Guns: The Small Arms Trade in the Americas

Gun violence has plagued Latin America since the early days of the colonial era. In June, archaeologists excavating an old Inca cemetery near Lima found a skull marred by a pair of small, round holes—­evidence of the oldest gunshot victim in the Americas yet discovered. The musket, in this case likely fired during the final battle for the Incan empire in 1536, was brought over by the Spaniards, and in a sense, the invasion of gun technology continues: In the last three decades, thousands upon thousands of small arms have inundated the region. According to the World Health Organization, between 73,000 and 90,000 people in Latin America and the Caribbean are shot to death each year, as Rachel Stohl and David Tuttle note in this issue’s opening piece. In a seeming paradox, gun violence in many countries in the region has actually increased since the cessation of formal warfare.

March/April
2008
Volume: 
41
Number: 
2

Intro

Pablo Morales
Gun violence has plagued Latin America since the early days of the colonial era. In June, archaeologists excavating an old Inca cemetery near Lima found a skull marred by a pair of small, round holes—­evidence of the oldest gunshot victim in the Americas yet discovered. The musket, in this case likely fired during the final battle for the Incan empire in 1536, was brought over by the Spaniards, and in a sense, the invasion of gun technology continues: In the last three decades, thousands upon thousands of small arms have inundated the region.

Open Forum

Amalia Córdova
Together with four Mapuche activists, Troncoso, 37, a former theology professor, was convicted in 2004 of “terrorist arson” under the Pinochet-era Law 18314, known as “the anti-terrorist law.” They were accused of setting fire in 2001 to the 250-acre Poluco Pidenco pine tree farm, owned by Forestal Mininco, a major Chilean lumber company.­

Updates

Wes Enzinna
Semi-secretly established in 2005, a Salvadoran branch of the International Law Enforcement Academy, a U.S.-sponsored global network of police schools, has angered critics and human rights activists, who wonder if it will perpetuate long-standing patterns of police and military abuse in the country. A NACLA investigation sponsored by the Samuel Chavkin Investigative Fund finds that establishing transparency in the academy’s operations—including making public its course materials and the names of its graduates—is the first critical step in ensuring it does not become, or has not already become, a new School of the Americas.

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.
Frida Berrigan
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.
Bill Weinberg
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.
Peter Lucas
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.
Roger Burbach
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.
Pablo Morales
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.

Reviews

Christopher Hewlett
The Assassination of Hugo Chavez, a film by Greg Palast (DVD, 2007, 24 minutes, www.gregpalast.com) Puedo hablar?/May I Speak?, a film by Sol Productions (DVD, 2007, 73 minutes, www.sol-productions.org)
Christy Thornton
U.S. Relations with Latin America During the Clinton Years, by David Scott Palmer, University Press of Florida, 2006, 144 pp., $24.95 paperback The Bush Doctrine in Latin America, edited by Gary Prevost and Carlos Oliva Campos, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 272 pp., $22.95 paperback

MALA

Dan Beeton
In October, Costa Rica became the last signatory nation to ratify the U.S.–Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). A little more than half (51.6%) of Costa Rican voters said “sí” to the accord in the world’s first popular referendum on a trade agreement. U.S. reporting on the referendum largely simplified the CAFTA question as a matter of geopolitical rivalry between Venezuela and the United States, and it failed to seriously examine whether CAFTA would benefit Costa Rica.