People wait in line in Guatemala City to obtain and renew gun permits.

The US Is Pushing Guns on a Country It Labels Violent and Corrupt

The National Security Council says Guatemala’s lawlessness is fueling waves of desperate migrants. The Commerce Department has said the instability is a ‘unique opportunity’ for gunmakers.

By Monte Reel

Data analysis and graphics by Eric Fan and Christopher Cannon

Photos by James Rodriguez

August 10, 2023, 12:01 AM EDT

In courtrooms inside the judiciary tower in Guatemala City, Judge Carlos Ruano constantly confronts stories of criminals and their guns. There was the hit man who had a Glock 9mm tucked under his belt when the police apprehended him. The shooter with the semiautomatic Beretta that sent a bullet through the chest of a man playing basketball in a park. The extortionist whose Smith & Wesson .38 Special was confiscated when he was arrested for shaking down bus drivers. In the evidence packets, snapshots of the guns often appear next to the mug shots of the defendants, as if they’re partners in crime. The backstories of the accused criminals—dates of birth, occupations, addresses, family connections—are dutifully documented. The histories of the guns are not.

Many of the guns in Guatemala, including the three detailed above, were legally imported from the US. American gunmakers have been the leading supplier of firearms to Guatemala for years, but following a regulatory change in 2020, shipments have more than doubled. The vast majority have been semiautomatic pistols, the weapon most commonly used in US gun crimes. The influx has pushed Guatemala ahead of Brazil, a country with 12 times its population, as the top destination for US-made semiautomatics in Latin America. During the same three years, the number of murders in Guatemala has risen annually, after 11 straight years of decline. More than 80% have involved firearms.

Lea esta historia en Español.

What happens to guns after they’re imported and before they end up at crime scenes is often a blank spot in the public record, and the judge suspects these gaps aren’t innocent oversights. He’s noticed a trend in the cases that come into his courtroom: When a gun is confiscated by police and traced back to a national database, the listed owner of the gun—a commercial gun dealer, or a private security company, or even a governmental agency—files a report, after the fact, claiming the firearm in question was stolen or simply lost. That Glock carried by the hit man? It was imported in a shipment destined for the Guatemalan national police, whose administrators reported the pistol stolen from a warehouse after the man’s arrest. The Beretta used on the basketball court was registered to a gun store, which later claimed it was among 106 stolen firearms. The Smith & Wesson had been in a private security company’s warehouse, and after the pistol was found with the extortionist, the company reported that it was one of 236 guns that somehow had vanished from its arsenal.

Judge Carlos Ruano, head of the Ninth Criminal Trial Court in Guatemala.

“A backpack, a sweater, an umbrella—those things can be lost,” says Ruano. He narrows his eyes and lifts his chin. “But that many guns? It just defies logic.” To him, the explanation seems obvious: The guns weren’t lost or stolen; they were sold on the black market. Ruano has asked the national prosecutors in the Public Ministry to scrutinize the specific incidents. The requests have been ignored, he says. “The Public Ministry no longer investigates these cases.”

America, Global Gun Pusher by Bloomberg Investigations. Read the series

Guatemala’s unwillingness to crack down on the diversion of firearms has come as the influx of guns has soared. In 2020, regulatory authority for approving firearms exports shifted from the US Department of State to the Department of Commerce, a switch that the gun industry hoped would ease delays and result in more exports. Since then, the rise in sales to Guatemala has been among the steepest of any nation, according to a Bloomberg News analysis of trade data. Imports of US semiautomatic firearms jumped from an average of about 3,600 per year in the 2010s to more than 10,000 in 2021, and nearly 20,000 in 2022. Those figures reflect the broader success of American gunmakers since the US assault-weapons ban ended in 2004. In that time, their semiautomatic exports across the globe have totaled 3.7 million—more than doubling in the past six years alone.

Guatemala vividly, and often tragically, illustrates how the countries on the receiving end of the US export surge are often ill-equipped to handle it. Joe Biden vowed to reverse the regulatory change while campaigning for president, but his administration has kept it in place, and the guns have continued to flow to Guatemala—even as the administration has documented, in multiple State Department reports, the country’s slide into lawlessness. On paper, the foreign policy priority of the US in Guatemala is strengthening the rule of law—in no small part so that its citizens aren’t impelled to migrate away from a dangerous and broken system. In practice, the US government is taking advantage of a business opportunity connected to that same instability: gun sales.

Sources: USAID, United Nations Development Program

Shipping more guns to a place the US labels corrupt and violent seems a blatant contradiction to Ruano—“especially in a country like Guatemala, with such weak institutions that can’t cope with or control the weapons that do enter,” he adds. But it’s not just the Guatemalan government that’s weak on oversight. The US government’s regulatory safeguards, designed to prevent American weapons from being used to commit human-rights abuses or other crimes abroad, are full of holes, according to recent audits of those programs by internal watchdogs.

Those failures undercut the priorities that the US National Security Council identified for Central America in a recent report: to counteract the “root causes” driving illegal immigration to the southwest border. Those causes include “pervasive violence” and “entrenched networks of corruption.” A State Department assessment of the human-rights situation in Guatemala published this year reads like a checklist for a repressive dystopia: “arbitrary arrest and detention”; “serious problems with the independence of the judiciary”; and “serious government corruption.”

American guns, according to some in Congress, are further corroding a bad situation. “This is one American-made product that should not be pushed upon countries like Guatemala, where we are seeing a mass exodus of primarily women and children because they’re fleeing a government that has failed to answer to their basic needs,” says Representative Norma Torres, a Democrat from California who was born in Guatemala.

From his courtroom bench, Ruano says, he’s seen that guns are often the first link in a chain that drives thousands of Guatemalans to migrate north every year. “Violence increases, and of course people flee because they no longer feel safe in their neighborhoods,” he says. In the past five years, the number of Guatemalans apprehended at the US border has soared, with many of them citing the threat of violence as their reason for migrating.

As Ruano speaks about crime victims who become asylum seekers, two men chat in the hallway just outside the door. They’re slumping in hard plastic chairs, casting obligatory glances at everyone who shuffles past, then resuming their conversation. They’re his bodyguards, assigned by court officials to shadow him because he’s made powerful enemies. From 2007 to 2019, a reformist mindset held sway in Guatemala; thousands of government officials, police and military members were jailed during a comprehensive anticorruption probe run by a United Nations-backed commission. During that era, the judge was approached by a Supreme Court justice, who he says was seeking leniency for her son, a man who’d been charged with fraud and money laundering. Ruano recorded their meeting, and the audio recording cost the justice her job and landed her on the State Department’s list of “corrupt and undemocratic actors.”

But in 2019, then-President Jimmy Morales found out the commission was examining allegations of graft that involved him personally, and he dissolved the panel. Others who’d been under investigation, including a loose confederation of ex-military officers and business elites, joined forces in an aggressive and successful campaign against the reformers. Last year, after the ousted justice’s allies cemented their power over the judiciary, she was reinstated to the Supreme Court. Within weeks of her return, Ruano was charged with a crime: illegally recording the conversation with the justice. Now he’s waiting to see if the Supreme Court strips him of his judicial immunity to allow a trial. If convicted on all five of the counts he’s been charged with, he faces as many as 40 years in prison.

Ruano has been a judge for 14 years, and today his job is one where guns, violence and institutional corruption crash together. He’s weighing a decision as tough as any he’s made in the courtroom: leave his fate up to a judiciary that he believes has been thoroughly corrupted, or join the hundreds of thousands of Guatemalans who, fearing for their safety, have sought asylum abroad.

“It’s a very serious situation,” he says. “But I have to prepare myself. I don’t have much time.”

Oscar Grazioso and his brother, Renzo, run one of the most successful firearms dealerships in Guatemala, specializing in imports from the Italian gunmaker Beretta Holding SA. For years the guns were generally routed from Italy via Spain, which offered direct flights to Guatemala. When Spain banned the transshipment of certain firearms through its borders, Renzo says, the brothers began relying more on the US, where Beretta operates a manufacturing plant in Tennessee. Such shifts have become common as more international manufacturers have moved production to the US to take advantage of its comparatively permissive gun regulations. Today many of the major firearms companies that were founded in Europe—Austria’s Glock, Germany’s Sig Sauer, and Beretta among them—manufacture at least some of their guns in the US and export them from there.

One morning in May, in an office behind the brothers’ showroom, Oscar sifts through the paperwork related to a large shipment of guns that has just arrived in Guatemala on a Delta Air Lines flight. This shipment had been inadvertently split into multiple parcels in the Atlanta airport, which meant the information listed on the importation documents didn’t match the contents of the parcel, and therefore the guns couldn’t be released. While Oscar makes calls to Beretta in the US to straighten out the problem, Renzo explains that untangling bureaucratic knots is a big part of a gun importer’s work. Ordering from American manufacturers, however, usually results in relatively few headaches. “It’s easier because of the transportation, and also because of the permits, now that it’s the Department of Commerce,” he says.

Oscar Grazioso, owner of the store El Mundo de las Armas (“World of Guns”) in Guatemala City.

For decades, the State Department oversaw the issuance of export licenses for firearms. Part of the job entailed identifying red flags—human-rights violations, civil disorder, excessive violence and so on—in the countries where the guns were to be sold, and rejecting the license applications if the sale might contradict US interests or foreign policy goals. During the Trump administration, the State Department shed staff. The office of Defense Trade Controls Licensing, which vetted and effectively ruled on the firearms license applications, lost 28% of its staff by 2018 and shuttered its training program for agents, according to a 2019 audit by the Office of the Inspector General. Employees told the auditors they were struggling to keep up with their workload, and one official stated the staffing reductions had “affected both the quantity and quality” of their evaluations of export license applications. Of the approved export applications the auditors reviewed, 95% lacked information required by the government’s guidelines. Unless things changed, the audit stated, there was “limited assurance that licenses issued meet US national security and foreign policy objectives.”

Sources: US Census Bureau, Statistics Canada
Note: Excludes countries with a population less than 1 million.

In 2020 the Trump administration shifted the authority to issue export licenses for small arms—a category that includes semiautomatic pistols and rifles—from State to Commerce. As the switch was being debated, some in Congress warned that it might make it easier for US guns to end up in the hands of bad actors abroad. Proponents argued that it would modernize an outdated and inefficient process that always should have been overseen by Commerce, the department specializing in matters of international trade. Government officials backing the move insisted that safeguards would remain in place to block any problematic sales.

The gun industry was all for the shift to the Commerce Department, and it eagerly anticipated more international sales as a result. In a letter urging members of Congress to support the move, the president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation—a trade association for gun manufacturers—predicted the Commerce takeover would be “a significant positive development for the industry … all while not in any way hindering national security.” The National Rifle Association described the change to its members as “among the most important pro-gun initiatives by the Trump administration to date.” In July 2021, Deana McPherson, the chief financial officer of Smith & Wesson Brands Inc., explained to investors on an earnings call that Commerce had opened the flow of guns—particularly handguns—to international markets, eliminating the licensing delays that, along with Covid-19 uncertainty, had reduced exports. Comparing the early months of 2020 with those of 2021, she described the difference as “sort of night and day.”

In the first 16 months after the switch, the Commerce Department approved almost $16 billion in firearms export licenses, which, according to congressional estimates, represented a 30% increase over historical averages. The rate of approvals didn’t change significantly after Biden took office. In a letter to Biden’s commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, last September, a group of Democratic lawmakers said that crime control and the protection of human rights are among the factors her department is required by law to consider when issuing gun-export licenses. They cited licenses for sales in Guatemala, among other countries, as evidence that the department was failing to do so. The letter said Raimondo’s office was effectively “padding the gun industry’s profits while putting deadly weapons in the hands of corrupt actors around the world.”

The representatives and senators posed a list of questions to the department, including requests for more detailed statistics on license denials, examples of any export applications rejected because of human-rights concerns, and a list of the department’s strategies to prevent the diversion of guns to criminals and corrupt actors. Their letter asked for answers no later than Oct. 28, 2022. The Commerce Department still hasn’t responded and has ignored follow-up requests, according to the lawmakers. “Secretary Raimondo’s lack of transparency on gun exports is deeply concerning,” Senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement to Bloomberg Businessweek, “and raises serious questions about whether the Commerce Department’s actions align with President Biden’s gun safety priorities.”

At the time of the rule change in 2020, the value of gun exports to Guatemala had been relatively steady for years. They jumped about 35%, adjusted for inflation, in 2021, and soared again in 2022. Last year the dollar value of guns sent from the US to Guatemala was more than quadruple the annual average of the decade preceding the switch to the Commerce Department.

Source: General Directorate of Arms and Ammunition Control

Commerce says that, unlike State, it employs agents who specialize in export enforcement, and that this has strengthened, not diminished, the government’s ability to ensure that US guns don’t end up in the hands of the criminal or corrupt. However, the US Government Accountability Office last year published an audit finding that these agents are rarely used in the region. Even though Commerce employs hundreds of such agents around the world, none were permanently assigned to Central America. And throughout the four countries the report analyzed (Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras), the department had conducted just two end-use checks on firearms exports in all of 2020 and 2021.

The Commerce Department wouldn’t say whether any additional end-use checks have been conducted in Guatemala since the beginning of 2022 or whether any export enforcement officers have been assigned to Central America at all, even though for years the per capita rate of gun violence has been higher there than anywhere else in the world. In February, the Biden administration issued an order to prioritize human rights as a factor in weapons sales, but the flow of guns to Guatemala has continued uninterrupted. According to the Guatemalan government, gun imports so far this year are on pace to roughly match 2022’s record.

Representative Torres believes Commerce is more eager to fast-track licenses and facilitate deals than State was, and with several other lawmakers she’s drafted legislation to return licensing authority to the State Department. “The Commerce Department, they have a different mission—to sell, sell, sell American-made products,” she says. But Guatemala’s track record, she says, should disqualify the country as a trade partner for firearms. “Guatemala has proven to be a bad actor all around when it comes to weapons—even weapons and equipment provided to them by the US military,” she says.

The Commerce Department, they have a different mission—to sell, sell, sell American-made products.

Representative Norma Torres

The Grazioso brothers worry that such concerns could result in a firearms export ban to Guatemala. The guns they import, they say, are rigorously documented and tracked through the point of sale, and gun stores that violate standards end up on government blacklists that prevent them from importing. Such oversight has allowed the gun business to thrive, they said. They also credit the robust trade in part to the Commerce Department’s longstanding promotional efforts. The brothers have worked closely with Commerce officials at the US Embassy in Guatemala. Each year the department hosts delegations of Guatemalan importers attending American gun and security trade shows, and Commerce officials also have organized trade missions to promote sales in Central America. According to a Commerce Department memo from 2020, the stated goal of one such mission was “to leverage the regional political and economic climate” of the region to spur opportunities.

Source: US Census Bureau
Note: Export data to Nicaragua ends in 2018.

In fact, the safety and security market, the trade category that includes guns, has been identified by the department as a “best prospect industry sector” in the market analysis of Guatemala it provides to potential US exporters. Factors such as gang violence, drug trafficking, an ineffective police force and the proliferation of private security companies have spurred demand, giving American companies “a unique opportunity to showcase their safety and security solutions,” according to one Commerce Department report.

Earlier this year Oscar Grazioso was part of a delegation of local gun importers who, with assistance from the Commerce Department, attended the SHOT Show in Las Vegas—America’s largest annual trade show for gunmakers. “In fact, the delegation from Guatemala is one of the biggest in Vegas,” he says. The Commerce Department helps importers like him connect with manufacturers in the US. “They’re always trying to make it easier for us,” Renzo says.

Judge Ruano and his colleagues sentenced the extortionist arrested with the Smith & Wesson .38—the gun that was among the 236 the private security company said it had lost—to prison for illegal possession of a firearm, among other crimes. Three years later, in 2019, police charged the man with several more counts of attempted murder. From behind bars, he was using a smuggled cellphone to make as many as 60 calls a day to private bus operators, police said, telling them his hit men would kill them or their drivers if they didn’t pay their weekly “quotas.” He was part of a network of extortionists that for years has sent ripples of terror through Guatemala City and its outskirts. One of the households it ultimately reached was that of the Muñoz family, whose lives continue to be radically altered by the guns coming into the country.

You’d never know by looking at Gaby Muñoz’s lineless, 20-year-old face, but she carries the weight of that violence everywhere she goes. She grew up in Villa Nueva, one of the toughest neighborhoods in the capital’s metro area, with four siblings and four half-siblings. On Villa Nueva’s street corners, young men linger, working as lookouts for gangs, keeping track of everyone who comes and goes. Auto shops sell tires and hubcaps, and street vendors hawk everything from basketball shoes to underwear, but many of the shops that line the streets sit empty, abandoned. In May, a banner hung outside one of those businesses—a shuttered Domino’s Pizza franchise—with an explanation: “Unfortunately, and as a consequence of criminal acts that put our staff at risk, we have seen the need to temporarily suspend operations.”

Gun violence has afflicted Gaby Muñoz’s family three times.

Violent crime has strangled economic opportunity in the neighborhood, and Muñoz says it forces residents to risk their lives to earn a living. Her oldest brother, Héctor, got a job with one of the local bus lines when he was 14, starting as a ticket taker and graduating to driver a few years later. At the time, in the mid-2010s, criminal gangs were making millions of dollars a year by extorting bus companies, threatening drivers if their bosses didn’t make weekly payments. Around the same time, the Guatemalan government began funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies into the transportation sector, much of it flowing with a complete lack of transparency. This, according to investigations launched by the anticorruption commission, created shadowy alliances among the extortionists, business elites and government officials.

The owner of Héctor’s bus line always handed over his payments, until one week he didn’t. At the time, Héctor was three days into healing from an appendicitis surgery, but the owner asked him to cut his recovery short to fill in on a shift. Héctor needed the money, Muñoz says. He had a wife and five young children to support. At about 5 p.m., a hit man employed by the extortion ring boarded the bus and shot Héctor through the skull. He survived for almost a year but never left the hospital and was never able to utter a word before dying from severe brain injuries.

Gaby’s second-oldest brother, Byron, had by that time also found work as a bus driver, for a different line. Like the others in the family, she says, he was uneducated, with few prospects. History repeated itself a few years later: A gunman for the bus extortionists shot him. They didn’t intend to kill him, Muñoz says, but instead wanted to send a message to the bus line’s owner. The bullet went through Byron’s left forearm. The gunman fled on a motorcycle but crashed into a car during the getaway, and police arrested him. Byron, meanwhile, permanently lost the use of his left arm below the elbow. Today he still drives a bus, steering through the streets with the full use of just one arm.

Naturally, some of the other siblings began to question whether they should look elsewhere for opportunity. Gaby’s youngest brother, Emerson, is two years older than her, and her relationship with him is especially close. Both had friends who’d recently crossed the southwest border into the US, and the possibility intrigued Emerson. Many of the migrants who made it across cited violence as their reason for coming and for seeking asylum. From 2012 through 2018, what the US government calls migrant “encounters” at the southwest border generally fluctuated between 250,000 and 500,000 per fiscal year. In 2017, for example, the total number of migrant apprehensions numbered 303,916, with more than 38,000 of them citing “claims of credible fear” as their motive for crossing, according to the US Border Patrol. By 2019 the total number of apprehensions jumped to 851,508, with more than 66,000 claiming fear.

During the pandemic, the US government declared a public-health emergency and implemented Title 42, which removed the opportunity for migrants to apply for asylum and other humanitarian protections. Despite those restrictions, the number of encounters at the southwest border has soared under Biden—to 1.7 million in 2021 and 2.2 million in 2022. Guatemalans accounted for 228,220 of the 2022 encounters, more than any country other than Mexico.

Emerson looked into joining that northward tide. But he’d need to hire a “coyote” to arrange his transportation and passage. The price tag—anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000—was more than he could afford. So he decided to stay. He spent the little money he had on a Bajaj Pulsar motorbike.

This spring, Emerson was riding early in the morning when two bullets hit him in the lower back, narrowly missing the base of his spine. As he bled on the street, he managed to call his sister’s cellphone. The shooter, or shooters, had stolen his motorcycle and fled. When Gaby arrived, Emerson was lying unconscious in the street. Gaby rode in the ambulance with him to the hospital, where he remained in critical condition for several days. Today he’s still mostly bedridden and must use a colostomy bag, but he’ll survive.

On June 1, Judge Ruano slipped his black robe over his shirt and tie, opened his laptop and logged in to a court hearing that was to be conducted via videoconference. His lawyer sat to his left, because at this hearing Ruano wasn’t the judge but the defendant.

On his screen, Ruano saw a gallery of the forces that have aligned against him. The plaintiffs acting as prosecutors in his case are members of the Foundation Against Terrorism, known by its Spanish initials, FCT. It was founded primarily by ex-military members and their families, particularly those who were charged with human-rights abuses and other crimes after Guatemala’s brutal civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996. The leaders of the group have been denounced by the US State Department as corrupt and antidemocratic, but in the past three years they’ve effectively seized control of much of the Guatemalan judiciary.

A billboard with guns decorates the front facade of a gun store in Guatemala City. — A billboard decorates the front facade of a gun store in Guatemala City.

It’s the FCT, not Public Ministry prosecutors, that has brought the case against Ruano. The group has taken credit for forcing more than 20 judges to flee the country since the 2019 disbanding of the anticorruption commission, an institution the US government spent tens of millions of dollars to support. The FCT also has led the campaigns that have imprisoned journalists, prosecutors and politicians who spoke out against the sorts of human-rights abuses the group’s members and its allies have been accused of. The allegations have ranged from mass killings to rape to the persecution of political enemies.

Ricardo Méndez Ruiz, founder of the FCT, likes to compare it to a band of sharpshooters, and he’s posted photos online of the officials he’s pursued in court. The images feature large red X’s over their faces, representing a sniper’s target. “A legal shot,” Méndez Ruiz wrote under the pictures. “A civil death.” The group’s connection to guns isn’t solely metaphorical. Members are outspoken in their support of the firearms trade, and they believe more guns in Guatemala will help maintain civil order against the country’s enemies within. “The people must be armed and defend life, liberty and property,” the FCT’s attorney, Raúl Falla, has written. “Fire is fought with fire, but in greater proportion. An armed populace is a populace at peace.”

A police checkpoint, set up to find unauthorized guns and stolen vehicles, in Guatemala City.

The idea that the trade of guns and other weapons can be stopped to promote foreign policy objectives is written into the US Federal Code. “The judicious use of export controls is intended to deter human rights violations and abuses, distance the United States from such violations and abuses, and avoid contributing to civil disorder in a country or region,” the code states. When lawmakers in the US argue that the gun trade is causing harm in Guatemala, they don’t simply mean that it feeds street crime and violence, which in turn fuels migration; they also mean that it legitimizes and enables the actions of those wielding power, which in today’s Guatemala means groups such as the FCT.

During the court hearing, Falla and Méndez Ruiz argued that Ruano—who in 2021 was honored in a ceremony by the State Department as an “anticorruption champion”—was a threat to Guatemala’s security. As he listened, Ruano didn’t hide his exasperation. His head shook slowly from side to side, his eyebrows climbed his forehead, his mouth repeatedly bent into an astonished smile. In a tone of disbelief, he asked the court: “What message does this send to the public? What message does it send to judges? That we have to give in to pressure? That we have to do favors, and that we have to take bribes, wherever they come from?”

As Ruano spoke, Falla raised his cellphone to his screen to take a photo of the judge. When the hearing was over, Falla posted the picture of Ruano on Twitter, captioning it with the same words he had used earlier that day to conclude his statement to the court: “Prisoner or Fugitive?” It was a challenge to Ruano to accept one of the two outcomes of the case that the FCT considers acceptable.

After that, Falla retweeted, without comment, several pictures of pistols and automatic rifles that originally had been posted as promotional advertisements by American gun dealers and manufacturers.

In the two months before Guatemala’s Aug. 20 presidential election, the crisis inside Guatemala’s justice system deepened, throwing the country into turmoil and jeopardizing the election itself.

In June one of the country’s most vocal critics of government corruption, a newspaper publisher named José Rubén Zamora, was put on trial. Prosecutors from the Public Ministry, with courtroom assistance from the FCT, accused him of money laundering—a charge that numerous human-rights organizations and press freedom advocates cast as a manufactured attempt to criminalize independent journalism. As Zamora attempted to defend himself against the charges, the ministry and the FCT targeted the attorneys who tried to help him. Ultimately, four of Zamora’s lawyers were prosecuted and detained, and two others were forced to flee the country. When Zamora’s newspaper, El Periódico, highlighted irregularities in the case, the government accused nine of its journalists of obstructing justice. The State Department issued a series of statements condemning the Guatemalan government prosecutors.

One afternoon after another day in court, Zamora stood in a parking lot behind the court tower, waiting for his ride. Thin and angular, with bright silver hair, he held a manila folder in both hands, which obscured the handcuffs locked around his wrists. He said he appreciated the US government’s words of encouragement, but he also dismissed them as toothless. Real change in Guatemala, he said, would come only when the private sector and big business demanded it. That’s where the US could step in. “The US should paralyze trade—guns and everything else,” Zamora said. “The only way the forces will shift here is if they feel it in their wallets.” Weeks later, Zamora was convicted, and he’s serving a six-year prison sentence.

Upstairs in the same building where Zamora was tried, Ruano was attempting to go about business as usual, but little in Guatemala felt normal this summer. On June 25, more than 20 candidates for president competed in a first round of voting to determine which two of them would earn a spot on the August ballot. Bernardo Arévalo of the Semilla party took a public stand supporting all the judges, prosecutors and journalists who’d been imprisoned or forced into exile. During that first-round vote, Arévalo captured about 12%, enough to finish second and secure his place in the runoff.

Ruano was elated. “The sun’s rays are about to shine,” he posted on Twitter. “In Guatemala, a dawn is here …”

The optimism was premature. The Semilla party, which before the voting hadn’t seemed a threat to the status quo, was now in the Public Ministry’s crosshairs. The ministry announced that Semilla had collected invalid signatures when it registered as a party in 2018, and therefore Arévalo’s candidacy was fraudulent. Once again, the US government decried Guatemala’s flouting of democratic norms.

July was marked by days of confusion and judicial chaos. A Guatemalan high court ruled that the government couldn’t retroactively reverse the outcome of an election, effectively restoring Arévalo’s candidacy. But the very next day, the Public Ministry said it would continue to investigate Semilla, and its agents raided the party’s headquarters, seizing files and documents.

A man sells gun and rifle holsters in Guatemala City.

By the beginning of August, the FCT was leading the charge against Arévalo’s campaign. But with each passing week, he was rising in the polls. It seemed for a moment that Ruano’s case might get lost in the tumult. But he wasn’t safe. In media interviews, Arévalo admitted that even if he won, his hands would be tied when it came to helping those who’d already been targeted by the FCT and the Public Ministry, and those who’d gone into exile might not easily return.

Ruano was ordered to report to court on Aug. 4 to present any evidence to support his claim that his judicial immunity shouldn’t be stripped. Normally, he says, such court proceedings are scheduled up to two months in advance; he’d been given days. “It seems they’re speeding things up, trying to rush it,” he says.

If the court strips him of immunity, as it has in similar cases involving other judges, Ruano fears he’d have no choice but to go into exile. “It puts me at heightened risk of suffering attacks on my security, on my liberty and even on my life.” He believes the FCT will push for him to be detained in prison, alongside many of the violent criminals he’s sentenced over the years.

The prisons in Guatemala are notoriously violent. Every year, Guatemalan prison officials confiscate dozens of guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition during surprise inspections of the inmates’ cells. The week Ruano was summoned to court, inside Guatemala City’s largest prison an inmate shot two guards and another prisoner.

The gun used by the inmate will likely end up in the government’s warehouse of confiscated firearms—a stash that this year totaled 68,980—the majority of which had at one time been legally registered.

While Ruano’s case progressed, a couple of events that by now felt familiar punctuated Guatemala’s strange days of summer. The US government in late July sanctioned 10 more officials for corruption and for undermining democracy. And the first case the judge reviewed as the Supreme Court deliberated his fate was the sentencing of a criminal for illegal possession of a firearm.

Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates gun-safety measures, is backed by Michael Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.

With assistance from: Natalie Obiko Pearson and Michael Riley

Editors: Flynn McRoberts, Daniel Ferrara and Jason Grotto

Methodology:

Bloomberg analyzed data from two federal agencies to piece together the volume, value and foreign destinations of US gunmakers’ exports: the US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. We examined data from 2003 through 2022.

Each year, the ATF publishes its Annual Firearms Manufacturing and Export Report, which reveals the number of firearms made and exported by each licensed US manufacturer in the previous year. The reports provide the name and address of each gunmaker as well as the types of firearms it produced, but do not include the trade value or the foreign destinations of the guns.

So Bloomberg used international trade data maintained by the Census Bureau to track guns exported from each US state to their foreign destinations. To examine the value and volume of centerfire semiautomatic rifles and pistols, reporters relied on the 10-digit Harmonized Tariff Schedule codes. The analysis excluded military rifles, which have different codes.

During its work, Bloomberg identified a discrepancy between US and Canadian trade records that led to a significant US undercounting of its semiautomatic weapons exports to Canada. Specifically, US trade data reflected no semiautomatic firearm exports to Canada prior to 2020, when a regulatory change shifted the oversight of small arms exports from the State Department to the Commerce Department. However, Canadian trade data show that US gunmakers have been exporting semiautomatic pistols and rifles to Canada since at least 2005 — data Bloomberg confirmed by interviewing buyers and retailers in Canada. The US export data to Canada is derived from Canadian import data, due to the US-Canadian Data Exchange program. Consequently, for all statistics concerning semiautomatic exports to Canada, Bloomberg used trade data from Statistics Canada, the Canadian national statistical agency.

The US Is Pushing Guns on a Country It Labels Violent and Corrupt

The US Is Pushing Guns on a Country It Labels Violent and Corrupt

The National Security Council says Guatemala’s lawlessness is fueling waves of desperate migrants. The Commerce Department has said the instability is a ‘unique opportunity’ for gunmakers.

An Increasing Flow

An Unwelcome Reversal

Plenty of Buyers

Getting Armed

Open for Business

Missing in Action