House oversight committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa told The Daily Caller on Monday that Univision’s special investigation into Operation Fast and Furious finally puts faces and names on the victims of the Obama administration’s Operation Fast and Furious.
“We have known for some time that weapons brought to Mexico from Operation Fast and Furious would contribute to significant death and carnage,” Issa said. “Univision’s new findings add details and faces to what occurred as a result of a reckless initiative, mismanagement, and lack of leadership within the U.S. Justice Department.”
Issa has previously said that Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice has “blood on their hands,” and that the Obama administration owes the Mexican government and Mexican people an apology. Neither Holder, President Barack Obama nor anyone from the administration has apologized to Mexico or offered the nation condolences for Fast and Furious. (RELATED: Eric Holder in 1999: I care about victims [VIDEO])
The special report — which aired Sunday evening on the Spanish language television news network — found that Fast and Furious weapons were used in “massacres” that claimed the lives of many innocent civilians in Mexico. One such “massacre” ended up with several students being killed.
“On January 30, 2010, a commando of at least 20 hit men parked themselves outside a birthday party of high school and college students in Villas de Salvarcar, Ciudad Juarez,” according to a version of the Univision report in English, on the ABC News website.
“Near midnight, the assassins, later identified as hired guns for the Mexican cartel La Linea, broke into a one-story house and opened fire on a gathering of nearly 60 teenagers. Outside, lookouts gunned down a screaming neighbor and several students who had managed to escape. Fourteen young men and women were killed, and 12 more were wounded before the hit men finally fled.”
Citing a Mexican Army document it obtained and published, Univision reported that “[t]hree of the high caliber weapons fired that night in Villas de Salvarcar were linked to a gun tracing operation run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).”
That operation was Fast and Furious.
The network also uncovered another Fast and Furious weapons “massacre.” On September 2, 2009, 18 young men were killed at “El Aliviane, a rehabilitation center in Ciudad Juarez,” according to the report.
Univision found many of these victims through “access to the list of serial numbers for weapons used in Fast and Furious” and the “list of guns seized in Mexico,” according to English subtitles on the Spanish-language video.
“After cross-referencing them both lists, it became clear that a least a hundred of them were used in crimes of all kinds,” the subtitles read. “We found 57 weapons that were not mentioned in [the U.S.] Congress’ investigation.”
Though Univision tracked many more victims down, it said that “the death toll that this free flow of weapons authorized by ATF had in Mexico has not been tallied.”
