What they conveniently left out of thsi article is the TENS of THOUSANDS of fireams that they seize annually that they DON'T trace to US dealers, but are coming from China, Russia, Israel, and foreign militaries.
What they aren't showing is the tens of thousands of select-fire M-16s that were manufactured with no serial numbers on them by Ruger and Colt for the CIA to give to the Contras in Nicaragua, and therefore CAN'T be traced. Most of those have, in fact, made their way out of Nicaragua, and are now in the hands of the Mexican cartels.
What they aren't telling you about is the container ship LOADS of military-grade weapons (grenades, rocket launchers, large machine guns) that are being bought on the international market (often from GOVERNMENT sources) with CASH by the cartels, from nations that are supposedly our allies, like France, Israel, and Russia.
What they aren't telling you in this article is the fact that the DEA often refuses to prosecute Cartel members, because a LOT of the Mexican drug trade is intimately tied in to the US "intelligence community" and prosecution of these thugs would run the risk of having to expose "classified information".
What they aren't telling you is that the reason the drug problem is so bad in Mexico is because it is one of the only profit-making industries left in this hemisphere that isn't completely controlled by big corporate sociopaths (it's controlled by small, family sociopaths), and the fact is, they are, for the most part, serving a VERY useful role in the Globalist agenda...