DEA deal with Sinaloa Drug Cartel

 

http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2014/01/14/was-operation-fast-and-furious-really-part-of-a-secret-deal-between-the-dea-and-mexicos-sinaloa-drug-cartel/

Was Operation Fast And Furious Really Part Of A Secret Deal Between The DEA And Mexico's Sinaloa Drug Cartel?

By Rick Ungar

An investigation by a major Mexican newspaper, El Universal, has concluded that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency entered into agreements—dating back to 2000 and continuing through 2012—with Mexico’s largest drug trafficking gang, the Sinaloa Cartel.

According to Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, a highly placed member of the Sinaloa cartel and the son of top Sinaloa leader Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the deal involved the cartel providing information about rival Mexican drug gangs to the DEA in exchange for the U.S. government agreeing not to interfere with Sinaloa shipments into the United States and the dismissal of criminal charges against cartel participants.

In a series of court fillings in a criminal case against Zambada-Niebla filed in the federal court in Chicago, it is alleged that the U.S. efforts were part of a strategy previously employed by the U.S. government in combatting Colombian drug cartels whereby the government would “divide and conquer” by making sweetheart deals with one cartel in order to gain information to be used in destroying the cooperating cartel’s rivals.

The El Universal report is based not only on interviews with DEA and cartel members—some currently incarcerated in Mexican jails—but additionally based on the above-referenced court filings in the U.S. District Court.

A complete recounting of the alleged agreements can be found in the Memorandum of Law In Support Of Motion For Discovery Regarding Defense Of Public Authority filed on behalf of Zambada-Niebla in an effort to get his hands on depositions and additional discovery items that were not turned over to him by the government.

The document makes for some incredibly interesting reading and I highly recommend that you do so.
While much of what is included in various depositions and discovery documents in the case has been kept from public view, El Universal has managed to publish some of the statements made by Mr. Humberto Loya-Castro—an attorney for the Sinaloa cartel who was party to the meetings and a target of DEA investigations tied to his own activities in drug trafficking in the United States. Loya-Castro was ultimately indicted in the Chicago case.

“Mr. Loya-Castro stated that agents (DEA agents) told him that, in exchange for information about rival drug trafficking organizations, the United States government agreed to dismiss the prosecution of the pending case against Mr. Loya-Castro (a different case than the Chicago indictment), not to interfere with his drug trafficking activities and those of the Sinaloa Cartel, to not actively prosecute him, Chapo (Sinaloa boss Joaquin Guzman Loera), Mayo (Ismael Zambada-Garcia) and the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel and not to apprehend them. The agents stated that this arrangement had been approved by high-ranking officials and federal prosecutors.”

But was the agreement between the government and the Sinaloa cartel only about information and a “pass” granted the drug peddlers to freely ship their products into the United States?

A close reading of the motion referenced above suggests that the deal with the Sinaloa drug gang may have included shipments of guns to the cartel to be used to thin out the ranks of rival drug gang members in Mexico—something that the U.S. government would view as a “win” if they were following through on the “divide and conquer” strategy employed in Colombia and allegedly in play in Mexico.

As you will see in the pleadings, Zambada-Niebla is deeply interested in getting his hands on discovery that would support the claim that the United States government was doing all of these favors in payment for the deal the two sides had reached, including discovery documents suggesting that weapons were part of the equation.

The allegation that guns were part of a deal between the U.S. and the Sinaloa traffickers has been suggested before. The Blaze reported on this back in August of 2012—

“Zambada-Niebla claims that under a “divide and conquer” strategy, the U.S. helped finance and arm the Sinaloa Cartel through Operation Fast and Furious in exchange for information that allowed the DEA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies to take down rival drug cartels. The Sinaloa Cartel was allegedly permitted to traffic massive amounts of drugs across the U.S. border from 2004 to 2009 — during both Fast and Furious and Bush-era gunrunning operations — as long as the intel kept coming.”

If true–and the well researched El Universal report certainly gives credence to The Blaze’s earlier reporting—it may be that Operation Fast and Furious was not about a strategy to release guns into Mexico so they could be tracked to drug traffickers, but rather all about using the weapons—as part of the deal with the Sinaloa cartel—to kill soldiers of drug traffickers we wanted off the streets and out of business.

Interestingly, this might just make Americans feel better about Operation Fast and Furious.

While much of the anger the scandal set off was based on what appeared to be a sloppy and poorly executed exercise that resulted in one of our own being murdered with the very weapons we had supplied, would Americans feel better if they knew that the weapons were actually being used as part of a strategy to take scores of drug traffickers belonging to Sinaloa’s rival gangs off the playing field?
Indeed, if this is really a war, one might argue that this would be a pretty ingenious way kill enemy soldiers.

This leads me to ask a provocative question—

If the “divide and conquer” strategy was being applied in Mexico as a part of the deal with the Sinaloa cartel—the same being based on what many would claim was a successful strategy used to scale back the drug trafficking originating in Colombia—was Fast and Furious the result of a U.S. government that couldn’t shoot straight or a well organized effort to allow the Sinaloa crew to kill off thousands of rival drug traffickers to our mutual benefit?

Contact Rick at thepolicypage@gmail.com and follow me on Twitter and Facebook.