Here I am in Mexico City where “ Fast and Furious” (“ Rapido y Furioso”) is not just the title of a recent thriller, but the name of an arms delivery scheme. It has sparked wild conjectures about the purpose of the scheme and the source of these weapons of war. Two thousand pieces of sophisticated high-powered arms crossed the Mexico-US border and were delivered directly, door-to-door, to notorious drug lords and their respective cartels. Why is the USA allowing drug cartels to buy US-made guns?
According to the progressive local newspaper, La Jornada, “Rapido y Furioso” was negotiated and approved in Washington D.C. and that Mexican President Felipe Calderon buckled, allowing the deadly arms to enter Mexican territory; by doing so, he gave the arms supply scheme a mantle of legality.
The official excuse from both sides of the border was that “Rapido y Furioso” is more than just a sale of arms to criminal elements, it is a time-tested irrefutable homing system designed to detect, locate and monitor the movements and activities of the narcotraficantes or narcos, the drug lords.
Mexican legislators are not buying that argument and are demanding a credible explanation from the PAN (Partido Acciön Nacional) President Calderon’s party. The PT (Partodp del Trabajo) attacked President Calderon for his abject submission and boot-licking while the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) decried the PAN’s foreign policy aberrations, demanding the Senate to do something about it. The consensus is that the USA should not meddle in the internal affairs of Mexico and fighting organized crime– anti-drug trafficking included–in an internal national concern.
This should give us a hint of what might be going on in our own backyard. Could there be iterations of the same “Rapido y furioso” homing strategy? With a laureate of distrust, the Philippine Senate is conducting inquiries about scandalous corruption in the upper echelons of the military after the sons of a general were caught smuggling US dollars (tucked in backpacks and footwear) into the USA itself. Where did all those ”greenbacks” come from? Senators demanded to know. The general’s wife who was apprehended with her sons made unexpected arch comments about her husband accepting “goodwill money” for services rendered to foreign suppliers, More outrageous particulars have been uncovered since that airport entrapment and it seems that more generals and their families are involved.
Mexicans believe there is more than meets the eye in the arms cum homing deal. That is why they are absolutely furioso and want to get to the bottom of this very rapido.