How high up did the weapons of Operation Fast and Furious go in the cartels?  This high:

When Mexican authorities took Juarez drug cartel carnage king Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez — better known as “El Diego” — into custody, he had weapons from Operation Fast and Furious on his person, the English-language transcript of the Spanish-language television network Univision’s special investigation into the scandal shows.

“According to investigations, ‘El Diego’ forms the link between this massacre and Fast and Furious,” an anchor read on air in Spanish Sunday evening, referring to two different mass killings drug cartel operatives used Fast and Furious weapons to conduct as Univision reported.

“When he [El Diego] was captured in Chihuahua in the summer of 2011, he was found with weapons that the American government had allowed to enter Mexico,” the anchor added.

Supposedly, the point of the ATF/DoJ operation was to track the weapons so that they could find the movers and shakers in the Mexican drug cartels.  Imagine what would have happened if the ATF actually had intended totrack the weapons and cooperate with the Mexican government, as the Bush administration did earlier in Operation Wide Receiver.  The partnership might have caught El Diego a little sooner.

And they might have prevented this:

The English-language translated transcript of Spanish-language television news network Univision’s special report on Operation Fast and Furious shows that drug cartel leaders orchestrated a hit on innocent civilian teenagers using weapons they got from President Barack Obama’s administration. …

Davila’s children — 18-year-old Jose Luis Davila and 20-year-old Marco Davila — were next door at a birthday party with about 60 of their friends. “They had bought sodas, chips — the neighbors were going to make oranges with chilies for them, cracklings, everything,” their mother told Univision.

After that gunshot, Luz Davila said she knew something horrible happened to her children.

“I stood because it came to me and I said, ‘Something happened,’” Luz Davila told the network.

What had happened was Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez, or “El Diego,” the onetime leader of the Juarez Cartel’s La Linea, sent his team to the birthday party to kill what he thought were members of the rival Sinaloa Cartel.

Hernandez had ordered his men to block off the street and conduct the massacre under the mistaken notion that some of the attendees were Sinaloa rivals.  That turned out to be false, but more than a dozen hitmen sprayed fire throughout the neighborhood, killing 16 people overall, with guns helpfully supplied by the ATF.  (After his capture, Hernandez acknowledged that the targets were innocent.)

The Univision reporter says at the end that “the United States government has many things that they ought to make public.”  Unfortunately, this administration is still hiding Fast & Furious evidence and witnesses from Congressional investigators via a bogus executive privilege claim.  Perhaps that will change soon …. but perhaps it would be better to get a new executive in place so we can finally get answers as to how the American government armed Juarez cartel hitmen to conduct this massacre, and more importantly, why.