime — and deaths…
Continue reading on Naked Capitalism
Nick Corbishley 