When did Americans gun runners that helped Pancho villa?

Answer 1

Villa frequently crossed the border and at times controlled Ciudad Juarez across the bridge from El Paso...controlling a vast stretch of Mexico just across the Rio Grande from parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas made arms purchases more a matter of what he could afford to pay. Early on he was tacitly (if not actively) supported by the U.S., it was only later on that President Woodrow Wilson started trying to stop the flow of arms across the border, much like today. Back then, like now, America didn't make most of the guns one wanted for the Mexican Revolution while Germany did and had already been supplying the Mexican Army and police with their standard arms to an increasing degree. What Villa needed was light and heavy machine guns, field artillery, mortars, grenades, armored cars, armored trains, and bolt-action rifles so French 75mm and German Krupp cannons, German Maxim or French Hotchkiss machine guns, German Mauser rifles, etc.. The British Navy had blocked off sea access to German arms by 1914 and selling guns to the European nations was a lot more profitable than selling to revolutionaries anywhere, forcing Villa to focus on capturing federal armories and weapons after battles as well as buy what American guns he could (we were barely making 1895 Colt machine guns and Lewis light machine guns, Krag-Jorgensen or 1903 Springfields weren't for civilian sale, so settling for deer rifles, riot guns, etc. was about it.)

People think it's about buying guns from retail shops like a hardware store when this kind of use requires different guns, vastly more ammunition, spare parts, different accessories, and very noticeable quantities of hundreds if not thousands of rifles. Smuggled guns sell for far more than retail which both constrains cash and makes buyers choosier when they're paying through the nose and betting their lives on that gun's performance. Buying or taking guns from a military storage space has been preferred since the French Revolution.

It's like buying a minivan for 3x dealer sticker price, floating it over the Rio Grande on a homemade driftwood raft, and using it as is for an urban assault vehicle. Gun smuggling is generally done using a ship's cargo capacity, not a mule train through the desert, whether it's the 18th, 19th, 20th, or 21st century (sheer logistics demands it.) But American gunrunners helping Villa make great characters for novels and movies.