Global Ganja Report

A scandal involving US law enforcement programs to let guns "walk" into Mexico has now widened to include the 2001-2008 administration of former president George W. Bush, a Republican, as well as the administration of current Democratic president Barack Obama. The latest revelations concern a program codenamed Operation Wide Receiver, in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) reportedly allowed some 350 or 400 guns to enter Mexico illegally during 2006 and 2007.

Forty of the firearms that Mexican police seized on April 30 at the home of an alleged drug trafficker in Ciudad Juárez turn out to be among the 2,000 weapons that reached Mexico as a result of the US government's bungled Operation Fast and Furious. The house, which was empty when police arrived, belonged to José Antonio Torres Marrufo, considered by US authorities a top enforcer for the Sinaloa drug cartel of Joaquín Guzmán Loera ("El Chapo"). The weapons were bought legally in Phoenix, Ariz., then taken to El Paso, Tex., and smuggled across the border to Juárez.

The US Justice Department announced Aug. 30 that Kenneth Melson, acting head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), had been reassigned to another position in the department and that Dennis Burke, US attorney for Arizona, was resigning from his post. The department gave no reason for the changes, but they were clearly fallout from Operation Fast and Furious, a bungled ATF program that allowed some 2,000 weapons to go from the US to Mexico, where they were probably used in drug cartel violence.

Some "gun trafficking 'higher-ups'" who supply weapons to Mexican drug cartels may have been "paid as informants" by US government agencies, according to a letter two ranking US Congress members sent US attorney general Eric Holder on July 5. "The evidence we have gathered," Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-IA) wrote, "raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department"—which Holder heads—"not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have financed those engaging in such activities." The "other agencies" may include the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the letter said.