US Gun Exports Behind Murder and Mayhem in Latin America

 

"U.S.-sourced guns were used to commit crimes in nearby countries approximately once every 31 minutes." Image and Quote Source

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444 retired

GED/HEO

9-6-23

 

The US is losing its global influence but is still the world’s dominant imperial power. And this power comes with incredible arrogance as the US sends emissaries to Africa to educate these poor Africans about democracy and how to prosper. He threatens them with sanctions if they don’t help the US in its proxy war with Russia fought by Ukranian people on Ukrainian soil.  And he has warned China, and only this week, the little dictator Kim Jong Un that they’ll pay the price if they sell Russia weapons.

 

Yet the US ruling class is the greatest purveyor of weapons of mass destruction on the planet that brings untold riches to it investors in the arms industry.

 

But that’s not all. The gangsters in Washington harangue their Mexican counterparts for not being tough on immigrants from that country to the US. These economic refugees are fleeing poverty and lack of opportunity due to a century and a half or more of interference in their economy and society through economic warfare as well as invasions, assassinations and so on. The US rogue state mocks the governments of the small former colonial nations of Central America, once trapped by colonial powers now trapped through economic domination by US imperialism. Like all colonial states, they were never able to develop in to democratic capitalist states in the epoch of Imperialism, that time has passed.

 

The drugs that flow in to the US from our southern borders are not our problem but the problem of others. But let’s consider that the during WW2, the US military kept out the aircraft of two of the world’s greatest military powers at the time, Japan and Germany yet we are supposed to accept that a few planes of cocaine are unstoppable. There’s more to this than meets the eye.

 

The gangs of El Salvador and the cartels of Mexico who are notorious for mass killings and executions of rivals and community activists are grateful for US firearms. The US arms industry leads the way in supplying guns to governments in these nations that more often than not end up in the hands of drug dealers and gangsters.

 

Michael Bloomberg’s article in BusinessWeek, the magazine he owns, points out that the situation has worsened since the sexual predator Trump took the licensing process for gun exports from the Department of State, and handed it over to the Commerce Department in 2020. Now, the word “commerce” lets us know what that department facilitates----you’ve got it---- “commerce” the dictionary definition of commerce being, “the activity of buying and selling, especially on a large scale”. So we shouldn’t be surprised at this development.

 

Since 2016, BW reports, US exports of semiautomatic firearms have more than doubled. In Guatemala, a country whose democratic government the US rogue state overthrew in 1953, exports to that country are five times higher than in the first decade of this century and have doubled in the last two years. It’s no wonder the National Rifle Association referred to the shift of the licensing process to the Commerce Department as, “among the most important pro-gun initiatives by the Trump Administration to date”. I would hazard a guess that more Mexicans and Central Americans die through the US export and pushing of firearms on them than US Americans do from Cocaine.

 

Michael Bloomberg is the country’s 12^th richest man and Business Week is a Democratic leaning publication. Bloomberg ran for president in 2016 for a minute, spent about $6 million I think. Here he is calling on his friend Joe Biden to stop the flow of weapons that are fueling drug and gang warfare as well as social instability in general.

 

However, as the article points out, “Instead of hitting the brakes, on exports to troubled nations, department officials have been greasing the wheels. Aggressively recruiting foreign buyers and connecting them with US manufacturers.”

 

Apparently a US Commerce Department report stated that demand for guns due to political instability in these countries as well as gang violence and drug trafficking is a “unique opportunity”. Wars of all types are a good opportunity for profits, and the reader should not be surprised at such a callous, ignorant statement. What else should a commerce department do?

 

“…countries across Central America and far beyond are suffering from and influx of US guns.” the article points out. As far as I can gather, Michael Bloomberg is an ardent Zionist and I’m sure not too disturbed by the massive amounts of weaponry the US taxpayers sends to his friends over there so he won’t be complaining about that.