Fast and furious weapon trafficking between the USA and Mexico

Operation Fast and Furious has turned out to be one the Justice Department's biggest scandals in recent years, not only because of the seemingly obvious problems in allowing known members of violent drug cartels to buy military-grade weapons and carry them across the U.S.-Mexico border unimpeded, but also because of the way in which the program and the public fallout following its discovery have been handled by those officials who were aware of the program. In particular, since the extent of the program was first revealed earlier this year, Attorney General Eric Holder has provided seemingly inconsistent accounts of when and to what extent he was aware of the program, leading members of Congress to push for a more involved investigation. By examining the flaws in Operation Fast and Furious itself as well as the failure of leadership which occurred within the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms as well as the Justice Department in general will serve to reveal how such an obviously dangerous and unaccountable program was able to begin in the first place, as well as why the program may turn out to be one of the defining issues of this Justice Department.

Before discussing the fallout from Operation Fast and Furious, it will be useful to provide a history of the program and the key events which led to its discovery and subsequent disavowal. Operation Fast and Furious was actually part of a larger program called Project Gunrunner in existence since 2005 that constituted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms' central "efforts in recent years to suppress illegal gun trafficking across the southwest border" (Chu & Krouse 13). Project Gunrunner was given special importance, because "in the U.S. Department of Justice's National Drug Threat Assessment 2009, Mexican drug trafficking organizations were identified as the greatest organized crime and drug trafficking threat to the United States worldwide," and since the Mexican President Felipe Calderon's decision to make "combating drug cartels and drug violence a top priority of his administration […] drug cartel enforcers reportedly are buying semiautomatic versions of AK-47 and AR-15 style assault rifles, and other military-style firearms, including .50 caliber sniper rifles in the United States," where all of these weapons are legal and many of them may be obtained without any special licensing or background check (Chu & Krouse 1).

The availability of these military-style weapons has meant that "the cartels are achieving parity in terms of firepower with the Mexican army and law enforcement," and a look at the statistics surrounding seized guns shows just how fully the United States has contributed to that firepower parity. According to a 2009 report to Congress, "although only a fraction of recovered firearms [found in Mexico] are submitted for tracing, approximately 87% of traced firearms were determined to have originated in the United States," with the Mexican government estimating "that 2,000 firearms are smuggled across the Southwest border daily" (Chu & Krouse 2). This process of buying guns in the United States and bringing them to Mexico has not only allowed cartels to match the Mexican military and police, but it has also been widely profitable, contributing to the income received from drug and human trafficking with its "profit margins that in the past have typically ranged between 300% and 500%" (Chu & Krouse 2).

It is worth noting that this gun trafficking is a direct result of U.S. gun laws, in many of the same ways that U.S. drug laws are ultimately responsible for the continued success of the cartels, a process which can be summed up in "the Southwest border paradigm: drugs and illegal migrants flow north, guns and money flow south" (Chu & Krouse 2). The dramatic increase in the number and destructive potential of weapons flowing from the United States into Mexico over the last decade, which ultimately precipitated the instigation of Operation Fast and Furious, is undeniably the result of the United States' lax gun laws, because "in many ways, the gun trafficking issue between Mexico and the United States is analogous to the "crime gun" trafficking issue that has arisen among states within the United States," where "oftentimes, [states with strict gun laws] view [states with lax gun laws] as the source of many crime guns and, hence, gun-related crimes" (Chu & Krouse 2-3). This is further demonstrated by the fact that although Mexican cartels represent the most pervasive border threat, the problem with gun trafficking is not limited to the Southwest border, because "it is noteworthy that the cross-border flow of illegal firearms has also been an issue for Canada, because Canadian gun laws are also generally much stricter that U.S. Gun laws" (Chu & Krouse 3). Recognizing this factor reveals an important fact that will serve to better contextualize this discussion of Operation Fast and Furious, namely, the fact that federal agencies have had a difficult time stemming the illegal flow of guns across the border precisely because in the United States, those guns are entirely legal. While this does not serve to justify the decision-making process by which thousands of guns were essentially lost to the cartels, it does at least provide some background information as to why federal agents felt it might be more beneficial to track guns rather than attempt to prohibit their purchase or sale.

As mentioned before, Project Gunrunner was in existence in some form since 2005, and had been gradually increasing in scope and financial support over the years, so that by 2009, Congress has brought "total funding for Southwest border firearms trafficking to $61 million," with some $10 million of that coming from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, AKA the stimulus bill (Chu & Krouse 14). This money helped the ATF open new locations as well as assign more staff to the project, but even with this influx of money and manpower the ATF has seemingly not dented the cartel's ability to purchase and traffic military-grade firearms. For example, recall the presumed 2,000 guns being brought into Mexico daily before noting that in all of 2007, "ATF agents investigated 187 firearms trafficking cases and recommended 465 defendants for prosecution," seemingly before they started selling weapons to the cartels directly (Chu & Krouse 13).

The difficult task the ATF was charged with, to stop the flow of weapons from a country that intentionally and explicitly makes it easy to buy weapons, likely contributed to its ultimate decision to institute Operation Fast and Furious and other operations like it (such as the similar "Operation Wide Receiver"), because there was simply no way that the agency could keep up with the thousands of firearms dealers it was tasked with covering. In most cases, weapons are obtained by "straw purchasers," who are people legally allowed to buy weapons who are actually buying them for someone who would otherwise be ineligible. In the case of weapons flowing into Mexico, "routine, small-scale smuggling of guns across the border often involves a series of straw purchases, during which guns are purchased from FFLs [federal firearms licensees] in border states and then sold to a middle man, who then smuggles the guns across the border," often utilizing "repeated trips across the border of one to three guns, referred to in border parlance as the ant (hormiga) run" (Chu & Krouse 10). Although straw purchases are technically illegal, it remains difficult to determine if an individual is actually conducting a straw purchase without serious surveillance, once again due to the United States' relaxed gun laws. In particular, although FFLs are required "to report to the Attorney General whenever they transferred more than one handgun to any nonlicensee within five consecutive business days," and forward that information on to local law enforcement, those records may not be kept for any longer than twenty days, and an individual purchasing guns at least five days apart would not even arouse suspicion in the first place (Chu & Krouse).

Understanding the background of ATF efforts to combat gun trafficking across the Southwest border is important for understanding Operation Fast and Furious, because although the difficulty of stopping gun trafficking from a country in which gun purchases are so loosely overseen does not justify the failure of leadership and accountability seen in the fallout from Operation Fast and Furious, understanding this background does at least allow one to appreciate both the scope of the problem and the myriad ways in which law enforcement was hindered at stemming the flow of guns through more obvious, direct means. Although Project Gunrunner really starting gaining traction in 2006, all available evidence suggests that Operation Fast and Furious did not begin until sometime in 2009, although there were similar programs in the past (Cochran 2011). The operation focused on suspected straw purchasers, but rather than attempt to stop the purchases before they happened or arrest the purchaser afterward (likely due to the protections afforded gun purchasers under U.S. law), the ATF instead let the guns "walk," allowing straw purchasers to resell the guns in an attempt to trace them to their ultimate source, thus setting up a larger bust. Over the course of about a year, it appears that "in total, some 1,725 weapons appear to have been involved," with weapons subsequently showing up in both the United States and Mexico (Cochran 2011).

Operation Fast and Furious first raised the interest and ire of the public in June 2010, when a document showed that the ATF had lets at least 309 guns walk before subsequently losing track of them (Cochran 2011). The practice of allowing straw purchasers to complete their purchase in order to track the gun had been done before, but the lack of oversight and communication seen in Operation Fast and Furious meant that the process of tracking these weapons suffered a fatal breakdown, so that they were ultimately lost until they showed up again at the scenes of crimes. It was this scenario that ultimately ignited the firestorm of controversy now surrounding the program, because in December of 2010, six months after the government acknowledged at least a portion of the missing guns, "Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was fatally shot with an AK-47 rifle in Arizona, near Rio Rico," and his assailant had been a member of the Sinaloa Cartel using "a weapon that was part of the Operation Fast and Furious sting" (Cochran 2011). More than anything this brought the issue to the fore, and adding an extra layer of irony and tragedy to an earlier revelation: in September of 2011, the New York Post reported than far from simply surveying straw purchases, "an ATF agent had been ordered by superiors to buy firearms and then intentionally resell them to Mexican drug cartel representatives" in what was later described as "an odd, deadly intended entrapment operation" (Cochran 2011, de la Isla 1). By the next month, Congressional hearings on the operation had begun.

Congressional hearings on Operation Fast and Furious, and in particular the extent to which high-level officials were aware of its existence and the particulars of the program, began under Representative Darrel Issa, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and are continuing to this day (Decker & Mattingly 2011). In particular, Attorney General Eric Holder has provided seemingly inconsistent or at least puzzling accounts as to the extent of his knowledge regarding Operation Fast and Furious. According to Kenneth Melson, the head of the ATF at the time, he was unaware of the operation and thus was unable to tell the Attorney General about it, who has likewise claimed that "he didn't recall knowing about the program until public controversy about it" (Decker & Mattingly 2011). However, this seemingly conflicts with the account of Lanny Breuer, the "head of the Justice Department's criminal division," who "was told in April 2010 that Arizona-based agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had allowed a gun trafficking ring to buy hundreds of weapons and send them to Mexico as part of an investigative tactic," and although "the briefing received by Mr. Breuer did not involve Operation Fast and Furious," it did cover the earlier program Wide Receiver, and Breuer "told aides to brief ATF leaders that agents in Arizona had used problematic tactics" (Savage 2011). Depending on who is to be believed, this briefing of ATF leaders apparently did not extend to the head of the ATF at the time.

The furor surrounding Operation Fast and Furious stems from two related but distinct criticisms. Firstly, the idea that the division of the government explicitly tasked with controlling and ensuring the safety of firearms would intentionally lose (and even sell) thousands of them to a Mexican drug cartel is atrocious on its face, because it appears like such a simple and obvious tactical failure that critics cannot help but to wonder in regards to what other incompetencies might be covered up, especially since at least "400 guns disappeared as part of Wide Receiver," predating Fast and Furious and demonstrating the difficulty of maintaining the trace of guns once they have entered the illicit market (Savage 2011). The example of operation Wide Receiver is especially damning, because it reveals that the ATF lost guns in the past, and apparently had no problem with it so long as the public was unaware of these losses. This reveals a cultural problem within the Justice Department, because this means that either no one in the ATF realized the potential issues with programs like Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious, or that someone did notice and their concerns were disregarded. The latter seems to be the case, as investigations have revealed that Fast and Furious "was controversial because some agents believed that their supervisors, bent on identifying ringleaders, were not letting them move quickly to bust low-level straw purchasers and get guns off the street" (Savage 2011). As will be discussed later, even when straw purchasers were arrested, these arrests were done in such a way as to undercut the entire point of Fast and Furious in the first place, further demonstrating a lack of effective communication.

The case of Brian Terry, the Border Patrol agent murdered with a gun from Operation Fast and Furious, leads to the second, somewhat more fundamental criticism, which is that the very people tasked with preventing violence and crime have, whether intentionally or not, aided the murder of numerous innocent people, so that while "the hearing[s], thus far, seem to dwell on the number of weapons, […] the more important unasked question is how many innocents were killed, wounded, injured or suffered through use of these weapons" (de la Isla 1). This question is not merely hypothetical, because the guns can be traced once they have been used in a crime, and in some cases, these guns were actually directly supplied by the ATF, instead of merely being allowed to cross the border without intervention. While one may regard both cases as an abrogation of duty, the former situation removes even that little bit of distance between the ATF and the actual crime because "the facts show more than merely a passively observant federal agency" (Cochran 2011).

Despite the failures of Operation Fast and Furious in preventing the trafficking of guns across the border or the subsequent use of those guns in crimes, it must be noted that the operation did lead to some arrests, although that will be little consolation to those critics of the program and the Justice Department. Nonetheless, these arrests must be considered in order to appreciate the full impact of the operation, because they represent a further lack of due diligence on the part of the Justice Department, revealing some of the pervasive structural and cultural problems which seem to have led to the instigation and maintenance of Operation Fast and Furious in the first place.

In particular, "in March or 2011 Mayor Eddie Espinoza, Columbus Police Chief Angelo Vega, Columbus Councilman Woody Gutierrez, and a host of other residents of Columbus and Palomas [in New Mexico] were arrested in a sting operation for gun running to the drug cartels," a sting operation that was later revealed to be a component of Operation Fast and Furious (Nunez Neumann 48). Even then, however, the arrest of Espinoza and the others represents a kind of inversion of the stated goal of Operation Fast and Furious, which was to track the guns to higher-level cartel members. Instead, "in a rather distorted series of thought patterns, various agencies, including, but not limited to, the FBI, DEA, and ATF were on one hand paying the cartel figures, and then on the other hand pursuing them," because the arrest of Espinoza and the others, who functioned as straw purchasers for the cartels, was only made possible due to the fact "that the FBI paid at least six Mexican Drug Cartel figures, involved in the gun smuggling, as informants" (Nunez Neumann 49).