Report
Rachel Stohl and Doug Tuttle
Small arms and gun violence present the most dramatic threat to public safety in Latin America and the Caribbean. After decades of uncontrolled proliferation, at least 45 million to 80 million small arms and light weapons—that is, weapons operated by an individual or small group, including handguns, assault rifles, grenades, grenade launchers, and even man portable surface to air missiles—are circulating throughout the region.
In 1997, Presidents Bill Clinton and Ernesto Zedillo joined together to sign an OAS treaty known as the Firearms Convention, or by its Spanish initials as CIFTA, designed to end the illicit manufacture and trafficking of guns, ammunition, explosives, and related materials. On June 9, 1998, the U.S. Senate received the treaty and referred it to the Foreign Relations Committee “by unanimous consent.” And then . . . nothing.
The violent struggle between Mexican drug cartels for supremacy over the multibillion-dollar narcotics trade is starting to look like a real war. With local police outgunned, President Felipe Calderón began his term in the final days of 2006 by deploying the army to fight the cartels.
Brazil is not a country at war in the conventional sense. But its deaths by weapons rival the world’s worst war zones. In the same four years that Sarajevo was under siege, three times as many people were killed in Rio by weapons. Brazil has 2.8% of the world’s population but claims 13% of its yearly firearms deaths. According to a study on firearm-related violence by the University of São Paulo, 325,000 Brazilians were killed between 1993 and 2003.
The extent of Pinochet’s arms trafficking was unknown to the public until 2004, when a U.S. Senate investigative subcommittee released a report describing how the Riggs Bank of Washington, D.C., had collaborated with Pinochet and his family in establishing special accounts and offshore shell corporations to hide their business activities. Funds from Pinochet’s military deals and commissions would be deposited in these private accounts and then used according to the whims of Pinochet and his associates, with no public accounting whatsoever.
Pinochet may have reached the apex of corrupt government arms trafficking in Latin America, but he was by no means unique. At lower levels, civilians and military officials alike have often turned a quick peso by engaging in small-arms “diversion,” meaning the shifting of arms from legal to illegal markets.