WASHINGTON & SANTA FE, NM (By Congressman Adam Schiff) December 8, 2011 ― For more than 30 years, the United States and Mexico have engaged in a mutually destructive trade in which narcotics are sent north and high-caliber weapons shipped south.

When I was a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles during the late 1980s and early ’90s, investigating the torture and murder of U.S. Drug Enforcement agent Enrique Camarena, I thought the level of drug violence could not be worse.

But it is — beyond anything we could have imagined.

 

As the cartels have fought for survival during the five years since President Felipe Calderon took office, violence against civilians, politicians, journalists and police has reached staggering levels of depravity. Just last month, the Zeta Cartel threatened public school teachers to turn over half their pay or be murdered. Hundreds of schools had to be shut down.

Extortion cases have tripled since 2004, murder rates have skyrocketed. The horrific violence in Ciudad Juarez — just across the border from El Paso, Texas — makes it one of the most dangerous cities in the world outside a war zone.

And make no mistake, U.S. guns have fueled the violence. Because there is such easy access in the U.S. to guns — including assault weapons — no one knows just how many have been smuggled into Mexico. Since Calderon took office, Mexican authorities have seized and traced nearly 94,000 guns: More than 60 percent have come from the United States. Yet the real number of guns shipped across the border is likely many times higher.

This illegal traffic in guns and drugs is a serious national security and public safety threat for both the U.S. and Mexico. Drug traffickers use ever more brutal measures to get their product into the United States, and U.S. Border Patrol agents face daily assaults with increasingly deadly results.

 

The 2011 National Drug Threat Assessment found Mexico-based drug trafficking organizations have infiltrated every region of the United States and have some level of influence in more than 1,000 U.S. cities.

There is increasing evidence U.S. gangs are collaborating with the Mexican cartels to traffic cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin into the United States.

Democrats and Republicans may not agree on much these days. But we all agree that the deadly trade in guns and drugs needs to be stopped.

 

There are some common-sense measures that can be taken to diminish the level of drug violence in the U.S., in Mexico and along the troubled border.

 

Unfortunately, Congress has failed to act on these, or worse, attempted to stymie the Obama administration from doing so, all while hiding behind the curtain of a failed operation called Fast and Furious.

The investigations to date have revealed Fast and Furious — and a Bush-era gun operation named Wide Receiver — used seriously flawed tactics that resulted in guns going south into Mexico. Attorney General Eric Holder has taken steps to ensure that those tactics are never used again.

But the continuing controversy over “who knew what when” has become a distraction from the serious issues surrounding the easy access in Mexico to weapons from the United States. As politicians try to outperform one another in a game of “gotcha,” a steady stream of guns is pouring over our border into the hands of increasingly desperate and violent drug cartel members.

If Congress is serious about prosecuting gun traffickers, it can pass legislation increasing the penalties on “straw purchasers,” individuals who illegally purchase guns on behalf of others prohibited from doing so. These low-level traffickers evade law enforcement by making multiple purchases of long guns in the United States and facilitating their delivery to the cartels.

Because the penalties on these purchasers are minimal, prosecutors have little leverage to roll them over to take down major traffickers and cartel members. This simple step would greatly help in the prosecution of syndicates that are now moving many thousands of weapons to the south.

But if Congress refuses to act, it should at least get out of the way.

 

The administration is currently implementing a new rule that requires gun dealers in the five border states to let authorities know when the same person buys more than one long gun in a five-day period. That’s already the law for handguns, and we know that semiautomatic rifles are the weapons of choice for the cartels.

But the same politicians beating their breasts about Fast and Furious just voted to keep the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from learning who is buying multiple AK-47s along the border.

The Justice Department’s inspector general will surely get to the bottom of Fast and Furious.

 

In the meantime, the rest of us need to get on with our jobs of improving public safety. The attorney general took decisive action to ensure that the operation’s flawed tactics are not repeated.

Now, we must regain our focus and take aim at the real problem: keeping guns out of the hands of the cartels.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) serves on the House Appropriations and Intelligence committees.