Ieva Jusionyte is the winner of the 2025 Juan E. Mendez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.
Her book, Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border, examines an often-overlooked but powerful fuel for drug-related violence: the trafficking of guns from the United States into Mexico.
Prior to completing her PhD in Anthropology, Jusionyte worked as a firefighter and EMT in Arizona. That work deeply influenced her perspective on immigration and gun violence in the United States. Exit Wounds follows firearms both as policy objects and cultural artifacts. The book is a cultural history of guns in two countries that share the legacies of colonialism and frontier violence.
Deborah Jakubs, University Librarian Emerita at Duke University, a historian of Latin America, and a Mendez judge, wrote that the book “engaged me from the very start. The combination of the author’s commitment to the topic, her daring field research and the personal stories and trajectories of individuals affected by guns, drugs, and violence.” The book connects US gun manufacturing, hunger for drugs, violence in Mexico, and the increasing number of immigrants fleeing that violence, “and does so through on-the-ground stories of smugglers, gang members, US agents, and people sucked into the maw of the system, many as they just tried to get by.”
Jusionyte will be speaking about her book at Duke University on March 20. Click here for more information.
What prompted you to write this book?
The idea for this book emerged from what I saw while I lived in Nogales, Arizona. Firefighters and EMTs saw the effects of border militarization and fortification firsthand. They were frequently called to help injured border crossers. I also volunteered as a firefighter and EMT with a local fire department and at a medical aid station for migrants in Sonora. I crossed the US-Mexico border almost every day, but it took a while for me to begin paying attention to the meaning of signs posted on southbound lanes, which warned people going to Mexico that guns and ammunition were illegal there. One day, it clicked: migrants and asylum seekers were risking their lives on the journey north, hoping to reach the safety of the United States, because guns, made and sold in the United States were going south and were used to perpetrate the violence that made them flee. It was a vicious circle: American guns smuggled south to Mexico and beyond - Central America, the Caribbean – turned people into migrants and refugees headed for the US border. I became determined to follow the guns south in order to understand how American guns get to Mexico and what they do on the other side of the border.
Exit Wounds
How did your experience as an EMT influence your perspective of this topic and the way you wrote the book?
As an EMT and paramedic, I saw what guns do to people. I treated patients with gunshot wounds and witnessed some of them die from bleeding out. I was afraid of being around guns. My practical experience of treating patients with gunshot wounds made me see guns as material objects, as tools that can cause injury, not unlike the metal border wall that wounded migrants who tried to climb over it and fell down. The materiality of firearms mattered to me before I began looking into their legal and symbolic meanings. Knowing how they worked was essential to both being safe when I hung out with armed people and being able to talk to them seriously and earnestly about guns. I did not want Exit Wounds to be another version of my previous book, Threshold, which focused on border-related trauma and emergency responders, so I decided to switch the perspective from victims and survivors of gun violence and from EMTs who treat them, to people who own, smuggle, and use guns, including perpetrators of violence. For an EMT and paramedic in me, this was a radical shift of perspective and it made me very apprehensive to be around people who wound others instead of those who help the wounded, but I knew that understanding how they got to this place - where the gun becomes the tool to inflict violence on others - was worth the effort.
How does your book connect human rights to gun violence?
Gun violence threatens the most fundamental of human rights - the right to life. This is a big issue in the United States, where there are more mass shootings than days in a year, and where firearms have become the leading cause of death for children and teens. A number of international human rights organizations, including the UN Human Rights Committee and Inter American Commission on Human Rights have been criticizing the United States for failing to protect its citizens from gun violence, noting that it has a disproportionate impact on communities of color. Despite ongoing efforts by activists and those who support them to implement reforms that would reduce gun violence, it seems we are deadlocked in the debate over whether right to life or right to guns matters more. Because of the high stakes of this domestic issue, we don’t even have the bandwidth to consider that this problem is not ours alone - that the protections that the gun industry has here also affects people outside of our country’s borders. US guns violate the right to life of people in Mexico, in Haiti, and elsewhere. It is also important to note that the effects of gun violence are not only individual. Bullets kill and maim individuals, but the repercussions of gun violence extend to their families, their communities, their neighborhoods. The trauma of gun violence is passed from generation to generation. This is the broad meaning behind the title of the book, Exit Wounds. These wounds are not just the punctures bullets leave in the human body. The effects of guns are physical as well as social, economic and political. In Mexico, in addition to more than thirty thousand annual homicides, very few of which are investigated, there is gender-based violence, kidnapping for ransom, forced recruitment into gangs, threats and extortion that make people choose between being killed and fleeing in search of safety. More than 110,000 people are officially registered as disappeared in Mexico. There is no justice, no accountability for violence, and no truth or closure for families who lost their loved ones. That, too, is how guns violate human rights.
What is the book's significance as a new administration implements very extreme policies on immigration?
The US government continues to see migrants as threats and limit in any way possible their entry into the country. This has been the cornerstone of our border policies for decades. The main difference with the current administration is its openly hostile rhetoric and complete disregard for human rights, particularly the right to asylum and right to due process. My book shows that many people who try to reach the US - asylum seekers from Mexico and other places in Latin America and the Caribbean - do so, in part, because of our very weak gun laws which allow firearms to be smuggled to their countries and cause havoc there. For example, Texas alone is the source of over 40% of all guns recovered in crime scenes in Mexico. It has almost no regulations for who can purchase guns and how many of them. At the same time, Texas Governor Abbott is fiercely anti-immigrant, so much so that he ordered the installation of concertina wire and floating buoys on the Rio Grande to make crossing the border ever more difficult and deadly. But there is no acknowledgement that those people trying to get across the border are fleeing violence that is often perpetrated by guns sold in Texas. This is not a surprise to US or Mexican governments. Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum in her first conversation with President Donald J. Trump promised to stop northbound migrants (and drugs) in exchange for the US doing more to stop guns going south. I am not very optimistic that this would happen under the current administration, which is unlikely to want to regulate firearms (on the contrary!), but including this issue in the highest-level negotiations between the heads of the neighboring states is significant on its own. It’s an acknowledgement that it is a problem.
What do you think is the main takeaway from your book? How do you want it to resonate with people?
There are two takeaways I would like readers to think about. The first is that guns that are so easily bought in the United States not only affect people living in this country but are implicated in human rights violations in Mexico and other parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. And the second, which is an extension of the first, is that guns trafficked south are responsible for forced displacement that has turned hundreds of thousands of Mexicans into migrants and refugees seeking safety in the United States. Furthermore, these guns arm organized crime groups that make and smuggle drugs to US consumers. Often, earnings from the sale of fentanyl or cocaine in the United States are invested in buying firearms to be smuggled in the opposite direction. This northbound movement of migrants and drugs is part of a vicious circle that only exists because of the southbound movement of guns. The problem is binational and so are the solutions, which are not limited to more gun safety legislation, but extends to addressing drug addiction in the US and the weak criminal justice system in Mexico.