Informe: EE.UU. alentó la venta de armas a cárteles de la droga en México
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This is DemocracyNow, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report
I'm Amy Goodman
A new report from three U.S. senators
finds some 70 percent of guns seized in Mexico
last year
came from the United States.
The report is called "Halting U.S. Firearms Trafficking to Mexico"
and was compiled by Democratic Senators Dianne Feinstein of California,
Charles Schumer of New York, Sheldon Whitehouse of
Rhode Island.
It finds Mexican drug cartels are arming themselves
with U.S. military-style weapons and
urges a strengthening of U.S. regulations to stem
the flow of guns to Mexico.
Mexican President Felipe Calderón has repeatedly
called for the U.S. to implement stricter firearms laws.
Last year, he accused
the Americans of, quote, "irresponsibility"
on arms sales.
The Americans began to sell arms as a voracious, ambitious industry,
like the American arms industry.
This often provokes conflicts in countries that are poor and less developed,
such as Africa, due to the sale of arms,
is in a very similar situation to that which is being lived by the Mexican people.
For the arms traffickers,
it’s a business to sell arms to criminals,
and we need to mobilize not just public opinion against this,
but unite with international public opinion
to show the irresponsibility of the Americans,
as much as it bothers them
or hinders their political campaigns.
That was Mexican President Felipe Calderón.
Meanwhile, Congress is holding hearings
this week on a once-secret
U.S. government plan to encourage U.S. gun shops
to sell thousands of guns to middlemen
for Mexican drug cartels.
The operation is called "Fast and Furious."
It focuses on using these middlemen
to gain access to senior-level figures within Mexico’s
criminal organizations.
Run by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,
the operation has come under severe criticism
since hundreds of guns that were sold to the cartels
have later been found at crime scenes
in both countries,
including two at the murder scene
of a U.S. Border Patrol agent.
For more, we’re going to Washington, D.C., to David Heath,
senior reporter at the Center for Public Integrity,
who’s extensively covered Operation Fast and Furious
and gun trafficking on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, David.
Explain Operation Fast and Furious,
which is
going to be the focus of a hearing
today in Washington.
Right.
Beginning in late 2009,
the ATF decided that they wanted to
make a strategy shift
in how they investigated gun running.
Typically what the ATF does is they
focus on what’s called straw buyers.
These are people who are paid
to go buy a gun for somebody who can’t
legally go buy a gun.
And typically, what they do is,
once the straw buyers buy a gun,
they try to
confiscate them
and take those weapons out.
That strategy, according —
the ATF felt that that stategy wasn’t working.
Tens of thousands of weapons
are making their way into Mexico.
So they decided that what they wanted to do
was look at the straw buyers
and try to follow the
guns up the chain of command and take out an entire
gun-running organization.
And their hope was that, by doing that,
that they would be more effective
in stemming the flow of weapons.
This really goes against the culture
of the agents at the ATF.
It goes against their training.
They saw weapons that were
essentially being allowed to
hit the streets and go out,
and it upset them,
and especially when
two of the weapons were found at the murder scene
of a Border Patrol agent who was killed.
This was Brian Terry, right?
Brian Terry, the U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona?
Yes.
Talk about the hearings and their significance.
I mean,
we’re talking about the possibility of holding
the Obama administration, the Justice Department,
in contempt.
Yeah, that’s a very unusual thing.
I think it’s only happened a few times in history.
What’s happening is
that there’s two investigations going on right now.
The inspector general in the Justice Department
is investigating to see if mistakes were made
in the approach
that the ATF took.
At the same time, members of Congress,
specifically Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa
and Darrell Issa of California,
Representative Darrell Issa of California,
are also doing their own investigations into Operation Fast and Furious.
And
I think they’re going to have a hearing today to
— and they’ve already released a report to show,
essentially, that
agents within the Phoenix office of the ATF were very upset about
how this was handled.
Addressing a meeting of the National Rifle Association in April,
former U.S. ambassador to the U.N.
John Bolton argued American guns
are not to blame
for drug-related violence in Mexico.
There are a lot of guns in
Mexico in the hands of the drug cartels,
absolutely.
Where do they come from?
No doubt, some of them come from the United States.
A lot of things in the world come from the United States.
But the bulk of those guns in the hands of the drug cartels
probably came from police
arsenals in Mexico
or arsenals of the Mexican army,
where corrupt police officials and corrupt army officials
sold them to the drug cartels’ agents.
Or they were procured in the vast international
weapons market that the cartels obviously have access to.
The idea that what’s going on in Mexico is somehow
our fault because of lax
gun control laws here is exactly the kind of subterfuge
that the Obama administration would like to carry forward
in the near future to get stronger gun control laws here.
That was former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations
John Bolton.
David Heath,
his arguments, and especially in light of
this report
that 70 percent of the guns seized in Mexico
last year were from the United States?
Right. The only data we have on this are
the guns that are recovered by the Mexican authorities and then
traced by ATF.
That’s really the only data that exists on that.
And the data is that in the last
two years
there were roughly 30,000 guns
that Mexican authorities asked the ATF to trace.
And often, these
guns come with incomplete serial numbers,
or they’re not inputted into the database correctly,
so there’s a lot of times when they can’t do a match.
But of those that they were able to trace,
70 percent of the weapons — about 20,000 weapons —
were traced back to the United States. There’s 8,500
gun dealers along the border of Mexico.
And you can, of course, buy
assault weapons,
and very easily, at any of these gun shops.
I mean, very interestingly, CBS News did a big exposé
on Operation Fast and Furious.
It didn’t get a lot of attention.
Sources told CBS News several gun shops
wanted to stop the questionable sales,
but the ATF,
the U.S. government — you know, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,
the agency — encouraged them to continue.
Yeah, my understanding is that there was one gun shop
that had raised questions,
and there had been gun shops in the past that had been held
liable for selling weapons.
And so, there are issues about that.
And so,
there was one gun shop that I know of
that raised questions about
selling these weapons, and the ATF,
as I understand it,
told them that
they were doing an investigation and that if they
helped, that this would
supposedly help them
trace the guns to the cartel.
And then the issue of the
the sunset of the
assault weapons ban, which President Obama says
he will
not push to reinstate,
the significance of the flow of assault weapons into Mexico?
Right.
One of the things that hasn’t gotten very much attention in this whole
investigation is that,
up until 2004,
AK-47s were illegal in this country.
There was a ban
for 10 years
on assault-type weapons,
these military-style weapons that the drug cartels like.
And so,
you’ve seen a dramatic increase in violence in Mexico
since then.
You’ve seen
— and these AK-47s, especially, or these .50 caliber guns,
are really the weapons of choice for the drug cartels.
And just in the last —
since 2007, you’ve seen
about 34,000 drug-related deaths
caused by firearms in Mexico,
15,000 just last year.
So there’s been an explosion of violence
in Mexico.
And
like your report said,
President Calderón really blames that on the lifting of the assault weapons ban.
It’s fascinating to see
the conservative presidents of
of Mexico, from Vicente Fox to Calderón,
also all
pushing for some kind of decriminalization or legalization
of drugs at this point,
talking about sane drug and gun policies.
Right.
I mean, I think the other — I mean, what you have is you have —
these cartels are, as you know, are huge.
I mean, these are multibillion-dollar
organizations,
and they’re really equipped like armies.
They have helicopters.
They have grenades.
They have military-style weapons.
And this is all being funded by American
America’s appetite for illegal drugs.
They’re coming north
coming north through the border.
And as you have these
drugs coming north, you have — through that same pipeline,
through the same people, you have guns going south.
So they’re really tied, very closely tied together. If you could stop
the flow of drugs,
then you would also
simultaneously be stopping the flow of guns.
David Heath,
I want to thank you very much for being with us,
senior reporter at the Center for Public Integrity.