I-TEAM: Guns From Texas Flowing To Drug Cartels

by ABC-7 I-Team Investigator Martin Bartlett

EL PSO, Texas — There is new evidence that Texans are helping arm the brutal drug cartels in their war for dominance across the border.

U.S. officials estimate drug cartels in Mexico get 95 percent of their guns from the United States. Officials with the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Bureau say most of those continue to come from Texas.

Juarez is a city under siege and Juarez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz said Mexico’s military will remain in the border city, beating back crime and corralling cartels.

Phil Jordan, retired from the Drug Enforcement Agency, said the bloody war is likely to continue, especially as the flow of weapons from Texas to Mexico grows even more dangerous.

“They can buy anything they can afford and they can afford anything…I’ve even heard of a couple of cases of bazookas being sold,” Jordan said.

Jordan said North Texas is a major hub for arms trafficking. “Dallas is a major transportation point for drugs coming in, the money going back to Mexico, but also for weapons originating in Dallas and going to Mexico… Either through Laredo, El Paso, Matamoros, etc.”

Jordan said cartel operatives bring illegal guns and bullets to North Texas, sell them on the black market there and load them on to private planes at small general aviation airports in the Dallas suburbs where security is lax and it is easy to blend in.

“Anything can happen as far as trying to smuggle the weapons…to El Paso and then to Mexico.”

But the federal government is cracking down on illegal gun sales and transports in the El Paso area. In fact, the ABC-7 I-Team uncovered court documents detailing an arrest in a Lower Valley neighborhood.

According to the documents, El Paso County Sheriff’s deputies and agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms searched a house in the 1600 block of Tejas as part of “an ongoing Mexican firearms trafficking investigation.”

That is when 39-year-old former El Paso County Detention officer Luis Armando Rodriguez allegedly showed them a cache of illegal weapons.

A federal grand jury indicted him on charges he falsified records while buying other weapons from a company called Cold War Shooters. Their Web site lists an El Paso address.

But the address is a Westside Postal Annex store in a shopping center near Hornedo Middle School.

The documents do not suggest any wrongdoing by Cold War Shooters.

Rodriguez pleaded guilty to one charge that he possessed the sawed-off shotguns. He was sentenced to a year in federal prison. The government dropped the other charges.

“Traffickers are going to go where the availability of weapons exist,” said Jordan. He said as long as guns are available, the bloodshed will continue on our part of the border.

Rodriguez is no longer employed by the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office.