On the morning of Nov. 30, 2019, a convoy of pickup trucks carrying men armed with a heavy machine gun and powerful .50-caliber rifles entered the Mexican town of Villa Unión and opened fire.

The men had been sent on a mission of intimidation: They planned to set fire to the town hall. Their superior firepower pinned down state and local police officers as they waited for military reinforcements. Terrorized residents scrambled to take cover from the hail of bullets.

Luis Manzano, 27, a local Villa Unión reporter who drove into town during the shootout. Image: Marian Carrasquero / The New York Times

The smell of smoke filled the streets and spent casings covered the ground like “fallen leaves,” said Luis Manzano, a Mexican journalist who drove into town during the shooting. But his most vivid memory was the thunder of .50-caliber guns. The “ground trembled” as they fired, he said. “I had never experienced anything like that.”

The military drove off the assailants. In the end, four police officers, two civilians and 19 cartel members were killed. Afterward, as investigators collected evidence from the scene, they gathered at least 45 .50-caliber casings stamped with the initials “L.C.”

The letters stand for the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant, a sprawling facility just outside Kansas City, Missouri, that is owned by the U.S. government and is the largest manufacturer of rifle rounds used by the American military.

It has also been a major supplier of ammunition for American consumers, including .50-caliber cartridges. These powerful rounds — as big as a medium-sized cigar and designed to be used by the military to destroy vehicles and light aircraft — are currently available for purchase by civilians across the United States.

Millions of pages of court documents, seizure records and government data obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The New York Times show how agreements between the Army and the private contractors that run Lake City have allowed .50-caliber ammunition and components made at the plant to enter retail markets and fall into the hands of Mexican cartels.

Mexico’s government has also purchased Lake City ammunition, the documents show, although they do not indicate the caliber.

The U.S. domestic market for the ammunition is small: .50-caliber rifles, which have limited civilian application, typically retail for thousands of dollars, and heavy machine guns like the one used in Villa Unión cost considerably more. The guns’ standard cartridges average between $3 and $4 apiece and are rarely purchased by American gun owners.

But in Mexico, where cartels have deep pockets and a seemingly endless appetite for .50-caliber firearms, demand is high.

Cartel gunmen armed with .50-caliber firearms have downed helicopters, assassinated government officials, shot at police and military forces, and massacred civilians.

A police officer holds a round of .50 caliber ammunition in Villa Unión. Image: Marian Carrasquero / The New York Times

Since 2012, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has seized more than 40,370 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition in states bordering Mexico, according to data obtained through public records requests. Lake City’s product accounted for about a third of them, a larger share than any other manufacturer.

While .50-caliber ammunition from other companies — located primarily in Brazil and South Korea — has also made its way to Mexican cartels, the data makes clear that the U.S. Army plant has been a major source of the destructive ammunition being used to wage military-style battles with Mexican authorities.

This includes a particularly powerful version of Lake City’s ammunition —  incendiary rounds capable of piercing armor, which were used in an attack on Mexican police in 2024 and are for sale online today

In February of last year, the Trump administration declared six Mexican cartels to be foreign terrorist organizations, yet these same organizations are acquiring ammunition made at the plant owned by the U.S. Army.

At least 16 online retailers have sold armor-piercing ammunition made at Lake City or made with components from the plant, according to a count by ICIJ and The Times.

Vasily Campbell, who owns one of those businesses, said he stopped selling the ammunition “about two years ago once we found out where it was going and how it was getting there.”

He said he became suspicious when buyers began asking to have 100-round ammo cans delivered to residential addresses. “That’s not a normal purchase,” he said. “There’s several orders I straight-up canceled.”

The U.S. Army did not respond in detail to questions about the use of Lake City ammunition by drug cartels. In an email, a spokesperson said that allowing commercial sales from the plant has saved taxpayers around $50 million annually, primarily by lowering the government’s cost for ammunition.

The impact that one .50-cal has in a firefight is outrageous … They really, really tip the scale — former ATF agent Chris Demlein

Successive presidential administrations have pledged to crack down on the flow of arms to Mexico. And in September, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a new initiative with the Mexican government to stop gun trafficking to the country.

The number of .50-caliber rounds seized is small compared with that of other cartridges. But it’s the power of the .50-caliber ammunition, not its quantity, that has made it a game changer for the cartels, giving them the ability to overwhelm police and even the military, according to Chris Demlein, a former ATF agent, who spent years investigating gun smuggling to Mexico.

“The impact that one .50-cal has in a firefight is outrageous,” he said. The weapons allow cartels to engage with targets at distances of more than a mile: “They really, really tip the scale.”

ICIJ and the Times obtained investigative files from three incidents involving .50-caliber rifles, including the assault on Villa Unión. In each of them, Mexican authorities reported finding casings marked with the Lake City imprint.

In a fourth example in early 2024, gunmen used the more destructive variant, .50-caliber armor-piercing incendiary rounds, from Lake City to attack a police convoy, according to a press briefing given by then Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval. One of the bullets pierced an armored vehicle, killing one of the crew members and wounding three others. “The armor that we have cannot protect our personnel from this kind of penetration,” he said.

Brenda Aparicio Villegas’ husband, Edder Paul Negrete Trejo, was one of 13 police officers killed in October 2019 in an ambush in Michoacán. Image: Enrique Castro

Brenda Aparicio Villegas is all too familiar with the devastating power of .50-caliber weapons. Her husband, Edder Paul Negrete Trejo, was a police officer who died on October 14, 2019 when he and his fellow police officers were ambushed in the western state of Michoacán. Authorities blamed the attack on the New Generation Jalisco Cartel, news media reported at the time.

Her husband and his colleagues — who often had to purchase their own bullets — did not stand a chance against the cartel’s .50-caliber rifles, she said. Negrete, the father of three children, died from a gunshot wound to the chest. Twelve other officers were also killed in the attack, including one who burned to death. Investigators later found .50-caliber casings from Lake City at the scene.

Not enough has been done to stop the flow of guns and ammunition to Mexico, Ms. Villegas said. “Sadly, many of us pay the price.”

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y quantity, but taking it across the border requires a license.

“Our mantra became, follow the ammo and you’ll get to the guns,” Red said in a recent interview. “We were tracking shipments from all over the country.”

The team seized hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition likely bound for Mexico, according to Red and court records. The vast majority of the ammunition was 7.62-mm rounds, most commonly used in AK-47s, he said.

Seizures of .50-caliber ammunition were small and infrequent at the time, according to ATF and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) records.

Our mantra became, follow the ammo and you’ll get to the guns. — former investigator Jason Red

But as American authorities introduced new initiatives and increased resources aimed at reducing gun trafficking to Mexico, the numbers grew.

Between 2019 and 2024 the ATF seized more than 36,000 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition in border states. About a third of them were identified as coming from Lake City.

During the same period, CBP seized nearly 21,400 units of .50 caliber ammunition. This included 2,850 of the armor-piercing incendiary rounds.

acted with the company to demilitarize unneeded ammunition from Lake City, American Marksman wrote on its website, adding that it “gets many of its components from its Lake City recycling operations.” That included components for its armor-piercing incendiary rounds.

Olin Winchester’s policies on the sale of .50-caliber ammunition from Lake City are unclear. The company’s catalog does not offer the rounds for sale to civilians. But Lake City cartridges and components, including armor-piercing incendiary rounds and bullets, have continued to appear on the market.

Pallets of the armor-piercing incendiary ammunition, labeled with a code denoting they were manufactured by Olin Winchester at Lake City, were being sold by at least one online retailer in March 2023. And American Marksman continues to sell armor-piercing incendiary ammunition on its website. (It is unclear which Lake City contractor manufactured the components used to make those rounds.)

In January 2022, the Department of Justice announced the indictment of members of a gun trafficking ring, run by a former U.S. Marine, that sold guns and ammunition, including .50-caliber rifles, to the Jalisco Cartel, the same group that was accused of killing Villegas’s husband, the police officer. Four months later, the Marine pleaded guilty.

During the operation, U.S. federal agents seized approximately 10,210 .50-caliber armor-piercing incendiary rounds with Lake City markings. There is no indication that the ammunition came from American Marksman or SGAmmo.

Outside the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Missouri. Image: Emily Rhyne for The New York Times

In an email, the Army said that Lake City’s contractors are “required to comply with all federal and state regulations governing the sale of commercial ammunition. While the operating contractor does not sell directly to the public, it sells to distributors, resellers, and retail stores, which are also required to adhere to federal, state, and local laws regulating ammunition sales.”

Olin Winchester did not respond to a detailed list of questions about its Lake City operations and its policies on the sale of .50-caliber ammunition and components made at the facility.

In an email, Northrop Grumman said that it “fully complied with government contract obligations in its sales of ammunition” during the two years it ran Lake City. SGAmmo did not respond to multiple emails about its purchases of .50-caliber ammunition. American Marksman also declined to comment.

letholes-mayor-NYT-768x432.jpg 768w, https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/02/Villa-Union-bulletholes-mayor-NYT-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/02/Villa-Union-bulletholes-mayor-NYT-1109x624.jpg 1109w, https://media.icij.org/uploads/2026/02/Villa-Union-bulletholes-mayor-NYT.jpg 1920w" sizes="auto, (max-width: 1138px) 100vw, 1138px" /> Villa Unión’s former mayor Sergio Cárdenas in his butcher shop, right. Buildings in the town still sport bullet holes from the 2019 attack.

Image: Marian Carrasquero / The New York Times

Authorities traced one of the .50-caliber guns used in the assaultto a store in Texas. The owner, investigators found, had sold nearly 500 guns that ended up in the hands of the C.D.N, including a .50-caliber machine gun and at least six .50-caliber rifles. A federal court sentenced him to 10 years in prison, following a guilty plea.

American authorities indicted 14 members of the gun-smuggling ring, seizing over 2,300 rounds of Lake City ammunition.

Upon learning that the .50-caliber rounds he had heard in Villa Unión came from an ammunition plant owned by the U.S. Army, Cárdenas did not seem surprised.

“The drug traffickers can get their hands on anything,” he said. “And they get the best weapons from the United States.”

Times reporter Emiliano Rodríguez Mega reported from Mexico City and Villa Unión, Mexico.

Contributors: Jesús Escudero, Miguel Fiandor Gutiérrez, Delphine Reuter (ICIJ); Paulina Villegas (NYT); Mathieu Tourliere (Proceso, Mexico).

The trial of Diezani Alison-Madueke resumed this week in the Southwark Crown Court in London, with prosecutors alleging that the former Nigerian oil minister once blew about $190,000 (140,000 GBP) on a shopping spree for furniture and art that was paid by intermediaries.

The trial, which began in January, is the latest milestone in a longstanding corruption investigation across multiple jurisdictions.

Alison-Madueke, 65, who is currently out on bail, was minister from 2010 to 2015 under President Goodluck Jonathan and chaired the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, for part of that time. She was first questioned by British authorities in 2015, and formally charged in 2023 on several counts of bribery.

Britain’s National Crime Agency accused her of improperly influencing multimillion dollar oil contracts in return for bribes, including at least $137,000 (100,000 GBP) in cash. Prosecutors allege she “enjoyed a life of luxury in London” that included the use of several London properties and service staff, furniture, school fees for her children, private flights and chauffeur-driven cars.

repatriation of over $52 million in forfeited funds that were proceeds of corruption.

Assets seized by the U.S. included prime real estate in New York and California, and the superyacht Galactica Star.

st week, the U.K. court heard how the bank cards of Aluko and his company Tenka Limited paid about $2.5 million (more than 2 million GBP) for Alison-Madueke’s shopping sprees at London’s famous departmental store, Harrods. Tenka also allegedly paid for staff and refurbishments at the property that Alison-Madueke used.

Aluko rose to prominence during Alison-Madueke’s stint as minister, when Nigeria’s government awarded lucrative oil blocks to companies linked to him on a no-bid basis. One of those companies was created the day before it was granted a multimillion dollar licensing deal.

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After years of alarms raised by experts and civil society groups about transnational repression, the Canadian government has named its first foreign interference watchdog, ICIJ’s media partner CBC News reports.

Former British Columbia chief electoral officer Anton Boegman, nominated by the federal government, will take on the new position, CBC News reports. The seven days given to opposition parties to respond lapsed this week.

The new watchdog comes less than a year since ICIJ’s China Targets investigation revealed how Chinese authorities use extensive surveillance, pressure on family members, hacking and other tactics to target regime critics living overseas.

The collaboration of over 40 media partners worldwide featured interviews with 105 targets, alongside internal Chinese government records spanning two decades, to reveal a coordinated, systematic and global effort by the Chinese government to neutralize dissent in all forms.

In Canada, CBC News uncovered cases of intimidation and harassment against a Hong Kong pro-democracy advocate in exile and a pro-Taiwan activist that included the circulation of deepfake, sexually explicit images online and threats against the activist’s family members still living in China.

Lawmakers have repeatedly emphasized the issue as a priority; in the time since, CBC News reports, the results of a foreign interference inquiry concluded transnational repression was a “genuine scourge” in Canada, citing China as the “most active perpetrator of foreign interference targeting Canadian democratic institutions.”

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Reporting by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists helped force a shift in Beijing’s public stance on Xinjiang, according to new academic research — from denying the existence of a vast detention camp system to justifying it and, eventually, to partially dismantling it.

In an article published in Modern China, a peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to China studies, political scientist Jan Švec traces how China responded to growing global scrutiny of its “re-education” campaign in Xinjiang between 2014 and 2022. Švec, who’s based at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, used official Chinese documents, state media analysis, leaked files, and international reporting to argue that international exposure played a decisive role in forcing Beijing to adjust both its narrative and its policies.

Following ethnic rioting, and a series of deadly terror attacks within and outside Xinjiang which Beijing blamed on Uyghurs, President Xi Jinping launched a “Strike Hard Campaign against Violent Extremism” in 2014 that framed Uyghur identity as a security threat. Local authorities experimented with so-called “de-extremization” centers, openly praising them in regional media. At this stage, there was little international awareness — and little effort to conceal what was happening.

That changed dramatically in 2017, when mass detentions expanded across the region. As arrests surged, Beijing imposed a strict information blackout. References to the camps disappeared from national media, and Xinjiang coverage was softened to emphasize development and stability. But outside China, journalists, researchers and Uyghur exile groups began piecing together evidence of mass incarceration.

Švec says a turning point came in late 2019 after the U.S. imposed sanctions over the repression of Uyghurs and ICIJ published the China Cables, a trove of leaked internal documents that laid bare how the camps operated. The files included detailed instructions on surveillance, discipline and indefinite detention, confirming in the Chinese government’s own words what survivors and investigators had long alleged: the camps were coercive, centrally coordinated and part of a sweeping program of mass surveillance and population control.

China, which denies human rights abuses and says religious freedom is respected in Xinjiang, responded to the China Cables investigation by decrying it as “pure fabrication and fake news.”

China Cables and a second leak published that November by the New York Times called the Xinjiang Papers — which included internal speeches and documents confirming the central authorities endorsed the mass repression —  had immediate impact. Google searches for “Xinjiang” surged by 236 percent between September and December of 2019, according to Švec.

“The leaked documents and the imposition of sanctions significantly heightened the public attention on Xinjiang in late 2019,” he wrote.

According to Švec, Chinese officials reacted to the leaks as forcefully as they did to Western sanctions. State media launched aggressive attacks on critical media reports, while diplomats scrambled to counter the damage.

“In one response, the official media deemed it necessary to say that Western media ‘cannot have any actual influence’ and ‘just cannot do anything about it’. An officially published letter by a former ‘student’ of one of the camps urged Americans to ‘shut up,’ ” Švec writes.

Yet just days after the China Cables were published, authorities announced that all camp “trainees” had “graduated,” signaling an abrupt policy shift.

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Entities linked to the Chinese state have quietly assumed control of one of Malawi’s most strategic rare-earth mineral projects — without required oversight from Malawian authorities, an investigation by ICIJ partners PIJ Malawi, Finance Uncovered and The Continent found.

The probefocused on Mawei Mining Company Ltd., the holder of a large heavy mineral sands concession near Makanjira on the shores of Lake Malawi that are believed to contain more than 350 million tonnes of ore including zircon, titanium and monazite, a key source of rare earth elements.

Despite the government’s initial heralding of the site as a major economic opportunity with promises of jobs and infrastructure, work has largely stalled since the licence was granted in late 2017. Community leaders say they have seen no tangible benefits and that promised development projects have not materialized.

The investigation found that the ownership of Mawei’s parent company, British Virgin Islands-based Xinjin International Company Ltd., changed hands twice between 2023 and 2025, ultimately placing the project under majority control of two Chinese state-linked entities — Shandong Zhaojin Ruining Mining Industries Co. and Hainan International Resources, a regional state enterprise.

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As traditional offshore havens like Switzerland tighten regulations and financial scrutiny, African elites and companies are increasingly turning to Asian financial hubs — notably Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong — according to a recent University of Oxford

study.

Capital flight exacts a heavy toll on African economies, with the continent haemorrhaging over $88 billion each year according to U.N. figures cited in the study. The three Asian financial centers are increasingly attractive destinations for this money and have become among “the fastest growing and most significant transnational connections for Africa.”

The study, a working paper that has not been peer-reviewed, was authored by Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, professor of political science at Sciences Po and a senior research fellow at Oxford.

The research “was motivated by the fact that African offshore links with Asian financial centres have massively increased over the past decade or so, but that there are few studies addressing this dynamic,” de Oliveira told the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

He said that: “While some financial centres have become more tightly regulated, and less accessible to African financial flows, other centers have come up to replace them. There is certainly no lack of supply to meet the demand, and no reason to believe that hiding money abroad has become more difficult.”

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r this hesitation,” de Oliveira argues, “but vested interests by those who benefit personally from offshore strategies is one of them.”

And despite the shift towards Asia, Western jurisdictions and firms remain central players in the offshore world. The offshore industry is completely interwoven and both Western and Asian offshore centers, the report notes, “function in strikingly similar manners,” while Western blue-chip companies remain key players in Asian offshore markets.

Though the rise of the trio of Asian financial hubs is widely seen as “a new post-West business arrangement” unconstrained by “good governance moralizing” and “practical barriers,” the study suggests that these trends do not signal an entirely separate and competing offshore system.  Instead, this represents the expansion and diversification of an existing global offshore network.

Reforms to curb illicit financial flows, says de Oliveira, therefore “need to be truly global.”

“If they are not, tightening up in some jurisdictions merely shifts business away to other more permissive jurisdictions. If their home countries become more demanding, Western service providers are happy to follow the business and expand their footprint in the new locations.”

Europe must take a coordinated response to fight the rising threat of transnational repression, according to a group of experts commissioned by the European Parliament to investigate ways to counter this emerging form of cross-border authoritarian coercion.

A new study commissioned by the European Parliament

, which cites ICIJ’s China Targetsinvestigation, details a set of policy recommendations for the European Union and its member states aimed at closing gaps in protection and accountability.

Chief among recommendations are the development of an EU-wide definition of transnational repression, the creation of an internal data collection and knowledge hub on the issue within the bloc, and strengthened communication channels between member states’ law enforcement agencies.

“There is a need, broadly speaking, that there be more and better data collection on transnational repression, whether it is done at the multilateral or state level,” Nate Schenkkan, the lead author of the report, told ICIJ. “The knowledge drives action, so collecting the information and disseminating it is part of the process and policy framework of forcing those other stakeholders to address the issues.”

The report recommends strengthening data protection clauses in EU laws, including identifying transnational repression as a “systemic risk” that regulated platforms are responsible for under the Digital Services Act. It also calls for more aggressive action to counter transnational repression, including visa bans, the expulsion of diplomats, and swifter mobilization of sanctions.

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Bitpanda prides itself on being one of the most regulated crypto exchanges in Europe. The Austrian firm — backed by investors including billionaire Peter Thiel and reportedly planning for a listing on the Frankfurt stock exchange this year — has promoted its services with the slogan “secure, regulated and real.”

But reporting by Süddeutsche Zeitung, WDR and NDR, in Germany, and profil magazine, in Austria, found that internal auditors of Bitpanda’s German-licensed subsidiary, Bitpanda Asset Management GmbH, raised red flags last year about the Berlin firm’s operations. The warnings came months after the subsidiary had assured Germany’s Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, or BaFin, it had addressed concerns raised by the regulator following a routine audit.

The new findings by media partners of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists are part of The Coin Laundry, an ICIJ-led exposé into the lightly regulated crypto industry. They highlight regulators’ difficulties in holding crypto companies to the same customer care and risk management standards as banks and other traditional financial institutions.

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