Excerpt
How the United States Arms the Mexican Cartels
In an exclusive excerpt from the new book Exit Wounds, author Ieva Jusionyte traces the deadly pipeline of assault weapons into the hands of organized crime
What are American guns doing in Mexico? This question first came to me nearly a decade ago while working as an EMT treating wounded migrants who were risking their lives trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. I wanted to understand what role high-powered weapons, easily bought in the U.S., played in turning Mexico, their home, into a country they had to flee. Over the next five years, I followed American guns from dealers in Arizona and Texas across the border and into the hands of organized crime groups in Mexico. As they have competed for control over trafficking routes to supply drugs to the U.S. market, these groups have built arsenals of weapons, including military-style semi-automatic rifles like AR-15s and AK-47s, and .50 caliber Barretts, which cartel snipers have used to attack the Mexican security forces. I talked to smugglers and buyers and to youths forcefully recruited by gangs and cartels. I also talked to journalists covering organized crime and to officials and federal agents on both sides of the border who are trying to stop gun trafficking. Usually, guns in Mexico don’t make much of a ripple in the States — then Operation Fast and Furious happened.
This excerpt from my new book, Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border, recounts what happened during this dark episode in ATF’s (The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) history and the consequences that the agents’ actions — and inaction — have had on both sides of the border.
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On Nov. 20, 2009, Mexican soldiers in Naco, Sonora, stopped a twenty-one-year-old woman driving a truck with a .50 caliber Beowulf rifle and forty-one AK-47s. She said she was transporting the guns to Sinaloa. A few weeks later, over three hundred miles west, in the border town of Mexicali, Baja California, the army seized another arsenal of forty-one AK-47s, one AR-15, and one FN 5.7, and detained twelve people, all of them from Sinaloa, some of them identified as members of an organized crime group. By the end of February 2010, U.S. federal agents in Phoenix counted more than one thousand weapons confiscated before or after they crossed the border with Mexico. Most were semiautomatic rifles, primarily AK-47s.
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Tracing the AKs seized in Sonora and Baja California was the task of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The agency, better known by its acronym ATF, was initially part of the US Department of the Treasury, where its main mandate was enforcing federal alcohol and tobacco tax laws. In 1968, following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, President Lyndon B. Johnson formed the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, whose recommendations led to the passage of the Gun Control Act. Soon after, ATF began overseeing violations of federal laws involving firearms and explosives, including arson and bombings. However, it wasn’t until the reorganization of U.S. federal agencies following the 9/11 attacks in 2001, when ATF was moved to the Department of Justice (DOJ), that illegal use and trafficking of guns became its priority.
Gun tracing is a critical part of this work. Still analogue in the largely digitized world, it is a time-consuming process, which relies on phone calls and paper records instead of searchable databases. To trace a gun, the agent has to submit a request to the personnel at the National Tracing Center in West Virginia, providing a description of the gun and its serial number. Then, people at the tracing center begin making calls: first, they call the manufacturer or, if the gun is foreign-made, its importer, dictate the serial number, and ask which wholesale distributor the gun went to; next, they call the distributor and ask for the name of the dealer that ordered the gun; then they call the dealer. But the dealers don’t keep electronic records either, so when they get a call from the tracing center, the manager has to look through file boxes to find the right firearm transaction record (it’s known as ATF Form 4473), which lists the person who bought the gun from the store — their name, date, and place of birth, address, and sometimes their social security number. This process, from beginning to end, takes about a week for each gun and may require as many as seventy calls. When the request is urgent, the National Tracing Center can turn it around in twenty-four hours.
ATF agents in Phoenix who reviewed the tracing reports of guns confiscated in northern Mexico in late 2009, could have skipped this process. By then, they already knew about the handful of men purchasing large quantities of high-caliber weapons in a handful of stores in Arizona. One firearms dealer who had for years voluntarily informed ATF about sales he found suspicious contacted the office in Phoenix on Oct. 31, a few weeks before the seizures in Naco and Mexicali, and told them about four young men who had purchased nineteen AK-47 style rifles. Following that conversation, an agent reviewed the firearms transaction records the dealer provided, including one documenting a sale of six identical AK-47 rifles to a man who had also bought several FN Herstal 5.7 caliber pistols. Over the next few weeks, agents gathered more 4473s from Phoenix-area gun stores and conducted background checks and surveillance. They established connections between the individuals making these large purchases and merged their cases into a single investigation.
Coordinated by the ATF’s Phoenix Field Division, the operation was conducted under the auspices of Project Gunrunner, a nationwide initiative launched in Laredo, Texas, in 2005, which sought to reduce the smuggling of firearms across the U.S. southern border. But while the primary tactic of Gunrunner was the interdiction of buyers and sellers who were violating the laws, the agents in Phoenix had other plans. They wanted to see where the guns went if they were allowed to cross the border — to follow the small fish until they caught bigger ones. The men buying AK-47 style rifles in bulk used an auto body shop as one of the stash houses, so agents named their operation “Fast and Furious,” after the popular movie about car racing.
In law enforcement lingo, what the agents did is known as gunwalking. “It’s like saying that gangsters run guns, but governments walk guns,” journalist Ioan Grillo said, noting the irony, in his book Blood Gun Money. The speed of movement has nothing to do with it. The logistics are the same. The difference is in law only: gunrunning is a crime, while gunwalking receives the government’s authorization. The tactic’s formal name is “controlled delivery,” defined in Article 2(i) of the United Nations Organized Crime Convention as “the technique of allowing illicit or suspect consignments to pass out of, through or into the territory of one or more States, with the knowledge and under the supervision of their competent authorities, with a view to the investigation of an offence and the identification of persons involved in the commission of the offence.” The tactic is often used by agents pursuing the trafficking of drugs, wildlife, and counterfeit products. Following minor buyers and smugglers until they deliver the goods allows law enforcement officers to learn about the transit routes and destinations, map criminal schemes, and understand the structures of organized crime.
ATF agents in Arizona had been using controlled delivery for decades. The most recent precedent was Operation Wide Receiver, run out of their Tucson office in 2006 and 2007, under President George W. Bush’s administration. Then, too, agents watched hundreds of weapons — AR-15 and AK-47 style rifles and Colt .38 Super pistols — being sold to “straw purchasers.” These were men and women hired for the job who went to retail stores and gun shops to buy the firearms, who passed the background checks and signed the forms and, once they left the stores, handed the weapons over to others who smuggled them across the border through ports of entry. Then, too, ATF hoped to build a bigger case against an arms trafficking network. But after years of delay the prosecutors ended up charging only low-level buyers, mostly for committing paperwork violations. Only 64 of the 474 firearms sold during the operation have been recovered. Mike Detty, a licensed fire-arms dealer who served as a confidential informant for the ATF, was so upset by how the agents handled the operation that he poured his outrage into a book. Despite failures, agents continued using this tactic in other cases, sending weapons to Mexico, where they lost track of many of them. They allowed people who were known to law enforcement for being involved in selling and smuggling drugs and guns to continue their activities. They could have stopped the men who procured some of the firearms the Zetas used to kill ICE agent Jaime Zapata and wound his partner Victor Avila during an ambush of their armored SUV in the Mexican state of San Luis Potosí, but they did not.
Fast and Furious was a reiteration of these earlier schemes, and a repetition of their failures. Over a year and a half, between September 2009 and December 2010, a joint task force comprised of federal officials from ATF, FBI, DEA, and ICE, working under the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Arizona, let over two thousand guns “walk” to Mexico. Instead of arresting suspects as soon as they identified them, agents waited. Straw purchasing cases were “hard to pursue,” wrote William Newell, special agent in charge of the Phoenix division, in the memo he sent to the ATF headquarters in D.C. Their approach in this case was to “further establish the structure of the organization and establish illegal acts before proceeding to an overt phase.”
Not everyone involved in the operation thought it was a good idea.
Some gun dealers and ATF agents they cooperated with became concerned when they saw the same buyers return to purchase large quantities of weapons: Alfredo Celis bought 133 AK-47 style rifles and one .50 caliber weapon in the span of one year; Joshua David Moore, a former member of the U.S. Marine Reserves, acquired 138 AK-47s and two .50 caliber rifles, all in just five months; Uriel Patino bought a total of 723 guns. But supervisors instructed those who raised concerns to keep watching and waiting. Special agent John Dodson recalled the time the owner of the Lone Wolf Trading Company tipped them off that a straw buyer they had already identified in the case was about to purchase more weapons. The agents hurried to the store and saw a man walk out with more than a dozen AK-47 style rifles, load them into a car, and drive off. They followed him, expecting an order from their superiors to intercept the vehicle. But the order never came. Rather than receiving authorization to intervene, they were told to return to the office. “We’ve got it handled,”27 Newell assured ATF leadership.
Some on his own team doubted it.
“What are we doing here? I don’t know. What the hell is the purpose of this? I have no idea. This went on every day,” Agent Dodson later told congressional investigators. “Every day being out here watching a guy go into the same gun store buying another 15 or 20 AK-47s or variants…, guys that don’t have a job, and he is walking in here spending $27,000 for three Barrett .50 calibers…and you are sitting there every day and you can’t do anything,” he recalled his frustration. “I cannot see anyone who has one iota of concern for human life being okay with this.”
Special agent Lawrence Alt, who had been a police officer before he joined ATF, was also worried: “Prior to my coming to Phoenix, Arizona, I had never witnessed…a situation where there wasn’t at least an attempt to interdict or take the firearm at some point.” During eleven years he had spent with the ATF, Agent Alt worked with cases which involved illegally purchased guns. “Follow the gun was also the motto, follow the gun, stay with the gun.” Sometimes “people would sit on houses all night long, days on end, waiting for the guns to go so that they could then follow it, satisfy the requirements of the investigation.” He’d never been in a situation where he was told to do nothing. “Something bad was going to happen,” he said.
“On our first visit to the home, just hours after the massacre had occurred, we’d seen the bloodstains on the walls, the sneaker prints stamped in dried blood. The blood that had not yet been mopped had run down the driveway in rivulets and had caked on the tires of parked cars, including our SUV,” wrote journalist Alfredo Corchado about what he and his companions saw when they arrived at Villas de Salvárcar, a working-class neighborhood of small cinder block homes in the southern part of Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Corchado had returned to Texas after years at the Wall Street Journal and still dressed like a business correspondent, pairing shirts and blazers with blue jeans. Having grown up in a family of migrant farmworkers, who left Durango for California and then settled down in El Paso, he felt at home on the border. As a reporter for a major regional daily, the Dallas Morning News, he had been writing about communities on both sides, including the murders of women in Juárez. But even his experience of routinely covering violent organized crime couldn’t prepare him for what he saw on that winter day in 2010.
The previous night, on Jan. 30, the small house on Calle Villa de Portal was packed with high school and college students celebrating the eighteenth birthday of Jesús Enríquez. They were watching a soccer game when around midnight several trucks with tinted windows pulled up in front of the residence where the party was taking place. Inside the vehicles were members of La Línea, a gang that served as enforcers for the Juárez cartel. They disembarked, entered the house, and opened fire, killing fifteen people, injuring fourteen others. No police or ambulances arrived when witnesses called emergency services. Parents had to drive their children to the hospital on their own. More than a hundred 7.62 caliber bullet casings were found at the scene. Three of the weapons used in the attack were later traced to Fast and Furious.
When Corchado asked a father whose son had been killed what he wanted readers in Mexico and the United States to understand about the massacre, the man said: “I want them to feel my pain.”
Some of these crimes in Mexico, like the Villas de Salvárcar massacre, made it to the news in the United States, mostly through efforts by El Paso–based journalists like Alfredo Corchado, Angela Kocherga, and others who reported from the Texas borderlands. But the murder that made the flawed operation public and political in the United States was of an American citizen on US soil: the killing of US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry northwest of Nogales, Arizona, on December 14, 2010. Terry died from a single gunshot wound to his lower back, fired from an AK-47.46 Though the investigators could not identify the specific gun that fired the bullet, two AK-47 style WASR-10 rifles were recovered at the scene. Both were traced to the Lone Wolf Trading Company in Glendale, Arizona, where they had been sold to Jaime Avila Jr., one of the straw purchasers the agents were monitoring under the Fast and Furious operation. During a seven-month period Avila bought fifty-two guns, including seventeen AK-47 style rifles, two AR-15 variants, and two .50 caliber weapons.
Terry’s murder precipitated a scandal about Fast and Furious that fueled several conspiracy theories about the operation. According to one of the theories, better known in Mexico, it was a deliberate attempt by the United States to weaken and control its southern neighbor. Additionally, there were whispers that since most of the guns went to the Sinaloa cartel, it was proof that the U.S. government had made a deal with this organized crime group and supported them against their rivals. In the United States, the most popular conspiracy theory saw Fast and Furious as a plot by President Barack Obama’s administration to rein- state an assault rifle ban and implement new gun control measures. Some said that Arizona was specifically chosen for this plot because it had lax gun laws which could easily be made the culprit. But, as Grillo put it, this theory is oblivious to the fact that “gun deaths in Mexico don’t swing politics in the United States.”
The sad reality is that deaths in Mexico, rather than being a liability, are profitable to the U.S. gun industry. ATF agents have made horrible mistakes with Fast and Furious and the gunwalking operations that preceded it, but it was not because the agency was part of some plot to strengthen gun control laws in the United States.
ATF agents who shared their experiences during interviews conducted by a congressional committee admitted they knew that the only way they would learn the whereabouts of the guns they let go would be when Mexican law enforcement recovered them at crime scenes. “Most of the Mexican recoveries are related to an act of violence,” Agent Alt said. “You can’t allow thousands of guns to go south of the border without an expectation that they are going to be recovered eventually in crimes and people are going to die.”
When the investigators questioned special agent Olindo Casa, an eighteen-year veteran of ATF who had previously worked firearms trafficking cases in California, Florida, and Illinois, he confirmed that violence in Mexico was an expected outcome of what they were doing:
Interviewer: It was a likely consequence of the policy of walking guns that some of those guns would wind up at crime scenes in Mexico?
Agent Casa: Yeah.
Interviewer: And is it fair to say that some, if not many, of these crime scenes would be where people would be seriously injured or possibly killed?
Agent Casa: Of course.
Interviewer: So is it a fair, predictable outcome of the policy that there would be essentially collateral damage in terms of human lives?
Agent Casa: Sure.
Reprinted from Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence across the Border by Ieva Jusionyte, courtesy of University of California Press. Copyright 2024. You can order your copy here.