(GunReports.com) — A Univision television report blames the Obama administration for helping fuel violence and a war between Mexican drug cartels because of Fast and Furious, which began in 2009. At that time, the report said, “the ATF and Arizona prosecutors told gun-store owners to sell weapons without restrictions to suspicious buyers.”
“In Mexico, the timing of the [Fast and Furious] operation coincided with an upsurge of violence in the war among the country’s strongest cartels,” the Univision account said.
According to the Univision report, it wasn’t weak gun laws that made Fast and Furious possible.
“If up to this point drug dealers could easily obtain and smuggle guns, the United States government made it easier,” English subtitles on the report read.
According to Univision: “In 2009, the northern Mexican states served as a battlefield for the Sinaloa and Juarez drug trafficking organizations, and as expansion territory for the increasingly powerful Zetas. According to documents obtained by Univision News, from October of that year to the end of 2010, nearly 175 weapons from Operation Fast and Furious inadvertently armed the various warring factions across northern Mexico.”
Univision also said that it was Phoenix ATF office leader Bill Newell who ultimately concluded that “the only way to track the guns was to wait for weapons to be recovered in crime scenes in Mexico.”
That charge, if true, would mean the Obama administration decided to allow cartel operatives to kill and injure people with the weapons it gave them, and to recover the guns only after criminals ditched them at brutal — often deadly — crime scenes.
Univision also found additional details about other gunwalking operations the Obama administration undertook, such as in Florida, where weapons from “Operation Castaway” ended up in the hands of criminals in Colombia, Honduras and Venezuela.