According to ATF, Most Guns at Mexican Crime Scenes Traced to US Diana Washington Valdez - El Paso Times
go to original December 27, 2012

More than 68 percent of the weapons recovered at Mexican crime scenes over a five-year period were traced to U.S. manufacturers or U.S. dealers who import firearms, according to statistics of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Between 2007 and 2011, Mexican law enforcement submitted 99,691requests to the ATF for tracing, and 68,161 of those firearms were determined to come from U.S. makers or were legally imported into the United States by federally licensed firearms dealers.

The ATF said it was unable to determine the source of the rest of the firearms because of missing information about the guns themselves, where they came from and how they got into Mexico.

Mexican drug cartels have waged brutal battles over turf in several areas of Mexico, including in Juárez, where firearms were used in most of estimated 11,000 homicides that police reported between 2007 and the end of November.

The "ATF Mexico" report does not include information on which, or if any, of the reported firearm recoveries were traced to the agency's Operation Fast and Furious, in which federal agents allowed guns purchased by straw buyers in the U.S. to be smuggled into Mexico in an attempt to identify and arrest high-level arms traffickers.

More than 1,000 of the 2,000 weapons connected to the Phoenix-based operation are unaccounted for, according to U.S. lawmakers, who investigated the botched ATF operation that began in late 2009.

Read more at El Paso Times

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