‘Fast and Furious’ weapon linked to shootout in Mexico
USAToday: A new accounting of guns that were allowed to be trafficked to Mexico as part of a botched U.S. firearms investigation shows that one of the weapons was used last year in a deadly shootout that left three Mexican police officers dead.
A Justice Department summary provided to two Republican congressional committee chairmen Tuesday found that a WASR-10 rifle, purchased six years before in the U.S., was one of three rifles fired in the July 27 assault in the town of Valle de Zaragoza. It was not immediately known which weapon caused the officers’ fatal wounds.
Nevertheless, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives officials traced the WASR rifle to a Nov. 12, 2009, transaction that was part of the flawed federal gun trafficking operation, known as “Operation Fast and Furious.”
“ATF and the (Justice) Department deeply regret that firearms associated with Operation Fast and Furious have been used by criminals in the commission of violent crimes, particularly crimes resulting the death of civilians and law enforcement officers,’’ Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik said in a Tuesday letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa and House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz of Utah.
“ATF accepts full responsibility for the flawed execution of Fast and Furious, and will continue to support Mexican law enforcement in efforts to recover and identify associated firearms.’’
As of January, according to the Justice Department letter, 885 firearms purchased by targets of the ATF operation have been recovered. Of that number, 415 were found in the U.S. and 470 “appear to have been recovered in Mexico.’’
The same letter confirmed prior reports that one of 19 weapons —a .50-caliber rifle —recovered in the January raid in Mexico that resulted in the re-capture of drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman also was traced to the ATF operation.
**** Is there an end it sight? Not so much
For years, the United States has pushed countries battling powerful drug cartels, like Mexico, to decapitate the groups by killing or arresting their leaders. The pinnacle of that strategy was the capture of Mexico’s most powerful trafficker, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, who escaped in spectacular fashion last month from a maximum-security prison.
And while the arrests of kingpins make for splashy headlines, the result has been a fragmenting of the cartels and spikes in violence in places like Chilapa, a city of about 31,000, as smaller groups fight for control. Like a hydra, it seems that each time the government cuts down a cartel, multiple other groups, sometimes even more vicious, spring up to take its place.
“In Mexico, this has been a copy of the American anti-terrorism strategy of high-value targets,” said Raúl Benítez Manaut, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico who specializes in security issues. “What we have seen with the strategy of high-value targets is that al-Qaida has been diminished, but a monster appeared called the Islamic State. With the cartels, it has been similar.”
While the large cartels are like monopolies involved in the production, transportation, distribution and sale of drugs, experts say, the smaller groups often lack international reach and only control a portion of the drug supply chain.
They also frequently resort to other criminal activities to boost their income, like kidnapping, car theft, protection rackets and human trafficking. And while the big cartels have the resources to buy off government officials at the national level, the smaller gangs generally focus on the local and state levels, often with disastrous consequences for communities.
That was abundantly clear in a case that stunned the nation last year, when 43 students disappeared in Iguala, a city a short distance from Chilapa.
