The war on drugs' bitter blowback

[CHIMO]

The violent deaths of Brian Terry and Juan Francisco Sicilia, separated by the span of just a few months and by the increasingly bloody US-Mexico border, have sparked separate but overdue examinations of the so-called "war on drugs", and how the US government is ultimately exacerbating the problem.

On the night of 14 December 2010, Agent Brian Terry was in the Arizona desert as part of the highly trained and specially armed Bortac unit, described as the elite paramilitary force within the US Border Patrol. The group engaged in a firefight, and Terry was killed. While this death might have become just another violent act associated with drug trafficking along the border, one detail has propelled it into a high-stakes confrontation between the Obama administration and the US Congress: weapons found at the scene, AK-47s, were sold into likely Mexican criminal hands under the auspices of a covert operation of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

Dubbed "Operation Fast and Furious", the secret programme aimed to trace arms sold in the US to so-called straw buyers, people who buy arms on behalf of others. The ATF's operation allowed gun shops to sell bulk weapons to straw buyers who, the ATF suspected, were buying on behalf of Mexican drug cartels. Instead of arresting the straw buyer, considered a relatively low-level criminal by the ATF, tracing the guns as they made their way into Mexico might allow the ATF to arrest more senior members of the criminal cartels.

At least, that was the plan.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/15/mexico-war-on-drugs-guns