This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 9, 2011.

I'm Keelup Brown.

The United States government has facilitated gun running for drug cartels and special protection services for drug cartels.

Now it appears the federal government has facilitated billions of dollars worth of money laundering for drug cartels as well.

Juan Carlos Hidalgo, project coordinator for Latin America at the Cato

Institute, comments.

Two years ago we had a story in the Washington Post, a very disturbing and interesting

note about how the immigration and customs enforcement agency

will bring drug traffickers from Mexico here as informants, but these traffickers in U.S.O will continue doing their criminal activities,

both in Mexico and the United States.

And one of the things that is actually mentioning the story is how somebody was killed in El Paso, Texas, and the person who ordered, the murder of this other man was one of these drug traffickers that the

immigration and custom enforcement agency will bring to US soil as an informant.

Then in June we had a very well publicized story about Fast and Furious,

the program by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Fire Ams, and Explosives, the ATF, where they will allow suspicious straw-prochases of firearms

to buy weapons in the United States and then smuggle them into Mexico.

And the idea was to track the guns all the way to their ultimate buyers,

which were the drug cartels, and see how the flows of guns from the United States to Mexico actually works.

Well, the problem is that they allow actually like hundreds of guns to be smuggled into Mexico.

And many of these guns have been found in crime scenes in Mexico including

one where a U.S. patrol agent was murdered.

So we have already these very disturbing cases where the federal government, different agencies of the federal government, were actually like facilitating the drug cartels, their business.

They were providing traffickers with safe heaven here in the United States, just as long as they

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