To Arms!

Have (No) Gun, Will Travel

As the creaking bus shudders around a tight mountain curve, an obstacle looms up ahead in the road. Thrown forward by the driver's rapid braking, we peer through the windows to see what waits in the dark road and dense Chiapan jungle surrounding us: a huge boulder blocking the narrow highway, and a mass of of men holding rifles. "Well, here it goes," we think, trying to remember whether we've stashed our passports and cash in the document wallets we wear under our clothes, and wondering whether this act of banditry will include beatings and abduction, or merely robbery. When a few of the armed men step into the headlights, amid intense scrutiny, we and the and the other passengers heave a collective sigh of relief. This time, the gunmen stopping us on a remote stretch of jungle road are soldiers, not bandits.

Halfway between Palenque and Bonampak, a few days later, our new impromptu caravan stops for breakfast. After watching the motley assortment of foreigners clamber out of the rickety VW buses and Suburbans used as "colectivos," our escort of Federales heads of into a nearby field. As we load our plates in the roadside buffet-style cafe, we hear a series of sharp reports. Several of the locals glance around nervously, just as my husband raises his eyebrows and says, "M-16, no doubt about it." A few of the more jaded travelers toss out wry witticisms -- themselves not knowing whether or not there was any truth in them -- about political prisoners.

In Mexico D.F., violent crime has become epidemic. Locals as well as foreigners are uncomfortably aware of the city's taxi crime wave, and of the vast amounts of other opportunistic crime the capitol suffers. Armed guards stand in the doorways of virtually every shop, from goldsmith's shops to kitchen appliance stores. Police officers mill about on every corner. Troop transports are a common sight, occasionally disgorging a group of baby-faced draftees and their M-16's to stand around a government building or mildly menace passersby. Many victims report not only that police did not help protect them from criminals, but that the police (or, as the official statements go, people dressed like police) were the very ones who beat, robbed, or raped them.

Men with guns. Everywhere you go in Mexico, there are men with guns. This in and of itself is not a problem; as Robert A. Heinlein once said, "An armed society is a polite society." But in Mexico and other Central American nations, "society" is not armed. In Mexico, the difference between men with guns (I've never seen a legally armed Mexican woman) and men without is not one of legal choice. In Mexico, an armed citizen is either a government lackey, or a criminal. In Mexico, as elsewhere, an increase in gun control equals an increase in the ability of armed criminals to prey on law-abiding, unarmed citizens. In this particular nation, the independent variable in the equation is that citizens have no gun rights, and possession of a single round of ammunition, let alone a handgun kept for home defense, carries a hefty prison term. So, too, have simple mistakes -- such as missing an exit in the U.S. and inadvertantly crossing the border with a U.S.-legal gun in the car -- cost American citizens the price of a long sentence. In a Mexican prison. Let us all collectively shudder.

Why should you and I care? That's a subject that will have to be taken up in another column. But for now, let us remember that Heinlein also noted that "An armed man is a citizen. An unarmed man is a subject" -- and that in Mexico, as in all other disarmed states, the difference is all too readily apparent.