EL GUAYABO, Michoacán, Mexico — The armored vehicle, or what now remained of it, lay abandoned in the road where a landmine had blown it up. The bodies of the vehicle’s occupants, cartel sicarios who had been killed as they tried to flee, were nowhere to be found when we examined the incinerated wreckage several days later. Neither, though, were most residents of the surrounding village, who had fled en masse to escape the same fate.

Nearly the entire population of El Guayabo, approximately 400 to 500 dirt-poor lime pickers living on communal land in the west Mexican state of Michoacán, fled hastily in mid-July to escape combat between the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, known as CJNG, and the Caballeros Templarios. When I went before dawn on July 30 with local human rights defenders to help displaced residents recover some of their belongings, the windows in every house were shattered by gunfire, roofs were blown open by bombs dropped from internet-bought drones, and everyone walked nervously, scanning the ground for landmines. Scattered everywhere were thousands of dull bronze shell-casings: .50 caliber rounds for sniper rifles and machine guns, 5.56 rounds for AR-15s and similar rifles, and 7.62×39 shells used for AK-47-style rifles.

Putting a stop “to every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States,” as President Donald Trump put it to the United Nations last week, has become his self-proclaimed mission. His administration designated CJNG and Carteles Unidos — an umbrella of armed groups that includes the Templarios — as foreign terrorist organizations in January, allowing the U.S. government to crack down on any individual or group who provides them with “material support” or “expert advice and assistance.” During the first weeks of Trump’s administration, as a Washington Post investigation recently revealed, DEA agents pushed for “targeted killings of cartel leadership and attacks on infrastructure” in Mexico but faced pushback from some administration insiders. And in late July, Trump secretly signed a directive authorizing the Pentagon to use unilateral military force against Latin American drug cartels.

Since then, Trump says the U.S. has launched airstrikes against at least three alleged drug boats in international waters near Venezuela, killing 17 people. On Thursday, The Intercept obtained a leaked document circulated to congressional committees in which Trump declares the U.S. engaged in “non-international armed conflict” with the cartels. While the administration’s public ire has focused on Venezuela, sources within the Pentagon’s Northern Command have said they would have plans for potential strikes against Mexican cartels, too, “ready by mid-September.”

If the U.S. military does confront the cartels in Mexico, it will find itself facing battle with its own weapons. An investigation by The Intercept traced the bullets that littered the ground in El Guayabo to at least two U.S. firearms manufacturers, one of which operates a massive factory owned by the U.S. military. The Intercept gathered 123 shell casings, some of whose numbered headstamps corresponded to the now-defunct St. Louis Ammunition Plant and Lake City Ammunition — a commercial ammunition factory in Independence, Missouri, operated by Winchester and owned by the U.S. Army.

This investigation documents the cartels’ use of ammunition from the U.S. Army-owned factory in enforcing mass displacement in Mexico.

This investigation is the first of its kind to document the cartels’ use of ammunition from the U.S. Army-owned factory in enforcing mass displacement in Mexico. While past work has focused on the factory’s ties to mass shootings in the U.S. and the deaths of U.S. citizens, The Intercept’s investigation analyzes U.S.-made shells collected directly from the scene where some of Mexico’s poorest residents fled for their lives to escape ferocious gun battles between paramilitary groups — the same ones the Trump administration now classifies as terrorists.

“The United States is perfectly capable of breaking down criminal groups involved in the drug trade,” said Julio Franco, a human rights advocate at the Apatzingán Observatory for Citizen Security, “simply by closing off the pipeline of weaponry produced in the U.S. and used by Mexican criminal groups.”

Yet the Trump administration is doing the opposite. Trump plans to slash over two-thirds of the weapons investigators at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives charged with ensuring guns sold by U.S. suppliers don’t end up in the hands of Latin American cartels and gangs, incinerating the already understaffed bureaucratic safeguards designed to stop the cartel weaponry pipeline.

The ATF, the U.S. Army, and the White House did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. A representative for the Pentagon said they didn’t have responses to The Intercept’s questions, citing the government shutdown.

Experts estimate that around 200,000 military-grade assault weapons and machine guns are trafficked every year from U.S. gunshops to Mexican criminal groups, moving south across the border with little to no scrutiny. This unchecked flow of weapons, longtime weapons experts told The Intercept, represents a massive missed opportunity in the country’s stated mission to kneecap the cartels.

In villages like El Guayabo, this neglect fuels warfare while driving mass displacement. The Ibero-American University and the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights registered 28,900 newly displaced people in at least 72 mass displacement events in Mexico last year, according to a report released in June. At least 392,000 people have been displaced since the U.S.-backed drug war was revamped in 2006, though experts estimate that to be a significant undercount. Franco estimated that several thousand have been displaced in El Guayabo since 2021, though the lack of recognition or authoritative studies means that figure too is likely an undercount.

Franco was in El Guayabo on July 30 with The Intercept and Carmen Zepeda, a teacher, humanitarian activist, and Apatzingán councilwoman for Morena, the dominant political party in Mexico. As one of the leading advocates for the victims of enforced displacement in Michoacán, Zepeda pointed to a growing list of villages where thousands have fled armed conflict: Acatlán, Loma de los Hoyos, el Mirador, el Manzo, Las Bateas, Llano Grande, El Tepetate, La Alberca, San José de Chila, El Alcalde, and El Guayabo — all in the municipality of Apatzingán.

“There’s a war in this municipality,” said Zepeda. “And this war is being carried out with bullets from the United States.”

The man taking the video growls at the bodies, two skinny young men, one with his mouth frozen open, sprawled out dead in the mud. “Just so you sons-of-bitches see, so you don’t keep coming to El Guayabo you motherfuckers, we warned you, you thought it was a game,” the man shouts in Spanish, out of breath, as he assesses the carnage under a soft, steady rain. Flanking the bodies are the steaming carcasses of two blown-up monstruos, the homemade armored........

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