Mexico: descent into chaosFeds arrest Arizona buyers of guns for drug cartels
Mexico’s violent drug war — which, in the last four years, has claimed nearly 30,000 dead — is fought with American guns; in a sweeping operation aimed at uncovering “straw buyers” blamed for funneling high-powered guns to Mexican drug cartels, federal agents have arrested dozens of Arizonans and seized a large amount of weapons
Recent Mexican arrestees and recovered firearms // Source: washingtonpost.com
Mexico’s violent drug war – which, in the last four years, has claimed nearly 30,000 dead — is fought with American guns. Mexico has been urging the U.S. government to do something about the flow of arms into Mexico, and the United States is responding.
In a sweeping operation aimed at uncovering “straw buyers” blamed for funneling high-powered guns to Mexican drug cartels, federal agents have arrested dozens of Arizonans and seized a large amount of weapons.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives says its successful investigation is just the beginning of ramped-up efforts to stop the illegal export of American weapons and is aimed at nailing the middle men who buy weapons on behalf of others for use in major crimes.
The Arizona Republic’s J. J. Hensley writes that Arizona’s status as a guns-and-drug hub for the rest of the country has created an industry that brings tons of marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine into the United States and sends cash and guns back to Mexico, according to federal agents.
In a 3-month span, more than 80 ATF agents linked 141 guns from crime scenes in Mexico to buyers in Arizona and made 66 arrests.
“We have a huge problem here,” Dennis Burke, U.S. attorney for Arizona, said Friday as he stood near a table piled high with dozens of high-powered weapons seized during the operation. “We have now become the gun locker of the Mexican drug cartels,” Burke said.
Last year, 100 agents flooded the Houston area in a similar operation that resulted in the seizure of about 600 weapons.
Agents worked the newest operation in Arizona and New Mexico from May until early August as part of the ATF’s Gun Runner Impact Team. It seized about 1,300 weapons and more than 71,000 rounds of ammunition.
Although the effort was deemed a success, agents admit there is no reliable way to track the number of weapons from the U.S. being used in Mexico’s ongoing drug war.
“As a result of these drug organizations and their thirst for money and power, lives are being lost to violence both on the Mexican side and on the Arizona side,” ATF deputy director Kenneth Melson said. “ATF along with our Mexican counterparts embrace the need to cut off the supply routes of illegal weapons going from the United States into Mexico.”
Hensley writes that the dozens of arrests that agents made in the course of the operation will likely not do
