A key goal in Vice President Kamala Harris’s bid to reduce illegal border crossings by improving life in crime-ravaged Central American countries is stuck in neutral, according to a new report.
Instead of jumping on orders to help end gun trafficking to Central American gangs, State Department offices have yet to begin, delaying implementation of a key element of the “U.S. Strategy for Addressing Root Causes of Migration in Central America.”
According to the Government Accountability Office, the State Department hasn’t reached out to top U.S. drug and arms agencies that have tracked arms legally and illegally imported from the U.S. to Latin American countries, fueling the biggest border crisis in recent history.
President Joe Biden has put Harris in charge of the border effort, which includes helping to reduce crime, as thousands of asylum-seekers cite crime as the reason the United States must take them in. She has called gun-related gang violence a root cause of the border crisis.
But the GAO report made it clear that the gun trafficking initiative in the Biden order is going nowhere fast. “State has indicated it plans to review its existing efforts and may design new efforts to address firearms trafficking in Central America. However, State has not obtained relevant available information that could support its ability to develop new firearms-focused projects in Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras,” said the audit report.
The State Department agreed, telling GAO it will get right on the recommendation to reach out to federal agencies and officials in Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
Officials won’t have to look far to see the problem. The extensive GAO report included gun numbers already collected by federal agencies and even included anecdotal information from Latin American officials about where drug gangs and cartels get their weapons.
The Central American countries, for example, often ask U.S. officials to trace the origins of suspected U.S.-supplied weapons. Over a four-year period, for example, 27,000 trace requests came in, and the federal agencies were able to show that about a third were U.S.-supplied.
The GAO also determined that not all are illegally trafficked, with some coming in legally because those countries do not manufacture firearms.
In one stunning section of the new report, the GAO said that many firearms go to police and military and are sometimes “rented” to drug gangs.
“Although U.S. agencies have no reliable data on criminals’ acquisition of firearms in Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, U.S. and foreign law enforcement officials said their experience had shown that criminals in those countries purchase firearms illegally in local black markets, steal them from legal firearm owners, and rent or borrow them from legal owners,” said the report.
GAO added, “U.S. and foreign officials described instances in which firearms were apparently rented or loaned to criminals by legal owners, including police officers and private citizens. For example, a Guatemalan official said that in one case a firearm registered in Guatemala was loaned by the legal owner, used in a crime in El Salvador, and then returned to the owner. Belizean law enforcement officials said such cases are difficult to prosecute because the legal owners often claim the firearm was stolen.”
