Iain Overton

By Will Worley

On Wednesday 22 April 2015, the Frontline Club welcomed investigative journalist and director of policy and investigations at UK charity Action on Armed Violence, Iain Overton for a discussion on his latest book, Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey into the World of the Gun. The event was chaired by ANC former politician and author Andrew Feinstein, who has written extensively on the global arms trade.

Overton began by reading an extract from Gun Baby Gun, describing the aftermath of a brutal shooting in Brazil. Soon after witnessing this event, he visited a basement gun repository in Sao Paulo, where he found “thousands and thousands of guns across the walls, a bit like a horrific library, where every sort of gun seemed to have a background story.”

This “basement of horrors” led Overton to realise that every single gun present “told this story of disconnected realities.”

The ignorance of arms manufacturers and dealers as to the eventual fate of their guns “made me think how the gun is separated in all of its different segments.”

Overton elaborated on the many aspects of the gun covered by his book: “its dead, its wounded, the suicidal, the killers, the criminals, the police, the military, civilians, hunters, traders, smugglers, lobbyists, manufacturers.” The relationship between gender and the cult of the gun is even explored in a chapter aptly titled ‘Sex Pistols.’

“Every single isolated group around the gun is seen through my eyes as part of a whole.”

Guns are the biggest killer in war – 90% of deaths during conflict are a result of guns. They are also the biggest killer in armed violence – 60% of all violent deaths are by the gun. In the USA, 20,000 people commit suicide every year with a gun. Although the National Rifle Association (NRA) claims that gun deaths in the US have fallen significantly, this is down to significant advancements in trauma care, largely developed as a result of the experiences of the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. What is not often taken into account is the colossal rise in the numbers of those wounded by guns annually.

The ubiquity of guns in some parts of the world and the resulting violence go largely unreported internationally, despite huge numbers of casualties. Central America is a particular case in point, as El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico witness huge levels of violence as a result of the ongoing US-led ‘war on drugs’.

Overton also pointed out that many Central American cartel members have their guns made to order north of the border in the United States.

Great night at the @frontlineclub w/ @iainoverton & @andrewfeinstein on people’s relationships people with guns – pic.twitter.com/f1UyB2iwwW”

— Jenny Marc (@JennyLMarc) April 22, 2015

In many instances of violence globally, the presence of a gun has become an assumption, rather than a newsworthy element of the story. “The gun has just become a background noise in violence.”

Overton went on to highlight the transformative power of the gun. There is a “very physical transformation that occurs in a man when he picks up a gun.” Being in possession of a gun emboldens people to the point of recklessness, he added.

“It transforms power, it transforms situations. And for the people who are in the midst of despair, it doesn’t take a lot to pick up a gun and end your life.”

“I don’t think the book is anti-gun,” concluded Overton, as the discussion drew to a close. “If someone has their life dictated by going out hunting at the weekend, they see the gun as purely a tool to take down a deer.”

What do a dead poet, organised crime and the air we breathe have in common?
On Thursday 21 November the Frontline Club screened The Carbon Crooks – director Tom Heinemann’s exposé of the massive fraud and failures within global carbon trading schemes.

Heinemann introduced his picture thus:

“This film is a about a system where, one could say everybody are crooks, or nobody are crooks. . . . How can you nail a whole system? That was the challenge in this film. Maybe you’ll find a lot of crooks in this film, or maybe you’ll find no crooks.”

Director Tom Heinemann. Photography Credit: George Symonds

The first question from the audience asked: “The VAT carousel has been known for 20 years. How is it possible that they didn’t think of it for emissions trading?”

“That’s a very good question,” said Heinemann, “that the EU Commission didn’t want to answer me either. . . . I don’t know who designed the system, but I’m sure someone has some red ears, somewhere. It took them way too long to stop this. Way too long.”

“Are we going to move away from market-based mechanisms?” followed another audience member.

“Well, I’m a journalist. I ask questions, I don’t give the answers,” began Heinemann. “But, my impression is that . . . the politicians today say, ‘We can’t do it better so we’ll pick the second or third best system.’ What can we do about this? I don’t know. Kevin Anderson, the advisor for the British government on climate issues has stopped flying. He has said, ‘I’ve used my credits.’”

https://twitter.com/CCESltd/statuses/403805857760428032

In response to a question on police investigations Heinemann explained:

“The real problem here is that most of the scam money came from organised crime. We have drug dealers, terrorist funders – the scum of the earth – have laundered money into these VAT carousels. There are a lot of investigations going on . . . there are employees of Deutsche Bank still accused of laundering carbon credit money.”

On why the authorities refuse to answer where the missing – traceable – credits have gone:

“Why don’t they tell us? Maybe it’s too embarrassing,” offered Heinemann. “Maybe it would reveal that these credits have been in so many ‘honest hands.’ . . .  You heard the Director of Europol, Rob Wainwright, saying it’s easier to hack into a carbon credit registry than stealing a car. I mean, that’s really trustworthy isn’t it? These questions need to be asked by people other than me, because there are a lot of people who don’t want to talk to me any more.”

Heinemann then expanded on the connection between carbon trading and international development:

“Gold Standard admits to us that half of their projects – about 60 – throughout the world are based on a system called ‘suppressed demand’. Meaning, you ask the poor people, ‘If I brought in a money tree, and you pluck it every day, would you then change your behaviour?’ . . . It’s not a big part of the system but a very important story. Because it was created by a lot of NGOs, based on a mathematical economic theory where the Danish professor says, ‘In the old days we had the vicar, we could go and get redemption. Today we have a long mathematical formula.’ So it fits!”

Heinemann concluded with his forecast for future carbon control:

“The head of communication for DONG Energy, a 80% state-owned Danish energy company, admits it has never been cheaper to pollute than today. It is cheaper than ever. Then there’s something wrong with the system. . . . The problem is that the market cannot reduce carbon emissions, apparently.”

More information about the film can be found at The Carbon Crooks website.

From over five years of interviews with members of the main cartels in Mexico, ex-policemen, army generals and officials in the government, journalist Anabel Hernández‘s book Narcoland: The Mexican Drug Lords and Their God Fathers investigates the corruption and compliancy of the official governmental system and the drug cartels in her home country of Mexico. Selling over 200,000 copies since it was originally published in 2010, it is still the best selling book in its category in Mexico.

Anabel Hernández in conversation with Ed Vulliamy

“Mexicans want answers and I think this book gives them…the people really want to understand. The official version doesn’t fit with reality, it’s very obvious in Mexico,” Hernández said in conversation with journalist and author Ed Vulliamy, at the Frontline Club on 11th September 2013. “Nobody is in jail, the government of course protect them, but now in Mexico everybody knows who is who and that’s the most important thing.”

The book has now been translated from Spanish into English for a completely new audience – an audience that Hernández says has as much to do with the drug economy in Mexico as drug lords such as Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán and Miguel Treviño Morales.

But how can this new audience begin to understand how Mexico came into its current position? Hernández explained:

“In the sixties the federal government protected all the cartels, they let them do their business [in exchange] for money; it’s always about money. . . . At that moment the money that came from the medium crime organisations was used to build schools”

 

“In the 1980s and 1990s the Guadalajara Cartel came to dominate the city. [They] started to be the conduit to traffic the cocaine from Columbia to the USA. So that money made the medium crime organisations more powerful [and] that’s when the Guadalajara Cartel was created…Félix Gallardo, Rafael Caro Quintero [of the Guadalajara Cartel], started to change their game… They became free,”

 

“A law unto themselves,” Vulliamy added.

The Mexican economy grew existentially during this time Hernández says:

“That money was useful. For example in the 1980s Félix Gallardo created many enterprises in Guadalajara. Guadalajara was this size [very small] in the 1980s but with the money of the Guadalajara Cartel the city started to grow and grow and grow. He built hotels, restaurants he create car dealerships.”

 

“That’s why in the 90s when he is put in jail…the government put him in jail but they government never confiscated his money because his money was moving the economy.”

 

“This has happened many times – now how can Mexico live without that money? That is the question.”

Vulliamy asked Hernández how the meaning of the book changed with the new English translation. What about “the responsibility of everybody who sells a gram of cocaine, takes a gram of cocaine, where does this stop?… Who are the criminals?”

“There are many guys [in Mexico], we can find their faces in the pages of the FBI or Interpol…”

 

“There are very many other important businessmen in the world that are drug lords too. . . . They like to look like legal people, but I think they are worse that Chapo Guzmán, because if you see Chapo Guzmán in the street, you can see he is coming – maybe you’ll walk away. . . . Who is worse? The Chapo Guzmán or the people who pretend to be in the legal world but launder their money and buy the guns?”

 

“When I really talk with the drug cartels… and their lawyers, one lawyer told me ‘stop thinking of the violence, stop thinking in the murders, this is just a business . . . like Coca-Cola or Pepsi. If a market exists we want it.”

 

“Dirty money moves the economy . . . my country is very poor, but still having a fake economy, with money of the drug cartels [is preferable], the price that we have to pay is very high.”

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/insight-with-anabel-hern-ndez