Obama DOJ Failed to Stop Mexican Cartel Murder of ICE Agent with Smuggled Guns

The Obama administration had numerous opportunities to arrest Mexican drug and weapons traffickers before the murder of a federal U.S. agent and the seriously wounding of his partner but opted for the hands-off approach, a new federal audit reveals. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which operates under the Department of Justice (DOJ), should have stopped the traffickers—members of the Los Zetas organization—long before the Immigration and Customs (ICE) agents were ambushed in Mexico with firearms smuggled south of the border thanks to a once-secret Obama administration gun-running operation.

Instead, on February 15, 2011, ICE agents Victor Avila and Jaime Zapata were assaulted while returning to Mexico City from Matehuala, Mexico in their government-issued armored sports utility vehicle. Both agents were on assignment in Mexico and their SUV displayed diplomatic license plates. After passing through a toll booth on Mexican Route 57 in the early afternoon the agents noticed that two vehicles were following them, one of which passed and blocked the agents’ SUV from the front, forcing it to stop. Approximately eight assailants approached the SUV armed with various firearms, including assault weapons (AK-47s and AR-1Ss) and handguns. Two of the assailants gained access to the interior of the SUV through a partially open window and shot Zapata and Avila. Zapata died and Avila was seriously wounded.

Authorities determined that members of the renowned drug trafficking organization Los Zetas carried out the attack with weapons that had been purchased in Texas as part of a scandalous Obama administration operation. . .

Ice Agent Jaime Zapata Murdered While Investigating Fast and Furious Weapons

ICE Agent Jaime Zapata and his partner, Victor Avila, were ambushed at a fake roadblock in Mexico. Were they set up? If so by whom?

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While the weapons found at the Zapata murder scene were not from among the Fast and Furious guns, this revelation is profoundly significant, because it directly contradicts sworn testimony by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
“I have no information to that effect, no. I don’t know one way or the other,” she replied to a direct question on any Fast and Furious connection by Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas.

Word games. Here's the little trick Napolitano, Holder and ATF are playing. F&F was an ATF operation run out of the Tucson AZ office. But some guns were walked out of Texas gun shops which puts them in the jurisdiction of Texas ATF offices so those ops must have had other names. So far I have not seen any reporting on what those op names were.

Armored SUV could not protect U.S. agents in Mexico
U.S. investigators recovered one of the military-style semi-automatic weapons used in the attack that killed Zapata.
The gun came from Texas.
Ballistic testing of spent shell casings and the raising of an obliterated serial number revealed the weapon was a popular Romanian-made AK-47 knockoff purchased at J&J’s Pawn Shop in Beaumont, smuggled south to the Zetas by a methamphetamine trafficker named Manuel Gomez Barba, a U.S. citizen.
ICE agent's family files wrongful death claim against Justice Dept.

In 2010 Obama and Janet Napolitano were claiming 90 percent of the illegal firearms in Mexico were coming from the U.S. Interpol said the figure was closer to 80 percent.

To justify more federal gun control laws the Obama Administration decided it needed to increase the flow of U.S. firearms into Mexico—a move the ATF leadership went along with. That’s what the Obama version of Fast and Furious was all about. It was to intensify gun violence in Mexico with weapons that could be traced to the U.S.

The Mexicans figured this out immediately and considered indicting AG Holder.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430153/fast-furious-obama-first-scandal

Mexico should indict Holder. So should the U.S. and so should Honduras which was the unwitting victim of the same gun running tactic.

Mexico's Gun Supply and the 90 Percent Myth
As we discussed in a previous analysis, the 90 percent number was derived from a June 2009 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report to Congress on U.S. efforts to combat arms trafficking to Mexico (see external link).
According to the GAO report, some 30,000 firearms were seized from criminals by Mexican authorities in 2008. Of these 30,000 firearms, information pertaining to 7,200 of them (24 percent) was submitted to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing. Of these 7,200 guns, only about 4,000 could be traced by the ATF, and of these 4,000, some 3,480 (87 percent) were shown to have come from the United States.
This means that the 87 percent figure relates to the number of weapons submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF that could be successfully traced are not from the total number of weapons seized by Mexican authorities or even from the total number of weapons submitted to the ATF for tracing. In fact, the 3,480 guns positively traced to the United States equals less than 12 percent of the total arms seized in Mexico in 2008 and less than 48 percent of all those submitted by the Mexican government to the ATF for tracing. This means that almost 90 percent of the guns seized in Mexico in 2008 were not traced back to the United States.

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