Unlawful firearm trafficking is inseparable from the unlawful drug business: Guns are regularly purchased with drug cash, can enhance cartels and can also be traded for medicine.
Within the spring of 2021, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, referred to as ATF, began a gun-trafficking investigation that ran from Idaho, down via California and into Mexico. The investigation exposed a scheme to force kilos of narcotics north, and a few in their “white China” and black tar heroin had been exchanged for weapons that an Idaho Falls resident bought out of a firearm vendor’s storage.
Via the summer time, ATF and different federal brokers tracked the traffickers to a resort off West Broadway Boulevard in downtown Idaho Falls, the place they seen a suspected drug deal and apprehended their suspects.
Their ultimate haul integrated 15 kilos of meth, a pound of heroin, 3,000 fentanyl tablets and 16 handguns and rifles.
The trafficking internet
The incident suits into a bigger internet of trafficking weapons south to Mexico and narcotics north to the American Midwest and coasts. The Louisville Courier Magazine documented the relationship of their investigation into cartel medicine poisoning Oregon.
We’re a professor of financial construction and an investigative journalist, and we’ve got spent a 12 months sifting via paperwork to practice the go with the flow of illicit guns trafficked from the U.S. to Mexico.
This trafficking internet incessantly presentations up in prosecutions, together with 14 federal sentences in North Carolina that integrated dozens of firearms and masses of kilos of narcotics.
Our number of court docket information and gun information lines the connection right through the US.
Learn the overall investigation: Mexican drug cartels use masses of hundreds of weapons purchased from authorized US gun retail outlets – fueling violence in Mexico, medicine in america and migration on the border
Of the 100 court docket circumstances we cataloged, just about one-fifth explicitly point out drug trafficking in connection to the confiscated firearms.
Medicine for weapons
In 2020, Pedro Roberto Hernandez-Gomez was once stuck in Los Angeles making an attempt to interchange a kilogram of fentanyl and a kilogram of heroin for 3 mechanical device weapons and 3 grenade launchers.
This semiautomatic pistol is without doubt one of the guns that Xavier Drew was once convicted of promoting to an secret agent.
ATF
And in March 2024, Xavier Drew, sometimes called “Flock,” was once sentenced to 13½ years in jail for promoting a number of kilos of meth, fentanyl and just about a dozen firearms to undercover brokers. The weapons integrated a semiautomatic pistol and pistols with obliterated or lacking serial numbers. He additionally offered them Glock switches, or machine-gun conversion kits. A collaborator, Esvin Ivan Calles-Corrales, was once sentenced to 5 years for transport narcotics and facilitating the switch of comparable proceeds to Mexico.
Xavier Drew was once convicted of promoting fentanyl to an secret agent, together with this bag of round 3,000 tablets.
ATF
Nearer to the border, in August 2022, Maria Del Rosario Navarro-Sanchez, aka Fernanda, coordinated gun purchases within the U.S. – the usage of drug budget from Mexico for the Jalisco Nueva Generación cartel and courier deliveries of meth and fentanyl tablets from Mexico via El Paso, Texas – with Brian Munoz-Castro.
Munoz-Castro allotted the narcotics to split couriers, who delivered the medication right through the U.S. Federal brokers arrested Munoz-Castro in a gun retailer parking space in March 2023 after he picked up gun portions from an El Paso gun store. He later took the brokers to his house in El Paso the place he had on the subject of 2½ pounds of meth.
Federal brokers indicted Navarro-Sanchez once they intercepted her communications with former Juarez, Mexico, town corridor police officer Rene Hernandez-Cordero.
The brokers tracked a gun trade involving Hernandez-Cordero at a Circle Okay in El Paso. Twenty attack rifles and two Barrett .50-caliber rifles had been set to be trafficked into Mexico in August 2023 behind a pickup truck for the acquisition value of US$66,000.
When Munoz-Castro was once convicted in September 2024, Navarro-Sanchez was once nonetheless a fugitive, consistent with the U.S. lawyer’s administrative center. Munoz-Castro gained a 10-year sentence for his position.
On the listening to, the protection attempted to name out the absurdity of such a lot of guns simply thrown into the again of a pickup truck and pushed around the border. “That’s inherently ridiculous, isn’t it?” the lawyer requested.
Mark Cervantes, a U.S. Customs and Border Coverage enforcement officer, replied through pointing to the ubiquity of most of these trafficking movements. “I’ve had one instance where an individual had 20 SCAR assault rifles and 30 Glock pistols without concealment in the vehicle,” he stated.
With some 135,000 firearms touring around the border every year, it’s no longer a wonder that some traffickers may well be so brazen.
Learn the overall investigation: Mexican drug cartels use masses of hundreds of weapons purchased from authorized US gun retail outlets – fueling violence in Mexico, medicine in america and migration on the border
