How the US Fuels Mexican Cartel Violence

[Music] jesus christ this kind of being what everybody's starting to clamor after it's a semi-automatic rifle here we have a border patrol vehicle going very fast one of the reasons so many guns get smuggled from the us into mexico is because it's easy that's still the united states but now thanks to this private wall i can't get through it's just crazy it is crazy [Music] when you look at them from above el paso and ciudad juarez look like one big city and in a sense they are their cultures their economies and their people are tangled together in a million different ways [Music] it's almost as if this weren't one of the most contentious borders in the world take david romo he's a writer and musician who's american according to his passport but he grew up back and forth between the u.s and mexico for three generations from my mother's side we've had family that have lived both in juarez and at basel so there was this constant crossing back and forth here on the border that's completely normal [Music] just like the river is constantly shifting sometimes you're on this side and sometimes you're on that other side that's just part of our history this idea that we're never really here nor there and power always feels very anxious about it so it has to try to tighten the border it has to define this side is black this side is white we met romo he asked us to follow him to a place that he considers special a monument that marks where the border was first drawn in the mid-1800s it's one of very few places where you can stand with one foot in mexico and one in the u.s so that right there on the other side of that fence is mexico on the u.s side there's so much stuff that's been built up to make the border inhospitable over the years that it's very difficult to get to the line itself the place we're going now is one of the very few places where you can do that but to get there you have to get to the other side of a privately built border wall this private wall was built on private land owned by this random brick company that gave permission to this organization called we build the wall here we have a border patrol vehicle going very fast jesus christ because the american congress was not apportioning the money necessary for trump to build the wall they decided to just fundraise and use private money to start building a barrier around here sure enough we see the wall up ahead along with something new and unexpected the wall was recently extended onto government property with a gate that blocks the road leading to the monument [Music] weird this is weird so this wall is brand new this is private wall yeah look i used to be able to walk all the way to monument market number one this is just sad i used to ride my bike here there wasn't all this barbed wire wasn't here i can't believe this i have brought people here for years and years and now i can't get through that's still the united states but now thanks to this private wall we can't walk all the way to the marker bastard so the border itself is just on the other side of this wall here basically yeah this part of the street still used to be part of u.s property the group behind this wall raised many more millions of dollars than it spent and later four people including former trump adviser steve bannon were arrested and charged with using the project as a fundraising scam we reached out to the group but didn't hear back and trump later pardoned bannon but in any case these two miles of the wall are very real i'm honestly confused about how they can do that this is this is a public marker right yeah it's a public marker but this guy is shutting everything off you can see it all the way up here he even you know build like a nice little road so that the amiga the border patrol can go up and down right and that's part of what it means to be a fronteriso right that this barbed wire is not only like a physical thing as a mental thing right you have to make a decision you know what side you're on you can't be on both sides it's crazy it is crazy the idea that mexico is a violent place full of dangerous people and that the border is there to keep them out is a powerful idea i am very very thrilled to be here in the great state of texas today we started a big beautiful wall right on the rio grande it's also an old idea much older than donald trump hello el paso the border patrol has 20 000 agents more than twice as many as there were in 2004 there's a buildup that began under president bush and that we've continued americans tend to obsess over everything that crosses the border in one direction from south to north but the border's criminal economy wouldn't work without one key ingredient that goes the other way [Music] every year hundreds of thousands of american guns are smuggled illegally into mexico america's powerful firearms industry and its permissive gun laws are partly to blame [Music] in texas alone there are more than 5 000 stores where anyone with an id a credit card and a reasonably clean criminal record can buy a gun and those are just the licensed ones richard garcia teaches firearm safety at one of them so with this one we'll lock it back to the rear that way we can actually check to make sure it's unloaded you want to shoot some i no thank you if i were to come in here looking for a rifle to protect myself and my home what are you going to show me um this kind of being what everybody's starting to clamor after it's a semi-automatic rifle got a safety on it's got sights um very easy to use and very easy to point and we also have an extendable buttstock it's just very user-friendly you're selling guns to people do you ever worry about what they're gonna do now it is at our discretion that we can refuse service to people if we ever feel that somebody may be trying to buy a gun illegally or purchasing or somebody else we immediately stop the sale and tell them i'm sorry i can't help you but if somebody decides that they're gonna buy a gun legally here and go sell it in mexico that's that guy's character he's gonna break the law whether he's doing it with guns i mean he might be doing with drugs too i can't control what an individual is going to do [Music] one of the reasons so many guns get smuggled from the us into mexico is because it's easy one extremely weird thing about this border is that in one direction from mexico into the u.s it's one of the most tightly controlled if not the most tightly controlled borders in the world in this direction from the u.s into mexico it's virtually open if you just go through the nothing to declare lane you go through as we're going through right now nobody stops you nobody asks you anything perhaps perhaps you're subjected to a random inspection but almost certainly not so if you're a smuggler trying to move things in this direction north to south all you really have to do is put it in your car and head on over in the event that you do get stopped it helps to have someone on the inside this woman works for the mexican government at a border inspection post but she says she also works smuggling weapons for the juarez cartel sometimes hundreds at a time [Music] in case you think corruption is a uniquely mexican problem the whole system wouldn't work without some help from the other side and the sorts of cross-border relationships that are common here exist in the underworld [Music] for over 20 years there's been a low intensity war in ciudad juarez for control over the border the city police agreed to show us some of what that looks like as long as we didn't use their names or show their faces they say they fear retaliation from the cartels as rival groups and corrupt officials battle for turf low-level gang members turn up dead alarmingly often [Music] the police took us to a cartel safe house that just days prior had been the scene of a brutal crime jacob because it's the olympia jesus christian respiration [Music] now they're taking us to the place where they found their bodies illustrated foreign [Music] oh one person who knows about violence in juarez is gustavo de la rosa a lawyer and long-time human rights defender de la rosa helped expose the mexican government's role in several murders and disappearances in the drug wars in response he received death threats and at one point had to flee the city alot of fronteras especially nasa [Music] for years people have contrasted the violence of ciudad juarez with the low crime rates of el paso to argue that the two cities are somehow fundamentally different but even that sense of peace was shattered in august of 2019 when el paso was visited by a distinctly american form of violence so today is the one year anniversary of the mass shooting the terrorist attack at this walmart in el paso all of these crosses represent each of the people who was killed that day [Music] the attacker was a white nationalist who who came here specifically to target people of mexican descent he drove over 600 miles to get here even though in the dallas area where he lives there are actually more hispanic people in dallas than there are here in el paso but he still came here to the border to perpetrate this act of terrorism because the border is a symbolically symbolically important place [Applause] [Music] after the shooting it seemed everyone in el paso knew someone who was affected david romo wrote a song about a childhood friend he lost in the attack [Music] in spanish [Music] on august 3rd 2019 a man armed with a romanian ak-47 and a white supremacist manifesto walked into the same shopping strip and massacred 22 from teresa and one of the people who lost their lives at cielo vista that day was my friend art ben avides whom i remember as a good natured kid who used to talk to me about everything and nothing under the sun this massacre made me feel like holy crap man it brought back all these memories on how naive we were how innocent we were as kids that there's somebody in a truck asking you for your citizenship or when you cross from one light to another they ask you you know who are you where are you from that barbed wire is normal that that all these deaths you know all these bodies that crop up are just normal when we tried to go to the monument marker we were physically prevented from getting there what was the significance of that experience for you and to me that was such a symbolic place it's a sight of memory in this side of of what it means to be a transnational so yeah it was anger that these guys these minutemen can come in here and raise funds to up my own land you know now i'm i'm i'm treated as a foreigner in my own body you say hell no i'm not gonna let that barbed wire fence cut you know cut a line right down my middle of the brain i'm not gonna decide one or the other i'm gonna be both [Music] a few days later we went back to the same place we had tried to visit with romo but this time we approached from the mexican side where there was no wall to restrict our movement [Music] once again we saw families swimming in the river we also realized that the international boundary here runs just west of the river meaning they were inadvertently in the [Music] u.s foreign [Music] it was a small reminder that the border is a messy thing impossible to define or control completely even in this border which is you know probably the most heavily enforced border in the entire world drones cameras border patrol agents the amount of resources that are devoted to making sure everybody knows exactly where this border is and never crosses it even here you have these weird absurd in-between zones where people can cross the border without even knowing it they can go swimming in another country without even knowing it [Music] better laughs [Music] [Music] you

Channel: VICE News

Views: 3,232,381

Keywords: VICE News, VICE News Tonight, VICE on HBO, news, vice video, VICE on SHOWTIME, vice news 2020

Id: v0KFCzRaLAY

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AdventurousShower223]

Most of the documentary wasn't even about the title.

[u/[deleted]]

Vice is kinda sketch. Good documentaries but never trusted them

[u/[deleted]]

For how long has Vice been complete shit again? Anti gun propaganda and open boarders while in the same breath showing that Ciudad Juárez is indeed sadly more dangerous. No pressure on any Mexican official, of course. It's the white man and his guns, that's the devil. Everybody in Mexico would turn into an innocent angle, if only there were no borders and guns :(

[u/[deleted]]

More like new Vice video about open borders... bummer

[u/Gun_Toro]

Smug hipster don’t know 💩. So many fallacies in this report. I hope people open their eyes and notice the misinformation this reporter is supposedly reporting

[u/acideyezz]

Damn caca beat me to it!

[u/whythisth23]

Nice video from Vice yet again

[u/[deleted]]

It’s not about cartels. Mainly some fucking sob story about how “wE dIDnt cr0ss tHe bOrder, thE boRder cR0ssEd uS”

[u/RollerToasterz]

half the video was anti borders and the other half was anti guns. only like 30 seconds of the video talked about the cartels. lol