All Men Carry Weapons

The story of a killing at the US–Mexico border, the subsequent trial, and the harrowing consequences of America’s long-standing culture of vigilantism and the lies we tell ourselves about immigration

Around noon on January 30, 2023, a forty-eight-year-old man named Gabriel Cuen Buitimea crossed the desert from Mexico into the United States. A doting father of ten, Cuen Buitimea was the primary source of support for his family. Although he had occasionally been detained and deported, he had been working construction jobs on both sides of the border for decades and had learned how to make the journey undisturbed.

Tragically, this time would be different. At 6:24 that evening, Cuen Buitimea was pronounced dead from a gunshot wound. His body had been discovered on the ranch of Alan and Wanda Kelly, a married couple in their seventies who had retired to southern Arizona two decades earlier. That night, Alan was charged with first-degree murder. He was soon lionized in the right-wing media, and he put together an eccentric legal defense team. His monthlong trial became a showcase for many of America’s pathologies, most notably the vigilante psychology that dates back to nineteenth-century Americans’ first incursions into Mexico and runs through our national politics today. And it put a spotlight on the troubled relationship between federal agents in ICE and Border Patrol, and the everyday citizens who fancy themselves partners in enforcement.

All Men Carry Weapons is the indelible first-person account of Alan Kelly’s trial for the murder of Cuen Buitimea, interwoven with in-depth reporting on these two men and the history that set them on a collision course. What emerges is a complex portrait of a region in crisis and a country in thrall to political rhetoric that implicates and endangers us all.