On the morning of Nov. 30, 2019, a convoy of pickup trucks carrying men armed with a heavy machine gun and powerful .50-caliber rifles entered the Mexican town of Villa Unión and opened fire. The men had been sent on a mission of intimidation: They planned to set fire to the town hall. Their superior firepower pinned down state and local police officers as they waited for military reinforcements. Terrorized residents scrambled to take cover from the hail of bullets. The smell of smoke filled the streets and spent casings covered the ground like “fallen leaves,” said Luis Manzano, a Mexican journalist who drove into town during the shooting. But his most vivid memory was the thunder of .50-caliber guns. The “ground trembled” as they fired, he said. “I had never experienced anything like that.” The military drove off the assailants. In the end, four police officers, two civilians and 19 cartel members were killed. Afterward, as investigators collected evidence from the scene, they gathered at least 45 .50-caliber casings stamped with the initials “L.C.” The letters stand for the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant, a sprawling facility just outside Kansas City, Missouri, that is owned by the U.S. government and is the largest manufacturer of rifle rounds used by the American military. It has also been a major supplier of ammunition for American consumers, including .50-caliber cartridges. These powerful rounds — as big as a medium-sized cigar and designed to be used by the military to destroy vehicles and light aircraft — are currently available for purchase by civilians across the United States. Millions of pages of court documents, seizure records and government data obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and The New York Times show how agreements between the Army and the private contractors that run Lake City have allowed .50-caliber ammunition and components made at the plant to enter retail markets and fall into the hands of Mexican cartels. Mexico’s government has also purchased Lake City ammunition, the documents show, although they do not indicate the caliber. The U.S. domestic market for the ammunition is small: .50-caliber rifles, which have limited civilian application, typically retail for thousands of dollars, and heavy machine guns like the one used in Villa Unión cost considerably more. The guns’ standard cartridges average between $3 and $4 apiece and are rarely purchased by American gun owners. But in Mexico, where cartels have deep pockets and a seemingly endless appetite for .50-caliber firearms, demand is high. Cartel gunmen armed with .50-caliber firearms have downed helicopters, assassinated government officials, shot at police and military forces, and massacred civilians. Since 2012, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has seized more than 40,370 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition in states bordering Mexico, according to data obtained through public records requests. Lake City’s product accounted for about a third of them, a larger share than any other manufacturer. While .50-caliber ammunition from other companies — located primarily in Brazil and South Korea — has also made its way to Mexican cartels, the data makes clear that the U.S. Army plant has been a major source of the destructive ammunition being used to wage military-style battles with Mexican authorities. This includes a particularly powerful version of Lake City’s ammunition — incendiary rounds capable of piercing armor, which were used in an attack on Mexican police in 2024 and are for sale online today In February of last year, the Trump administration declared six Mexican cartels to be foreign terrorist organizations, yet these same organizations are acquiring ammunition made at the plant owned by the U.S. Army. At least 16 online retailers have sold armor-piercing ammunition made at Lake City or made with components from the plant, according to a count by ICIJ and The Times. Vasily Campbell, who owns one of those businesses, said he stopped selling the ammunition “about two years ago once we found out where it was going and how it was getting there.” He said he became suspicious when buyers began asking to have 100-round ammo cans delivered to residential addresses. “That’s not a normal purchase,” he said. “There’s several orders I straight-up canceled.” The U.S. Army did not respond in detail to questions about the use of Lake City ammunition by drug cartels. In an email, a spokesperson said that allowing commercial sales from the plant has saved taxpayers around $50 million annually, primarily by lowering the government’s cost for ammunition. The impact that one .50-cal has in a firefight is outrageous … They really, really tip the scale — former ATF agent Chris Demlein Successive presidential administrations have pledged to crack down on the flow of arms to Mexico. And in September, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a new initiative with the Mexican government to stop gun trafficking to the country. The number of .50-caliber rounds seized is small compared with that of other cartridges. But it’s the power of the .50-caliber ammunition, not its quantity, that has made it a game changer for the cartels, giving them the ability to overwhelm police and even the military, according to Chris Demlein, a former ATF agent, who spent years investigating gun smuggling to Mexico. “The impact that one .50-cal has in a firefight is outrageous,” he said. The weapons allow cartels to engage with targets at distances of more than a mile: “They really, really tip the scale.” ICIJ and the Times obtained investigative files from three incidents involving .50-caliber rifles, including the assault on Villa Unión. In each of them, Mexican authorities reported finding casings marked with the Lake City imprint. In a fourth example in early 2024, gunmen used the more destructive variant, .50-caliber armor-piercing incendiary rounds, from Lake City to attack a police convoy, according to a press briefing given by then Defense Secretary Luis Cresencio Sandoval. One of the bullets pierced an armored vehicle, killing one of the crew members and wounding three others. “The armor that we have cannot protect our personnel from this kind of penetration,” he said. Brenda Aparicio Villegas is all too familiar with the devastating power of .50-caliber weapons. Her husband, Edder Paul Negrete Trejo, was a police officer who died on October 14, 2019 when he and his fellow police officers were ambushed in the western state of Michoacán. Authorities blamed the attack on the New Generation Jalisco Cartel, news media reported at the time. Her husband and his colleagues — who often had to purchase their own bullets — did not stand a chance against the cartel’s .50-caliber rifles, she said. Negrete, the father of three children, died from a gunshot wound to the chest. Twelve other officers were also killed in the attack, including one who burned to death. Investigators later found .50-caliber casings from Lake City at the scene. Not enough has been done to stop the flow of guns and ammunition to Mexico, Ms. Villegas said. “Sadly, many of us pay the price.” Congress bans some sales to civilians The .50 BMG cartridge was developed in the early 20th century for a heavy machine gun used to attack tanks and aircraft. For decades, the spent brass casings of .50-caliber rounds were rarely found beyond military training grounds and battlefields. However, that began to change in 1982 with the invention of the first .50-caliber rifle. The gun was almost five feet long and weighed around 30 pounds, making it difficult to fire from a standing position. But its greatly reduced recoil allowed users to shoot the heavy cartridges with sniper-like accuracy. The rifle made its official battlefield debut during the first Gulf War in the early ‘90s. It had already developed a cult following among gun hobbyists, who used it in long-range target shooting contests. There weren’t many sources of ammunition for civilians: the rifles’ owners sought out antique and imported rounds, bought them from boutique manufacturers or made their own, using bullets and casings purchased from specialty shops. Then there was the U.S. military. In the late ‘90s, government auditors found that Talon Manufacturing Co., a company contracted by the Department of Defense to demilitarize unneeded ammunition (a process that destroys a weapon’s military capabilities by means such as scrapping or disassembling it), had sold some of it to civilian retailers, including over 100,000 armor-piercing incendiary .50-caliber rounds. Rather than scrapping the ammunition, the company had broken it down and then built new cartridges with the components.Ammunition dealers told undercover government investigators that the armor-piercing bullets could shoot down a helicopter or penetrate an armored limousine. In effect, “the U.S. military is indirectly arming civilians with some of the most powerful and destructive ammunition currently available,” a congressional report concluded. In 2000, Congress passed a bill that prohibited the Pentagon from selling armor-piercing ammunition for .50-caliber weapons to the public. It instructed the Defense Department to require anyone receiving armor-piercing ammunition or components from it to pledge not to transfer the materials to “any purchaser in the United States other than a law enforcement or other governmental agency.” The legislation did not address standard, non-armor-piercing cartridges, known as “ball” rounds. Talon continued selling that ammunition, made with Lake City components, until 2007, when environmental and safety concerns led the company to stop operations. A new supply of Lake City rounds soon emerged, however. Concerned about the potential for ammunition shortfalls during the global war on terror, Army planners allowed Lake City’s operator, ATK, to ramp up commercial activity at the plant in exchange for guarantees that the company would maintain the ability to produce more than 1.6 billion rounds of ammunition a year. That included 60 million .50-caliber cartridges. By the end of 2008, ATK had begun selling some of that ammunition to retailers. A surge in violence Authorities soon began intercepting Lake City ammunition headed for the southern border. In October 2009, American officials seized 100 rounds of Lake City ammunition from a smuggling ring that had run hundreds of guns, including at least one .50-caliber rifle, to Mexico. Authorities there found the weapon in a raid of cartel forces that had attacked government officials, according to U.S. District Court documents. As the years went by, incidents of cartel violence increased substantially, and attacks with .50-caliber weapons became more frequent. In May 2011, cartel members forced down a Mexican Federal Police helicopter in the western state of Michoacán. A few days later, gunmen armed with weapons including a .50-caliber rifle fired on four more helicopters. Back in the U.S., Lake City was becoming a major source of .50-caliber “ball” ammunition. By 2013, 10-round boxes of the cartridges had become so widely available that they even showed up in some Walmarts. Online, cartridges linked together for use in a machine gun were available in 100-round ammo cans, just like those used by the military, often at significant discounts compared to other manufacturers. One popular website, Lucky Gunner, extolled Lake City ammunition’s power: “If you’re looking to stop a Jeep dead in its tracks, then you’re looking at the right round.” Starting in 2015, Mexico saw a steep escalation in violence, with homicides climbing for three consecutive years, according to official data. In border states, U.S. agents soon began monitoring bulk ammunition vendors as a way to find gun smuggling operations, according to Jason Red, a former investigator at the Department of Homeland Security in Arizona. In a typical scenario, retailers would sell large quantities of ammunition to a civilian, who would then give it to a smuggler. With few exceptions, almost any U.S. citizen or legal resident 18 or older can buy any type of rifle ammunition — even of the armor-piercing variety — in any quantity, but taking it across the border requires a license. “Our mantra became, follow the ammo and you’ll get to the guns,” Red said in a recent interview. “We were tracking shipments from all over the country.” The team seized hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition likely bound for Mexico, according to Red and court records. The vast majority of the ammunition was 7.62-mm rounds, most commonly used in AK-47s, he said. Seizures of .50-caliber ammunition were small and infrequent at the time, according to ATF and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) records. Our mantra became, follow the ammo and you’ll get to the guns. — former investigator Jason Red But as American authorities introduced new initiatives and increased resources aimed at reducing gun trafficking to Mexico, the numbers grew. Between 2019 and 2024 the ATF seized more than 36,000 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition in border states. About a third of them were identified as coming from Lake City. During the same period, CBP seized nearly 21,400 units of .50 caliber ammunition. This included 2,850 of the armor-piercing incendiary rounds. Another surge of ammunition In September 2019, the Army awarded Lake City’s $8 billion operating contract to the ammunition maker Olin Winchester, which took over the facility from the defense contractor Northrop Grumman. As Lake City changed hands, a small ammunition distributor, SGAmmo, negotiated the purchase of armor-piercing incendiary .50-caliber rounds from Northrop Grumman. In a newsletter, the distributor’s owner, Sam Gabbert, urged his customers to “get some before this stuff gets banned,” adding that “this is one of those products that actually surprised me when the deal went through.” The haul, he wrote, resulted from a “government contract that ended up being canceled due to COVID-19 and left the factory hanging with the inventory.” Securing the deal involved monthslong negotiations, he said. Another retailer, American Marksman, had also begun selling armor-piercing incendiary .50-caliber ammunition made with Lake City components. Northrop Grumman had contracted with the company to demilitarize unneeded ammunition from Lake City, American Marksman wrote on its website, adding that it “gets many of its components from its Lake City recycling operations.” That included components for its armor-piercing incendiary rounds. Olin Winchester’s policies on the sale of .50-caliber ammunition from Lake City are unclear. The company’s catalog does not offer the rounds for sale to civilians. But Lake City cartridges and components, including armor-piercing incendiary rounds and bullets, have continued to appear on the market. Pallets of the armor-piercing incendiary ammunition, labeled with a code denoting they were manufactured by Olin Winchester at Lake City, were being sold by at least one online retailer in March 2023. And American Marksman continues to sell armor-piercing incendiary ammunition on its website. (It is unclear which Lake City contractor manufactured the components used to make those rounds.) In January 2022, the Department of Justice announced the indictment of members of a gun trafficking ring, run by a former U.S. Marine, that sold guns and ammunition, including .50-caliber rifles, to the Jalisco Cartel, the same group that was accused of killing Villegas’s husband, the police officer. Four months later, the Marine pleaded guilty. During the operation, U.S. federal agents seized approximately 10,210 .50-caliber armor-piercing incendiary rounds with Lake City markings. There is no indication that the ammunition came from American Marksman or SGAmmo. In an email, the Army said that Lake City’s contractors are “required to comply with all federal and state regulations governing the sale of commercial ammunition. While the operating contractor does not sell directly to the public, it sells to distributors, resellers, and retail stores, which are also required to adhere to federal, state, and local laws regulating ammunition sales.” Olin Winchester did not respond to a detailed list of questions about its Lake City operations and its policies on the sale of .50-caliber ammunition and components made at the facility. In an email, Northrop Grumman said that it “fully complied with government contract obligations in its sales of ammunition” during the two years it ran Lake City. SGAmmo did not respond to multiple emails about its purchases of .50-caliber ammunition. American Marksman also declined to comment. Help us fight corruption, injustice and inequality with just $25/month. ‘The best weapons’ Villa Unión’s former mayor, Sergio Cárdenas, was frying pork rinds in his butcher shop when he thought he heard a car backfire. It was a gun. On the street, pickup trucks rolled past. Stamped on their doors in white capital letters were the initials CDN.: the Cartel del Noreste. “I hid behind the freezer, where they couldn’t see me, and I watched them go by,” Cárdenas recalled. “You could hear the .50-caliber rounds. Every now and then, a bullet or two would whiz by overhead. They ripped the air apart because they’re so big.” As soon as the convoy passed, he slammed the shop’s door shut. The chicharrones were left to burn. Outside, the streets fell silent as the town went into lockdown. People barricaded themselves in their homes for the rest of the day. The cartel’s foot soldiers failed in their attempt to burn down the town hall. But they riddled it and surrounding buildings with bullet holes, some larger than a fist. Authorities traced one of the .50-caliber guns used in the assaultto a store in Texas. The owner, investigators found, had sold nearly 500 guns that ended up in the hands of the C.D.N, including a .50-caliber machine gun and at least six .50-caliber rifles. A federal court sentenced him to 10 years in prison, following a guilty plea. American authorities indicted 14 members of the gun-smuggling ring, seizing over 2,300 rounds of Lake City ammunition. Upon learning that the .50-caliber rounds he had heard in Villa Unión came from an ammunition plant owned by the U.S. Army, Cárdenas did not seem surprised. “The drug traffickers can get their hands on anything,” he said. “And they get the best weapons from the United States.” Times reporter Emiliano Rodríguez Mega reported from Mexico City and Villa Unión, Mexico. Contributors: Jesús Escudero, Miguel Fiandor Gutiérrez, Delphine Reuter (ICIJ); Paulina Villegas (NYT); Mathieu Tourliere (Proceso, Mexico).

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
_ By IEVA Jusionyte

April 16, 2024

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.

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.

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.

How the United States Arms the Mexican Cartels

I think the Germans hate themselves. Talk about self loathing. First the pipe line now this. ukraine this ukraine that blah blah blah......So beta, The corpos are now boycotting individuals... We will not get the leverage needed until we physically change the power dynamic. Like the USA financed hitler during ww2 and these people are still leaning into it only difference is eurotrash neolibturd optics. I am sorry Germans but you can eat my arse. Respect yourselves…. Nothing personal but it is what it is. soooooo beta (pipeline + boycotting individuals by the corpos = yes daddy anything you want I hate myself)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22549657

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22549655

this one is for the Europeans who laughed when i made fun of the Yankees.

Before the fun police comes and confiscates my post, this is obviously a joke and should not be taken seriously(unless you are Portuguese)