ARMS: U.S. Urged to Stem Flow of Small Arms to Latin America

By Haider Rizvi Reprint | | Print |

Haider Rizvi

WASHINGTON, Aug 27 1996 (IPS) - As the Bill Clinton Administration debates whether it should lift a ban on sales of sophisticated weapons to Latin America, arms control advocates here are pushing the White House to adopt tighter restrictions on the flow of small arms to the region.

“The U.S. government must adopt a code of conduct for commercial sale of arms,” says Lora Lumpe, editor of ‘Arms Sales Monitor’, a publication of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) that monitors weapons sales to Third World countries.

Currently, the White House is considering modification of a long-standing U.S. policy that prohibits the sale of jet fighters, missiles and other advanced weaponry to the region. Proponents of continued restrictions argue that a policy change could ignite a destablising, region-wide arms race.

But the FAS and other groups say the current U.S. policy on small- arms sale and weak gun control laws already are directly responsible for the deterioration of social and political scene in Latin America, fueling state-sponsored killings and torture, as well as violent, drug-related crime.

“Weak gun control laws and inadequate enforcement of existing laws have made the United States one of Latin America’s main sources of black-market arms,” say Michael Klare and David Anderson, two FAS researchers who recently concluded a study on arms sale to the region..

The study, “A Scourge of Guns,” says there are more than 200 million firearms circulating in the United States, with 245,000 federally licensed dealers selling guns to the general public.

While most of these weapons remain in private hands in the United States, it is an open secret that a large number continues to be smuggled to drug lords and criminal gangs across the border, says Klare.

Every year, private citizens in the United States purchase almost six million firearms, a percentage of which is acquired by middlemen working for smugglers who resell them to insurgents, terrorists and criminals in Latin America.

Currently, there are no restrictions in the United States on the number of guns someone can purchase, except in two state — Virginia and South Carolina, where laws prevent people from buying more than one gun per month.

Apart from their use by criminal gangs and drug dealers, activists say they are particularly disturbed by the fact that light weapons, many of which are purchased through legal commercial channels, are used by some authoritarian regimes in Latin America to repress political opposition.

“We want a complete ban on commercial sale of weapons to countries that engage in aggression and abuse of human rights,” says Lumpe, who believes that most weapons purchased by Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and other regimes in Latin America are used against political opponents.

“We oppose all kind of arms sales to government that violate human rights. The U.S. must change its policy,” added Steve Goose of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, an influential group that tracks human rights abuses worldwide.

FAS researchers say it is hard to calculate how many light weapons are being exported legally to Latin America because of the secrecy that surrounds these sales. However, they estimate from available sources that there are millions of U.S.-made light weapons in the region.

“There is a lot of secrecy surrounding the commercial sale of light weapons,” complains Lumpe, who filed a number of requests for arms sales data with the U.S. State Department under the Freedom of Information Act.

One request answered by State revealed that between 1989 and 1993 the United States sold worth over 1 billion dollars of small arms to Latin American countries.

“This may appear as a minor concern to some policymakers,” says Klare, “but the high degree of societal violence is evident enough that sale of this type and magnitude can have profound social and political implications.”

Of all the major armed conflicts that have occurred in Latin America since 1945, only a handful involved the systematic use of major weapons alone, he says. “This is true of even the most bloody conflicts in Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Peru,”

Klare adds.

According to the FAS study, light weapons continue to figure prominently in the ongoing criminal violence that has beset many Latin American countries, including Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.”

Currently, under 700 different licenses, U.S. firms are not only exporting light weapons to Latin America, but also hardware used for torture, such as shackles, handcuffs, and electric shock batons.

During the peak of Cold War in the early 1980s, Washington and Moscow had supplied millions of light arms to Latin American countries. Researchers believe that most of these weapons are now in hands of drug barons and criminal mafias operating all over Latin America.

Citing Colombia as the most telling example of links between drug smuggling and export of weapons, FAS researchers note that the country’s murder rate is now nine higher than U.S. rate. In 1992 alone, some 25,000 Colombians were killed as result of gun-related violence, an all-time record.

Of those deaths, about 4,000 were politically motivated, FAS researchers say. They add that the military and police continue to commit political and extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, and torture, despite the Colombian government’s professed efforts to reduce the violence.

In El Salvador, the social and political scene remains heavily shadowed with violence. According to FAS, over 20,000 Salvadorans have lost their lives to violence during the past four years, according to FAS estimates.

” This increase in violence is partly due to abundance of firearms,” says Klare, who believes the young Salvadorans who returned to El Salvador from U.S. cities have established a variety of violent enterprises.

Similar rises in violence in Guatemala and Brazil are also attributable to the spread of small weapons, he adds.

“In this environment,” says Lumpe, “the uncontrollable flow of fire arms can produce nothing but more and more chronic and deadly violence,”