Editorial | CARICOM should join Mexico’s new gun suit

Even as they press the United States to do more at the policy and strategy levels to curb the flow of guns into their territories, Jamaica and its Caribbean Community (CARICOM) partners should seek to join Mexico’s lawsuit against gun dealers and distributors for supplying much of the weapons that cross the border illegally into Mexico.

Earlier this month, Mexico lost a similar case in a US court against gun manufacturers. It may well lose again. There is value, nonetheless, in pursuing this case, even as a symbolic gesture that keeps a spotlight on a problem that causes profound hurt to Mexico – as it does to the Caribbean.

At the same time, as we urged last week, Caribbean governments – including those territories that are ultimately accountable to major powers – should deepen the coordination of their anti-crime and security efforts, including hardening their network for the sharing of intelligence.

In its previous lawsuit, Mexico argued that US gun manufacturers knowingly undermine its gun control laws in how they design and market weapons, by adopting features, including the addition of special motifs, they know are favoured by drug cartels. In the US$10-billion claim, Mexico said that over two per cent, or around 880,000 of the estimated 40 million guns manufactured in the United States, reached Mexico. Nearly 70 per cent of these were made by the companies named in the suit – Smith & Wesson, Sturm, Ruger & Co, Beretta USA, Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, Colt’s Manufacturing Co, and Glock Inc. In 2019 alone, Mexico reported that over 17,000 homicides were linked to illegally trafficked guns.

But a federal judge, F. Dennis Saylo, dismissed the case, saying that the suit did not overcome protections provided to America’s gun manufacturers by the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. “While the court has considerable sympathy for the people of Mexico, and none whatsoever for those who traffic guns to Mexican criminal organisations, it is duty-bound to follow the law.”

While Mexico vowed to appeal the decision, it quickly followed up with a new lawsuit targeting the distributors and dealers, saying that they are not careful to whom they sell weapons and “allow straw purchasers to buy guns”. Coincidentally, the new Mexican lawsuit came around the same time the US State Department was warning Americans against visiting Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.

“Violent crimes, such as home invasions, armed robberies, sexual assaults, and homicides, are common,” the advisory said of Jamaica. “ Sexual assaults occur frequently, including at all-inclusive resorts.” In Trinidad and Tobago, the Americans claimed, the likelihood of terrorist attacks was real, which the Trinidadians say they have not had since the 1990 attempted coup by Yasu Abu Bakr’s Jamaat al Muslimeen.

Neither country could claim that it does not suffer from too much violent crime, although they could credibly argue that very little of that crime is aimed at foreigners, and in particular, America’s citizens. Both could unimpeachably say that they do not manufacture any of the guns that are the weapons of choice for their criminals and used in upwards of 70 per cent of homicides.

Those guns are overwhelmingly made in the United States, and exported to the Caribbean by people who the dealers pay little care to know, uncaring of, though not oblivious to, the mayhem their products wreak. At the United Nations General Assembly in September, Prime Minister Andrew Holness urged the strengthening of the regimes against trafficking in small arms. Other countries, several in Latin America, shared the sentiment.

Little, however, will happen, unless the United States, the major supplier of these weapons in this hemisphere, feels compelled to take action. Washington, however, fearing a political backlash, prefers to find shelter behind the claim of the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms and the legislative cover for arms dealers cited by Judge Saylo.

Yet, between Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, nearly 1,900 of their citizens were murdered in 2021, for homicide rates of 49 per cent and 38 per cent, respectively. These victims were killed mostly with American-made guns, imported illegally into these islands. The United States cannot close its eyes, plug its ears or cover its mouth in the face of this fact. It is morally bound to address the issue.

However, Caribbean countries cannot, in the context of America’s politics, assume that the US government will act on its own volition. It has to be pushed, poked and prodded on the issue.

This cannot be separate initiatives by Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago. CARICOM has to act together, creating coalitions with other countries that similarly suffer from America’s wanton gun policy. We repeat: the United States has to be harried and harassed to go after the facilitators of the illegal flow of guns from America, in the manner it pursues exporters of narcotics to the USA and the Jamaican lottery scammers who bilk elderly Americans of their money. And CARICOM has to beef up its intra-regional security arrangements.