Los Zetas in Chicago, and U.S. guns "gone walking" in Mexico
Mérida, Yucatán –
Marisela Morales, Mexico’s attorney general, addressed this country’s Camara de Diputados today, a legislative body roughly equivalent to the United States House of Representatives. Her topic was Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious, the recently revealed secret arms sale programs which were conducted by U.S. federal agents during the Bush and Obama administrations. Mexico’s drug cartels were able to acquire another 2,500 or so military assault weapons through those operations – in addition to the 60 or 80 thousand they'd already gotten their hands on from north of the border in recent years. It surely came as no surprise to anyone when attorney general Eric Holder told Congress just last week that "the U.S. is losing the war on arms trafficking."
Morales' marching orders from her boss Felipe Calderón were no doubt to throw cold water on the smoldering tempers of Mexican legislators outraged by the arms sales. Mexico's Senate has formally called for the extradition of anyone and everyone behind Wide Receiver and Fast and Furious. The operations have proved an embarrassment for both governments, all the more so since Calderón and Barack Obama have generally been team players in Mexico's full court press against the drug cartels. Of course, the extradition demands are as much about politics as policy, and they'll go nowhere while Calderón is in Los Pinos - anymore than they would if a PRI or PRD president occupied the country's executive mansion. Friends don't extradite friends, especially when both are facing the same enemy - one carrying an AK-47 or AR-15.
Still, Morales had to make a good show of Mexican pride and collective outrage over the gun sales, and she handled the task well. "In the U.S. people have the right to buy and acquire almost any firearm," she told the federal deputies, "but in Mexico we will prosecute anybody who violates our national sovereignty by bringing in weapons." Her predictable comments, hopefully, will be enough to satisfy most on this side of the border.
Meanwhile, far to the north in Chicagoland, a federal prosecutor in Illinois was delivering up his own civics lesson on "national sovereignty" about the time Morales spoke. U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald announced the arrest of 20 people, 12 in Chicago and another half dozen in and around Laredo, Texas. Among them were five members of Los Zetas, one of Mexico's most dreadfully violent drug cartels. This band of brothers had been peddling narcotics over a wide area, shipping the profits (concealed in vehicles) back to border crossings. Fitzgerald said that DEA agents - who planned Fast and Furious in 2009 - had seized 250 kilos of cocaine (about 550 lbs.), plus $12.5 million in currency.
The concept of national sovereignty has no relevance in this war. Drugs move steadily north, propelled by an insatiable U.S. craving, while an endless supply of weapons and unimaginable quantities of cash - the tools and the profit of the trade - move south. Just as thousands of those weapons were deliberately allowed to "walk" from the U.S. to Mexico (an ATF term for arms sold to cartels, with the ostensible goal of tracking them), it was inevitable that Los Zetas would sooner or later turn up in a major American city. Drug trafficking is international, and neither those running it nor those fighting it see borders.
Mexico's Continuing Agony
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