Gunwalking: Overview.

Introduction

Starting when Mexican president Felipe Calderon initiated a major crackdown on his country’s powerful criminal syndicates, or cartels, in late 2006, Mexico endured an unrelenting wave of gun violence. The nation’s drug cartels, amassing vast fortunes by controlling the export of cocaine and heroin to the United States, engaged in ongoing battles over territory and political influence. By mid-2024, an estimated 450,000 people had been murdered in Mexico as a result of cartel-related violence.

The violence in Mexico became a major concern for the government of the United States, for two reasons. First, the US is the primary final market for the drugs that the Mexican cartels buy and sell. Second, the United States is a major source of the firearms and ammunition that is used by the cartels to assert their power. Mexican and US government sources estimated during the 2010s that 90 percent of the guns used in Mexico are smuggled from the United States, though there is no definitive information to confirm this percentage.

Starting no later than 2006, the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) engaged in undercover operations to catch individuals involved in the illegal US-Mexican gun trade in what the agency called Project Gunrunner. Within the wider Project Gunrunner, there were controversial operations—namely Operation Wide Receiver (2006-2007) and Operation Fast and Furious (2009-2011)—that did not immediately arrest straw buyers in the United States, but instead allowed them to transport thousands of firearms into Mexico in an effort to trace the weapons to higher-level cartel affiliates. These were dubbed “gunwalking” operations, because ATF agents let the illegal buyers walk instead of arresting them right away.

Understanding the Discussion

ATF: Abbreviation used by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the US federal agency charged with regulating the sale of firearms within and across the borders of the United States.

Cartels: In this context, hierarchically structured criminal organizations that control the narcotics trade in Mexico.

FFL: Abbreviation for a federal firearms license, which is needed to engage in commercial-level gun sales in the United States.

Magazine: Container that feeds ammunition into a firearm; sometimes colloquially called a clip.

Semiautomatic: Describing a type of firearm action wherein gases from each shot propel another round of ammunition into the firing chamber; a semiautomatic weapon is capable of firing one shot for each pull of the trigger, whereas an automatic weapon is capable of firing an entire magazine while the trigger is depressed.

Straw buyer: A non-FFL holder who buys firearms not as an end user but to pass along to other parties.

History

Since the popularization of cocaine in the 1980s, major drug cartels have developed in Mexico to control the increasingly lucrative drug trade to the United States. Over 95 percent of the cocaine that enters the United States passes through Mexico, and the vast majority of that narcotics trade is coordinated by various rival cartels. During the first decades of the twenty-first century, cartels also became heavily involved in trafficking marijuana and opiates into the US. According to the US Department of State, Americans spend between $19 and $29 billion annually on narcotics that have been passed along by the Mexican cartels.

In 2006, Mexican president Felipe Calderon launched a federal effort to crack down on these cartels and stem the increasingly brutal violence associated with cartel activities. Within the first several years of this campaign, approximately fifty thousand Mexicans were killed in cartel-related violence; by 2024 the country had seen 450,000 homicides since the start of Calderon's crackdown.

Despite Mexico’s relatively restrictive gun laws, the cartels were heavily armed. Their weapons came from three main sources. Some firearms and explosives were sold to the cartels by corrupt members of the Mexican military and police forces. The cartels also purchased surplus military weapons from other Latin American nations. Probably the largest supplier of firearms and ammunition to the Mexican drug cartels, however, was private sellers based in the United States.

With its constitutionally guaranteed freedom to bear arms, the United States has some of the most relaxed gun laws of any nation in the world. A wide variety of handguns, shotguns, and rifles are available for purchase in most states by law-abiding citizens. American criminals, especially those living in states bordering Mexico, have taken advantage of this relative freedom to illegally feed the strong demand for firearms south of the border. They act as straw buyers, purchasing legal firearms and ammunition at gun stores and then selling them to cartel associates in Mexico. Although under US law it is illegal to engage in the commercial or interstate gun trade without an FFL, such crimes are relatively hard to detect and penalties are usually light.

Despite specific claims from a number of sources, the actual percentage of firearms that have come from America and were subsequently used in Mexican shootings is not known with any accuracy. According to US president Barack Obama and Mexican officials, the number is around 90 percent. Other groups, especially those advocating gun rights in the United States, think this number is highly inflated. Some gun rights groups, including the powerful National Rifle Association (NRA), perceive the effort to crack down on straw purchases at American gun stores as a pretext for advancing more restrictive gun laws. Fox News issued several reports representing the viewpoint of such concerned gun rights advocates, stating that only 17 percent of the weapons used in Mexican crimes were from America. According to the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org, this lower percentage is based on mistaken calculations. Although it is difficult to put a precise number on the percentage of US guns used in Mexican shootings, it seems that America remains a--and probably the--major supplier of firearms to Mexico.

In 2006, the ATF began a systematic program called Project Gunrunner, aimed at cracking down on straw purchases of firearms in the area along the US-Mexican border. The main goal of the program has been to deny Mexican drug cartels the weapons they use to enforce their control of the drug trade. From 2006 to 2010, Project Gunrunner intercepted over ten thousand firearms and a million rounds of ammunition purchased by straw buyers, presumably for sale to Mexican cartels. In over a thousand cases, more than two thousand people were charged with US federal firearms violations.

The firearms intercepted in Project Gunrunner probes are all legal for civilians to own in most parts of the United States. They have included AR-15s (civilian semiautomatic versions of the military M-16 rifle), .38 caliber revolvers, civilian semiautomatic versions of Romanian AK-47s, and Barrett .50 caliber rifles. Media reports, presumably written by journalists unfamiliar with the models of firearms involved, have sometimes erroneously reported the AR-15s and AK-47s as high-powered weapons. These weapons actually fire ammunition of intermediate ballistic power, but they are formidable weapons because they are light and use high-capacity thirty-round magazines. The Barrett .50 calibers, on the other hand, do fire high-powered ammunition; they are used in the US military for long-range antipersonnel and antimateriel sniping.

In addition to intercepting weapons from low-level straw buyers, Project Gunrunner also in 2006 began a series of special investigations in which straw buyers were not immediately arrested, but were instead allowed to conduct their international gun transactions while under surveillance. Many in the ATF and the wider law enforcement community believed that in order for Project Gunrunner to be truly successful, the program needed to target high-ranking cartel associates in Mexico. The investigations became known as “gunwalking” operations, because they allowed gun smugglers to “walk” across the border. The most notable of these investigations were Operation Wide Receiver, from 2006 to 2007, and Operation Fast and Furious, from 2009 to 2011.

These gunwalking operations sought to target the cartel supply chain rather than just the American citizens making the initial purchases. Although many law enforcers lauded gunwalking as forward-thinking, the operations also received a good deal of criticism. Part of the problem came from a lack of disclosure between specific agency offices. ATF agents working in Mexico began to see a large increase in weapons confiscated in arrests on the Mexican side of the border that were traced back to the Phoenix, Arizona, ATF office. When the agents made inquiries, they were told that everything was under control. Meanwhile, gun violence in Mexico spiked, and ATF officials on the Mexican side of the border filled their evidence lockers with guns formerly tracked by the Phoenix office.

Gunwalking Today

Operation Fast and Furious was halted at the beginning of 2011. ATF officials said that the operation was intended only to be a temporary tool to catch higher-ranking syndicate associates, and they were planning to shut it down in June of 2010. In fact, the operation was ceased after a US Border Patrol Agent named Brian Terry was killed with two AK-47s linked to Fast and Furious, while patrolling the border area in southern Arizona on December 14, 2010.

Terry’s death underscored what many believed was fundamentally wrong with gunwalking as an investigative tactic. By allowing firearms to cross into Mexico and be passed up the cartel supply chains, critics argued that the US law enforcement agency charged with stopping illegal weapons exports knowingly armed Mexican criminals. Critics of the gunwalking approach also argued that the ATF was effectively complicit in the violence that claimed the life of a federal agent and civilians on both sides of the border.

Despite the risks that gunwalking posed, some law enforcement officials during the early 2010s believed that this tactic was the best way for the ATF to gather intelligence about Mexican nationals coordinating and financing large-scale gun purchases. According to this viewpoint, shutting down the cartels’ ability to buy firearms had always been the real goal of Project Gunrunner; in the ATF's view at that time, simply arresting low-level American citizens for making straw purchases from gun shops on the US side of the border was not an effective strategy for achieving this longer-term goal.

The gunwalking controversy largely surfaced in 2012, an important election year in the United States. Although many Democratic and Republican lawmakers were highly critical of the gunwalking approach, Republican officials attempted to use the controversy to create an election-year scandal for President Barack Obama, a Democrat. Republicans sharply criticized Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, and sought to determine the extent of his knowledge of Operation Fast and Furious. On June 28, 2012, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives took the unprecedented step of charging Holder with contempt of Congress for not releasing all documents about the Fast and Furious case, which President Obama controversially sealed with an executive order. Holder maintained that the contempt charge, the first ever levied against a sitting US attorney general, was motivated by a desire to create a political scandal rather than any criminal culpability on his part.

In subsequent months and years, Holder, as well as the ATF as a whole, continued to distance themselves from the gunwalking scandal and argued that this tactic was not a major strategy used by the agency. Holder was eventually cleared of charges of contempt of congress and remained attorney general until 2015.

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