ATF: Mexico seized 68,000 guns made in or imported to United States since 2006
Some U.S.-made M4A1 rifles with grenade launchers, part of an arsenal seized from Erick Valencia Salazar, the leader of the drug cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion, are presented to the press March 12, 2012, in Mexico City. / AFP/Getty Images
(AP) WASHINGTON - The government said Thursday that 68,000 guns recovered by Mexican authorities in the past five years have been traced back to the United States.
The flood of tens of thousands of weapons underscores complaints from Mexico that the U.S. is responsible for arming the drug cartels plaguing its southern neighbor. Six years of violence between warring cartels have killed more than 47,000 people in Mexico.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives released its latest data covering 2007 through 2011. According to ATF, many of the guns seized in Mexico and submitted to ATF for tracing were recovered at the scenes of cartel shootings while others were seized in raids on illegal arms caches. All the recovered weapons were suspected of being used in crimes in Mexico.
At an April 2 North American summit in Washington, Mexican President Felipe Calderon said the U.S. government has not done enough to stop the flow of assault weapons and other guns from the U.S. to Mexico.
Calderon credited President Obama with making an effort to reduce the gun traffic, but said Mr. Obama faces "internal problems ... from a political point of view."
There is Republican opposition in Congress and broad opposition from Republicans and gun-rights advocates elsewhere to a new assault weapons ban or other curbs on gun sales. The Obama administration says it is working to tighten inspections of border checkpoints in the absence of an assault rifle ban that expired before Mr. Obama took office.
For more than a year, ATF has been reeling from accusations that some of its agents in Arizona were ordered by superiors to step aside rather than intercept illicit loads of weapons headed for Mexico.
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The Justice Department's inspector general and Congress have been looking into the Arizona gun probe, Operation Fast and Furious.
The issue of gun control legislation hasn't been part of the Republican-led probe of Fast and Furious by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
The number of all types of ATF-traced firearms manufactured in the U.S. or imported into the U.S. and later recovered in Mexico rose from 11,842 in 2007 to 14,504 in 2011, according to ATF. The figures for U.S.-sourced firearms were 21,035 in 2008; 14,376 for 2009; and 6,404 in 2010. Included in those totals, the number of rifles recovered in Mexico, submitted to ATF for tracing and found to have come from the U.S. rose from 4,885 in 2007 to 8,804 last year.
Mexican law enforcement officials report that certain types of rifles such as AK variants with detachable magazines are being used more frequently by drug trafficking organizations, ATF said in a news release.
Mexico has provided ATF information on 99,691 guns. ATF determined that the source for 68,161 of the weapons was the U.S, 68 percent of the total. For the remainder, ATF was unable to determine a U.S. source or was unable to trace the request to a country of origin. The 68 percent figure is down from estimates of 90 percent in years past when Mexico was sharing less information with the U.S.
The controversial tactic of "letting guns walk" out of gun shops in the hands of suspected straw purchasers was used in Operation Fast and Furious at ATF in Phoenix in an effort to track the guns to major weapons traffickers and drug cartels in order to make criminal cases against smuggling kingpins who had eluded prosecution for years. But the tracking of the weapons was faulty, and many of them wound up at crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S. Two of the guns spotted at one point during Fast and Furious were later discovered at the scene of the killing of U.S. border agent Brian Terry.
Before Fast and Furious, ATF in Arizona had tried the gun-walking tactic in three separate investigations during the George W. Bush administration, with other tracking problems and only limited success.
During the Obama administration, ATF has undergone a management shake-up and Attorney General Eric Holder has called Fast and Furious a flawed operation that must never be repeated.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that thorough gun statistics are hard to come by and tricky to interpret.
"The only guns Mexico is going to submit for tracing are guns they know are from the United States, which clearly paints an incomplete picture of the firearms found in the country," Grassley said.
He said some of the guns would track back to the U.S. because of the federal government's own gun-walking operation.
Frederick Hill, a spokesman for Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, criticized the Justice Department over Fast and Furious.
"The Obama Justice Department's efforts to facilitate the transfer of thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels does not appear to have helped stop the flow of illegal weapons to Mexico," said Hill. Operation Fast and Furious lost track of 1,400 of more than 2,000 weapons agents identified as suspect purchases.
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http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-09-06/politics/30128095_1_furious-scandal-fast-and-furious-atf-agents
The woman from Austin, Texas who was smuggling arms to the cartels was buying Hungarian WASR assault rifles from local gun stores. Any amateur can convert this semiautomatic into an automatic rifle with little knowledge or effort.
Jean Baptiste Kingery, from California, is now in a Mexican jail after smuggling grenades to the Sinaloa cartel. He bought the grenades at U.S. gun shops and over the internet.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/06/mexico-drug-cartel-grenade_n_951088.html
And can you cross the border into Mexico without the kind of inspection you have upon entering the United States? Yes. But how many times after that will you be stopped by a highway inspection point manned by soldiers? I can tell you, many.
It's easy to point fingers, especially when you point to places you know nothing about. Face it. Sophisticated weapons enter Mexico from the United States directly into the hands of the cartels. Your government has done little or nothing to control or stop it, just as it does nothing to capture its own major drug lords.
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USMCSEMPER-FI: "There is something wrong with you if you really believe what you've written".
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Personally, I believe there is clearly something wrong with you if you dispute what I have written, because I clearly stand behind it!
Just like drugs or illegals crossing north into the U.S., we're probably lucky to catch 10% -- meaning that 90% pass through.
Same with guns headed to Mexico, if 68,000 have been recovered by Mexican authorities over the past 6-years, and traced back to the U.S., I surely believe that there are several hundred thousand from the U.S. today in Mexico.
Go ahead hero, leave the personal attacks behind, and show us what you've got that makes any sense at all.
And than you self righteous big mouth hypocrite satanic criminal thugs were prosecuting that Russian arms competitor....
Wonder how many of these weapons made it into the hands of the drug cartels in spite of being "seized"?