We may have avoided default – for now. But there’s another political monster we’ve tried to postpone that’s fed up with our recalcitrance. By this, of course, we mean Mexico’s drug war.

There’s not just an out-of-control conflict on our border. There’s also the very much related battle of gun lobbyists against the Obama administration, which is grappling with a growing gun-running scandal of its own.

The National Rifle Association has filed suit against the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, following new regulations requiring gun stores in border states to report multiple rifle sales. Beginning Aug. 14, if you live in a border state like Arizona or Texas and want to sell more than one semi-automatic rifle (above .22 caliber and with a removable magazine) within five days, then you will have to let the ATF know or risk your license. That is unless the NRA can block it.

These regulations include rifles like the AK-47, which are regularly trafficked across the border by agents working for Mexico’s largest and most dangerous drug cartels.

It’s all part of a revamped White House strategy, revealed last month aimed and at combating organized crime. The plan calls for blocking financial transactions from criminal networks, strengthening legal systems in partner nations and stopping “the illicit flow from the United States of weapons and criminal proceeds that empower TOC networks.” That’s national security lingo for drug cartels, among other groups.

But there’s one problem: The administration’s top agency dedicated to stopping illegal weapons trafficking, the ATF, is embroiled in a scandal over a disastrous plan to allow straw-purchased guns to “walk” into Mexico. Most of the weapons later disappeared out of the agency’s sight due to lack of resources (and sheer negligence), according to testimony by ATF officials last week to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

It all started in November 2009 with an operation by the ATF Phoenix Field Division to build cases and intelligence against Mexico’s top drug trafficking networks, dubbed “Operation Fast and Furious” after the Vin Diesel street racing movies. (The ATF apparently doesn’t have a rule against naming operations after commercial trademarks.) The plan aimed to eventually bring down entire cartels by tracking their supply of guns right into the organizations themselves — a shift from targeting individual straw purchasers, which was widely criticized as ineffective.

But then the operation began to go badly wrong. After the guns reached their destinations, they began popping up at crime scenes across Mexico: assassinations, shootouts with police and in stockpiles.

Late last year, Mario Gonzalez Rodriguez, the brother of former Chihuahua state Attorney General Patricia Gonzalez Rodriguez, was kidnapped and killed. Following a shootout, Mexican federal police arrested several suspects armed with weapons traced to Fast and Furious. Elsewhere, Mexican police were discovering caches containing ATF-walked AK-47s, AR-15s and Barrett .50 caliber rifles.

A November 2009 discovery in Naco, Sonora led to 42 rifles — all AK-47s and one Barrett — being traced to ATF-monitored sales. Last December, during a confrontation near Rio Rico, Arizona, a gunman armed with a Fast and Furious AK-47 shot and killed Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. The agency then moved to shut the operation down. All in all, the ATF watched 2,020 guns walk out of straw-purchase transactions, with only 590 guns so far recovered from crimes, 241 in Mexico. The rest have vanished, and it’s possible the numbers could be higher.

As recently as last May, Mexican Federal Police confronted La Familia gunmen armed with weapons later traced to Fast and Furious in the western state of Michoacan. The gunmen forced down a police helicopter, wounding two officers, and then shot up several more helicopters five days later.

“Unfortunately, there are hundreds of Brian Terrys probably in Mexico… we [ATF] armed the [Sinaloa] cartel,” Carlos Canino, the bureau’s deputy attache to Mexico, said in congressional testimony (.pdf). “It is disgusting.”

After all, without any physical means to track the guns, who knew where they would end up? And to make it even worse, the ATF’s agents in Mexico, the agency’s Mexican counterparts and White House national security officials were in the dark about what was happening.

So while the White House seeks to reduce gun trafficking into Mexico, its enforcement agency struggles with “limited resources” (.pdf) and even formulating a basic strategy (.pdf) regarding legal straw purchases fueling a deadly war. Thus, we get gun-walking schemes.

“The strategy says, for instance, that the U.S. must stop the illicit flow of weapons to criminal gangs,” wrote Steven Dudley, co-director of InSight, a monitoring group focused on organized crime in the Americas. “However, the Obama administration has not empowered its own law enforcement agencies to do this, and does not have the political will to change the law to make this a reality.”

Dudley points out the ATF “has the same number of agents it had in the 1970s, which amounts to about 700 inspectors to keep watch over 120,000 licensed firearms sellers.”

But back in the 70s, Mexico wasn’t in the middle of a massive drug war. It is now.

Photo: ATF