Washington, Mar 17 (EFE).– The U.S. government has confirmed that a rifle found earlier this year at drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzman’s hideout in Mexico entered the country as a result of the failed Fast and Furious gun-walking operation.

In a letter made public Wednesday and sent to members of Congress, the Justice Department confirmed a Fox News report in January indicating that a .50-caliber rifle – capable of downing helicopters – was discovered after a Jan. 8 raid that resulted in the fugitive’s capture.

Agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, checked the serial numbers of the weapons discovered at the hideout in Los Mochis, a coastal city in the western Mexican state of Sinaloa, and traced one of them to the Fast and Furious program.

They could not confirm, however, how many of the weapons found at the hideout had originated in the United States.

Guzman, the Sinaloa cartel’s founder, was recaptured near Los Mochis on Jan. 8, around six months after he had escaped from a maximum-security prison in Mexico for the second time.

The rifle linked to Fast and Furious was in the possession of Guzman’s bodyguards, according to Fox News, which reported on Jan. 20 that their boss would place them on hilltops with orders to shoot down any police helicopters conducting raids.

Fast and Furious was a federal undercover sting that allowed some 2,000 weapons to be smuggled into Mexico by straw purchasers allegedly working for drug cartels, a tactic known as “gun-walking.”

The operation was launched in 2009 by the ATF’s Phoenix office and shut down in late 2010 after guns traced to the program were linked to the killing in Arizona of U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

The idea behind Fast and Furious was to track the weapons purchased by illicit buyers to powerful drug traffickers in Mexico, but once it got underway ATF agents realized they had no dependable way of keeping track of the guns, which eventually began appearing at crime scenes on both sides of the border.

Around 1,400 of the 2,000 weapons sold through the program went missing, one of which was the rifle found at El Chapo’s hideout.

The Obama administration has vehemently denied any involvement in Fast and Furious and said it only learned about the operation after it was shut down. EFE