DISINFO: The Obama Administration and the Calderon government supplied Mexican drug cartels with weapons
SUMMARY
Two days before the visit of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador to Washington, the US Ambassador to Mexico Christopher Landau reported that the US had delivered the answer requested by the Mexican government on the stinky operation Fast and Furious, through which the Obama Administration supplied Mexican drug cartels with 2,000 illegal weapons, with the acquiescence of then Mexican president Felipe Calderón. The high explosiveness of the Fast and Furious file may reach Obama and Calderon, which could have an effect in the November election in the US and the 2021 partial election in Mexico.
RESPONSE
The article is deliberately misleading about the failed Operation Fast and Furious portrayed as if the Obama Administration and the government of Felipe Calderón in Mexico had willingly provided weapons to Mexican drug cartels. In fact, Operation Fast and Furious was a failed attempt to track gun trafficking across the US-Mexican border. From 2009-2011, the Phoenix Field Division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), along with other partners, allowed illegal gun sales in order to track the sellers and purchasers. Some of those weapons were later used in murderous shootings, including the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Arizona. As controversial and scandalous as it may be, this is not the same as suggesting that the US and Mexican governments agreed to supply weapons to criminal cartels. See other examples of pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives on the US and Mexico, such as claims that Washington is promoting the ‘Balkanisation’ of the country to annex its rich northern regions, that the US may designate drug cartels as terrorist organisations to have an excuse for military control over Mexico, that the US is preparing a military invasion of the country, which is next in Washington’s destabilisation list after Bolivia, or that it may be attacked because every US president needs an invasion. This disinformation message appeared in the same article as the claim that “Critics of Mexican president's visit to Trump are Soros-influenced globalists”.