ATF Death Watch 34: Guns, Lies and Videotape

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“Finally, 10 decapitated bodies – three of them women – were found Saturday morning in the northern city of Torreon, Coahuila state, and the heads discovered in different parts of town” Yes, that’s the end of a report from laht.com on this weekend’s cartel-related violence. Not including today (Sunday). The unstated info that points to the main cause of this murderous mayhem: the Mexican military is at war with Los Zetas. Not the rest of the Mexican drug cartels. Los Zetas. So guess which cartel benefitted from firearms purchased at American gun stores and smuggled into Mexico with the ATF’s help? For that answer, we turn to recently captured Los Zetas drug cartel leader Jesus Enrique Rejon Aguilar . . .

In his post-incarceration interview, Aguilar says “all the weapons” in the Zetas aresenal were “bought in the United States.” What’s more, “el cargamento era transportado a través de los cruces fronterizos, pero ahora se traslada por el río Bravo, que divide a Estados Unidos y México.” Before, the cargo was transported through border crossings, but now it’s via the Rio Bravo [river] that divides the U.S. and Mexico.

If true, Los Zetas paid off Mexican and U.S. border guards to import weapons from north America. And, for some reason, neither side can patrol the Rio Bravo. If Aguilar’s assertion isn’t true, the Mexican government is using the Zetas jefe to wage a disinformation campaign, trying to justify the ATF’s decision to go to “extreme” lengths to stop the flow of arms to the Mexican drug cartels.

If you’re spending any time pondering that question, I have one word for you: grenades. Clock this from dialogo-americas.com:

The more than 1800 grenades seized from a group of Salvadoran military personnel, who were trying to irregularly divert them from a destruction procedure, are believed to have been destined for the Zetas criminal group, of Mexican origin but also believed to be operating in Guatemala, Salvadoran Minister of National Defense Gen. David Munguía Payés confirmed on 24 June.

And if you think General Payés is indulging in idle speculation, there’s this from mexidata.info.

Between July 2007 and January 2008, members of Los Zetas stole an estimated 500 weapons from the Mariscal Zavala military base – a random assortment of pistols, rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and grenades are missing.

Finally, on 20 August 2009, alleged members of Los Zetas stole a shipment of weapons en route from Guatemala to Mexico. Grenade launchers, rocket launchers, grenades, assault rifles, and magazines were included in the heist.

If that’s not enough to convince you that Los Zetas need American gun stores like Charlie Sheen needs assertiveness training, let me remind you that General Douglas Fraser, the head of the U.S. Southern Command, recently told the U.S. Senate that

Over 50 percent of the military-type weapons that are flowing throughout the region have a large source between Central American stockpiles, if you will, left over from wars and conflicts in the past.

Point taken? In fact, Aguilar is right: one way or another, the U.S. is arming Los Zetas. And all the other violence-prone players engaged in the struggle to control the multi-billion dollar illegal drug trade putting THC, cocaine and meths into the bloodstream of millions of Americans.

Uncle Sam’s tooling-up the cartels via “seepage” of government-sanctioned, U.S. taxpayer-supported military and law enforcement arms sales to Mexico and its central American neighbors. Does the ATF, DEA, DHS, CIA, CPB, ICE, Sate Department and the White House know this? Ask Heckler & Koch, the German arms maker who’s suspended sales to Mexican police for this very reason.

Anyway, let’s focus on the pig-ignorant programs known as Project Gunrunner, Operation Fast and Furious and Operation Castaway—ATF initiatives that armed the drug thugs who killed U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata and countless Mexican nationals.

Aguilar has something to say about that, too:

Interrogado por policías federales, el detenido señaló que para el cártel del Golfo, rival de Los Zetas, es más sencillo comprar armas en Estados Unidos y hacerlas llegar hasta territorio mexicano. “Ignoramos el suceso, el porqué, nada más uno saca deducciones, que si es imposible estar comprando armamento y menos traerlo en una cajuela y ellos lo traen y pueden pasar libremente, pues tiene que haber un trato o algo, no sé, uno deduce que puede haber un trato con el gobierno, no sabemos”, dijo. 

Google translation:

Questioned by federal police, the detainee said that the Gulf cartel, a rival of the Zetas, [found it] easy to buy guns in the U.S. and Mexican territory to [import] them. “We ignore the event, why, just one out deductions, if it is impossible to be buying fewer weapons and bring them into a trunk and bring it and can pass freely, as it has to have a deal or something, I dunno, a clear there may be a deal with the government, we do not know,” he said.

Despite having a gun to his head (and probably electrodes wired to parts of his body that are extremely sensitive to electrical currents), Aguilar is “suggesting” that the Gulf cartel was/is working with the Mexican government to import firearms from the U.S.

The Mexican government in league with a drug cartel (or three) to help ease guns across the American border? What are the odds?

Quite good, actually. Setting aside the obvious (Mexican corruption), have you ever wondered how ATF-enabled smugglers managed to walk some two thousand guns into Mexico without ONCE being stopped or caught by either U.S. Customs and Border Patrol or the Mexican federales?

Let me spell it out. Mexico is our friend. Mexico is in cahoots with the non-Zetas cartels. For reasons of their own, the ATF wanted firearms from U.S. gun dealers to show up at Mexican crime scenes (an ATF Agent testified to Congress that his bosses were boasting about hecho en Mexico e-traces).

So the ATF somehow gets the message to U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agents and their Mexican counterparts: let my guns go! You want irony? What if the CPB let ATF-enabled guns walk—which drug thugs eventually used to kill a Border Patrol Agent?

I’ll write it until my fingers get tired of tapping: the Congressional investigation into the ATF’s Gunwalker scandal needs to hear from the people on the sharp end of these operations.

How exactly did these dastardly deals go down? Who got paid what to do what for whom when, and who knew about it? How did so many guns get from Houston’s Badger Guns (and the rest) to the Mexican drug cartels? Which cartels?

And one more: whose idea was it to let the guns walk in the first place? Who’s responsible for transforming a Bush-era interdiction effort into a protection racket, starting a chain of events that did nothing whatsoever to curtail the carnage in Mexico and, increasingly, the U.S.? Events that led to the death of a U.S. Marine, who gave his life protecting the sovereignty of the United States of America.