U.S. Sale of Legal Firearms Destined for Cartels Overshadows Fast & Furious

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
December 9, 2011

A CBS report on December 6 reveals that the U.S. government has legally sold thousands of weapons to the Mexican government and the firearms have ended up in the hands of the country’s violent drug cartels.

The Mexican military puts the number of police weapons “diverted” to the cartels at nearly 9,000, a number that overshadows the reported 2,500 firearms sold illegally to known or suspected straw purchasers under the ATF’s Fast and Furious operation.

The ATF subsequently used their covert operation to blame the Second Amendment for cartel violence and argue for new rules restricting gun sales in the United States.

“The problem of weapons legally sold to Mexico – then diverted to violent cartels – is becoming more urgent. That’s because the U.S. has quietly authorized a massive escalation in the number of guns sold to Mexico through ‘direct commercial sales.‘ It’s a way foreign countries can acquire firearms faster and with less disclosure than going through the Pentagon,” reports CBS News.

Mexico is one of the world’s largest purchasers of U.S. guns through direct commercial sales.

Larry Keane of the National Sports Foundation told CBS that more than 150,000 Mexican soldiers have defected to the drug cartels and this likely attributes for guns purchased by the Mexican government ending up in the hands of criminals.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Another reason may be that Mexico is essentially a failed state run by drug cartels financed by international banks.

A report published earlier this year claimed the notorious drug gang Los Zetas will attempt to overthrow the Mexican government next year using weapons sent by the United States.

In addition to the U.S. government directly arming the drug cartels under Fast and Furious, the DEA allegedly allowed the Sinaloa drug cartel to traffic several tons of cocaine to the United States over a five year period. The DEA also stands accused of laundering Mexican drug money.

According to a 1998 GAO report, Citibank helped the brother of a former Mexican president secretly funnel as much as $100 million in alleged drug money out of Mexico and into Swiss bank accounts. In Hidden Fortunes: Drug Money, Cartels and the Elite Banks, author Eduardo Varela-Cid documents how the Bank of Boston laundered $ 1.2 billion for the trafficker and mob boss Genaro Angiullo.

According to former Wall Street insider Catherine Austin Fitts, the liquidity of the NY Stock Exchange is so dependent on high margin cocaine profits that the Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange acknowledged he made “cold calls” in rebel controlled peace zones in Colombian villages.

“I presume [Richard] Grasso’s trip was not successful in turning the cash flow tide. Hence, Plan Colombia is proceeding apace to try to move narco deposits out of FARC’s control and back to the control of our traditional allies and, even if that does not work, to move Citibank’s market share and that of the other large US banks and financial institutions steadily up in Latin America,” she writes.

This article was posted: Friday, December 9, 2011 at 12:16 pm

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