Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University, worked as a paramedic on the southern U.S. border for more than a decade.
Drawing on that experience, she wrote her first book, Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border, an examination of Mexican and U.S. rescue workers in the militarized borderlands and the “camaraderie and friendships between communities and people split by the monstrous wall.” In Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border, Jusionyte continues her empathetic, ethnographic study of violence, power, and the stunning contradictions of U.S. border politics.
Exit Wounds: How America's Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border
By Ieva Jusionyte
University of California Press, 348 pages
Release date: April 16, 2024
Her first book, she writes, “barely made a dent in the narrative that still dominates American national imagination that paints the southern border as the site of danger, perpetual ‘crisis,’ an ‘invasion.’ ”
Not only is this narrative blatantly false, she argues—migrants commit fewer crimes than U.S. citizens, and it was the United States that invaded Mexico several times, not the other way around—but also it ignores the U.S. role in creating the conditions politicians claim to want to solve through increased border security.
Specifically, Jusionyte explores the U.S. role as the main supplier of guns to Mexican drug cartels.
An extraordinarily brave researcher, she spent years getting to know gun runners, members of criminal gangs, law enforcement officials on both sides of the border, and the journalists and community members who have witnessed the terrible toll of U.S.-made guns in Mexico.
The U.S. government focuses enormous energy on intercepting the people and drugs that flow northward across the southern border. But intercepting gun traffickers who carry a quarter-million U.S.-made guns down to Mexico every year is a low priority. Yet, Jusionyte writes, “neither that many drugs nor that number of people would be crossing the border if it weren’t for the guns.”
University of California Press
In 2019, when Mexican security forces tried to arrest the son of the notorious Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the operation failed because the military was outgunned by the cartel’s arsenal of U.S.-made weapons, including armored vehicles, .50-caliber machine guns, and a rocket launcher that hit a military helicopter.
Jusionyte recounts the horrific stories of torture, dismemberment, and mass murder that have given Mexican cartels the power to intimidate and co-opt whole areas of the country. But there is also something redemptive, even hopeful, in her exploration of the individual people whose life stories she relates, including the amazing story of “Samara,” a teenage girl who worked as an assassin for the notorious Zetas cartel and manages to survive and, ultimately, escape.
In her epilogue, Jusionyte makes suggestions for enlightened policies to mitigate the plague of gun violence in Mexico and the “border crisis” caused by people fleeing repression and extortion.
One obvious solution is for our country to address the ridiculously lax regulation of gun sales, especially in southern states where, as Jusionyte documents, Mexican cartels purchase much of their weaponry and ammunition.
Anything our country does to increase gun safety would reduce the flow of arms to Mexico, Jusionyte writes. Her suggestions include limits on the types and quantities of firearms civilians are allowed to buy since “nobody needs to buy a dozen AR-15s or AK-47s,” as the cartels’ straw buyers often do in the span of a single month; restricting sales of military-style semiautomatic weapons and sniper rifles; and regulating ammunition, which, even more than guns themselves, is constantly purchased in large quantities to keep criminal gangs sufficiently armed.
“Somehow we fail to connect the dots: that the violence people are fleeing, the violence we are afraid they would spread in the United States is, in large part, of our own making,” Jusionyte writes.
More than anything we need to recognize that we are in the same boat, tied together by an economy and politics that affect citizens on both sides of the border, and that can only be solved by working together.