This was a longer, bloodier, far more destructive war than the American Revolution. Let’s begin with the Mexican War of Independence. In fact, I’m actually leaving out many traumatic things that happened in nineteenth-century Mexico. But I promise I am not making any of this up. Mexico’s misfortunes in the nineteenth century were so profound and so numerous as to almost defy belief. Booty futures figure prominently into the story that I’m going to share with you tonight. Political scientist Michael Ross, a specialist in conflict in post–Cold War Africa, refers to the market for such promises as “booty futures.” He notes that this is a particularly destabilizing kind of finance precisely because it empowers the weak and the disconnected to do things that they otherwise would not have the power to do and probably wouldn’t even try if they didn’t have that support. Others, particularly governing elites and well-connected purchasers looking to buy in bulk, paid with bonds, with loans, or with vaguer kinds of promises about what they would do once they took power. One method was to pay outright with gold or silver, or with bills, cotton, horses, and sometimes slaves. arms trafficking intervened at critical moments in that history to destabilize Mexican governance.īefore I get to that history, let me say something about how the buyers in this story acquired the weapons that they used to pursue their political projects. In my brief remarks this evening, I hope to convince you of this state of affairs by taking you on a very quick tour through Mexico’s nineteenth-century history and explaining how U.S.
There’s an old saying in Mexico, “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.” The country’s two-thousand-mile-long land border with the hemisphere’s preeminent arms manufacturer and exporter has hardwired instability into Mexican history. With the possible exception of Haiti, Mexico has had a longer and more destabilizing relationship with American guns than any country in the world. It’s been with us for a while.”Īs a nineteenth-century historian I can attest to that fact. arms trafficking in these awful events, an official with the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives) said, “This is an ongoing problem. The cartel hitmen left behind hundreds of shell casings made by Remington, a U.S. Two weeks ago, cartel hitmen murdered three women and six children from a single Mormon family. The weapons they used almost certainly came from the United States.
#CONNECTICUT VALLEY ARMS SERIAL NUMBERS US 1847 FREE#
50 caliber M2 machine guns and other military-grade weapons to free the son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the jailed Mexican kingpin, from state custody, a profoundly humiliating and disturbing event for the Mexican government. For example, a month ago a military unit from the Sinaloa cartel used. But as I began to plan this talk, I kept seeing disturbing news from Mexico that was very relevant to tonight’s topic.
Part of the reason I thought that would be interesting is that the gun lobby has invested enormous resources in convincing the public that the government is the enemy of the arms business instead of its historic and indispensable patron. government and the private arms industry, which has been present and essential to the American arms industry since the Revolution. arms trading over the long term, and I wanted to root that discussion in a broader conversation about the connection between the U.S. I had initially planned on speaking about U.S. I am going to begin with something that will not surprise you: the United States is the arsenal to the world. His publications include the award-winning book War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War and the monograph Aim at Empire: Arms Trading and the Fates of American Revolutions. Brian DeLay is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.
0 kommentar(er)
