Dope dealers buying guns, ammo for Mexico criminal insurgency
...There is much more.Crucial to the flow of guns into Mexico, where they are largely illegal, are networks of straw buyers — U.S. citizens with clean criminal backgrounds who are bankrolled by the cartels to shop for guns. Some rings draw in ordinary people lured by easy money from near strangers. Others are more closely tied to cartels through “facilitators” who might oversee a network of buyers.
Texas, by far, leads the nation as the primary source of guns for the cartels.The former cartel foot soldier, for example, told the Express-News he got what he needed in Texas. He simply stated to the head of his 40-member cartel security unit — a feared paramilitary group known as the Zetas — what guns he wanted. The orders were passed to fellow cartel workers in charge of finding straw buyers who would be paid in cash or drugs.
“The people who was working here in the U.S. selling the drugs, they were the same that got the weapons,” said the former Zeta enforcer who is cooperating with U.S. authorities and asked that his name not be revealed. “They get some people to buy the weapons, every kind of them, and then pay them for it. ... Most times, we were better armed than the local police.”
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The U.S. is pursuing gun traffickers, and straw buyers in particular, like never before. More than 300 defendants were prosecuted in 2006 and 465 in 2007. Straw buyers include war veterans, college students, jail guards, grandparents and sons of lawyers; they get at least $100 a gun.
“Anyone who can legally buy a gun can get caught up in the scheme,” said Mark Siebert, resident agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in San Antonio. “It’s college students, girls, guys, grandmothers. It’s anybody.”
In Houston, ATF agents uncovered one network of more than 30 straw buyers who spent more than $400,000 on guns, said J. Dewey Webb, agent in charge of the office there, which oversees San Antonio and much of south Texas.
“A lot of straw purchasers say, ‘Hey I’m not hurting anybody. I’m just making a few dollars,.” Webb said. “But that AK killed someone in Mexico. It’s all connected and it’s all relevant.”
The U.S. and Mexico are, to some extent, cooperating more to track gunrunners, who often smuggle drugs as well. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched Operation “Armas Cruzadas” this summer. In June, similar bills co-sponsored by U.S. Rep. Ciro Rodriguez of San Antonio, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson and others to expand the ATF’s Project Gunrunner were rolled into the Mérida Initiative, which makes $1.5 billion available so Mexico can combat drug trafficking, Rodriguez said.
“Mexico is Texas’ best trading partner, but we can’t let the drug cartels dictate our lives and hurt our efforts to work with our friends on both sides of the border,” he said.
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We have a responsibility to disrupt the criminal insurgency supply lines and not be their weapons depot. I think this ATF program to stop the straw purchasers needs more publicity.
Meanwhile, Strategy Page reports that Iraq is now safer than Mexico.
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