THERE IS A REASON WHY MEXICO, THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA and the MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS ENDORSED AND VOTED FOR BARACK OBAMA!
Above the law – Obama,
His Banks and the Mexican Drug Cartels
WE
KNOW ABOUT OBAMA’S AGENDA OF OPEN BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX.
WIKILEAKS EXPOSES OBAMA’S OPEN
BORDERS AGENDA!
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/wikileaks-exposed-obamas-la-raza-open.html
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/05/wikileaks-exposed-obamas-la-raza-open.html
The Obama administration has also cut worksite enforcement efforts by
70%, allowing illegal immigrants to continue working in jobs that rightfully
belong to citizens and legal workers.
*
WE
KNOW HE HAS NOT INTENTION OF PROTECTING OUR BORDERS WITH NARCOMEX, EVEN AS HE
SQUANDERS BILLIONS PROTECTING THE BORDERS OF MUSLIM DICTATORS.
CBP said it
made 356,873 arrests in 2012, which is up from 327,577 in 2011 — though both
are still way down from 2006 when nearly 1.2 million arrests were made.
WE
KNOW THAT HE HAS ARMED THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS.
WE
KNOW THAT OBAMA TURNS OVER AMERICAN TAX DOLLARS TO THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of
LA RAZA.
WE
KNOW THAT LA RAZA OPERATES OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE UNDER CECILIA MUNOZ.
NCLR’s Muñoz
Promoted To WH Domestic Policy Director
January 10, 2012
President
Obama has elevated the one-time vice president of the National Council of La
Raza (NCLR) from White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs to the more
powerful and prestigious post of Domestic Policy Director.
That
means Cecilia Muñoz, a renowned open borders lobbyist in Washington D.C., will
be the president’s top adviser on domestic issues and she’ll coordinate the
policy-making process and supervise the execution of domestic policy in the
White House. Clearly the position wields tremendous power and influence.
This
can only mean good things for the influential nonprofit she once led and
lobbied for, the NCLR, which promotes itself as the nation’s largest Latino
civil rights group. Months ago a Judicial Watch investigation uncovered
that the NCLR, which for years has raked in millions of taxpayer dollars, has
benefitted handsomely from Muñoz’s quick rise in the Obama Administration. In
fact, the group’s federal funding has skyrocketed since she got her White House
job in 2009.
*
WE
KNOW HIS ADMIN IS INFESTED WITH FIRST BANKSTERS AND THEN LA RAZA PARTY MEMBERS.
EVEN HIS NOMINEE TO THE HIGH COURT, SONIA SOTOMAYOR IS A RACIST MEMBER IF THE
MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA RAZA “THE RACE”.
VIVA LA RAZA?
Supreme
Court Nominee Member Of Mexican La Raza Group
May 28, 2009
President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee is a
member of an influential extremist Mexican La Raza group that advocates open
borders and driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants.
Judge Sonia
Sotomayor is listed as a member of the National Council of La Raza in an American Bar
Association profile discovered
by a news organization dedicated to exposing public corruption. The appeals
court judge has already ignited a firestorm for publicly saying that a jurist’s
ethnicity and sex will make a difference in their judging.
The La Raza membership is a fiery compliment to the
now infamous Berkeley
speech in which Sotomayor said: “I would hope that a wise Latina
woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a
better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”
The National
Council of La Raza describes itself as the largest Latino civil rights and
advocacy organization in the United States, but it actually caters to the
radical Chicano movement that says California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and
parts of Colorado and Texas belong to Aztlan.
*
Above the law – Obama,
His Banks and the Mexican Drug Cartels
14 December 2012
In the latest scandal involving the criminal activities of major
banks, the US Justice Department on Tuesday announced a $1.9 billion settlement
with British-based HSBC on charges of money laundering on a massive scale for
Mexican and Colombian drug cartels.
The deal was specifically designed to avert criminal prosecution
of either the bank, the largest in Europe and third largest in the world, or
any of its top executives. Even though the bank admitted to laundering billions
of dollars for drug lords, as well as violating US financial sanctions against
Iran, Libya, Burma and Cuba, the Obama administration avoided an indictment by
means of a “deferred prosecution agreement.”
The agreement was in keeping with the policy of the US government
of shielding top bankers from any accountability for illegal activities that
led to the collapse of the financial system in 2008 and ushered in the global
recession. Not a single leading executive of a major bank has been prosecuted,
let alone jailed, for fraudulent activities that triggered the present crisis,
leading to the destruction of millions of jobs and the decimation of
working-class living standards in the US and around the world.
Under the protection of the state, the frenzied speculation and
swindling continue unabated, underpinning record profits for the banks and
bigger-than-ever multi-million-dollar compensation packages for top bankers.
In a front-page article on Tuesday, the New York Times outlined
internal discussions within the Obama administration that led to the decision
not to indict HSBC. The Times reported that prosecutors at the Justice
Department and the New York District Attorney’s office pushed for a compromise
in which the bank would be indicted not for money laundering, but for the
lesser charge of violating the Bank Secrecy Act.
Even this, however, was too much for the Obama administration. The
Treasury Department, headed by former New York Federal Reserve President
Timothy Geithner, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the
federal regulatory agency charged with policing major banks including HSBC,
vetoed any prosecution on the grounds that a serious legal blow to HSBC would
jeopardize the financial system.
What does this mean? HSBC, in its pursuit of profit, facilitated
the activities of drug cartels that have been the target of the so-called “drug
war”—a war prosecuted by the Mexican military at the behest of and with the
collaboration of Washington—in which over 60,000 people have died. This is in
addition to the human suffering caused by the narcotics trade in the US and
around the world.
It was allowed to pay a token fine—less than 10 percent of its
profits for 2011 and a fraction of the money it made laundering the drug
bosses’ blood money. Meanwhile, small-time drug dealers and users, often among
the most impoverished and oppressed sections of the population, are routinely
arrested and locked up for years in the American prison gulag.
The financial parasites who keep the global drug trade churning
and make the lion’s share of money from the social devastation it wreaks are
above the law. As the Times put it, “certain financial institutions,
having grown so large and so interconnected, are too big to indict.”
Here, in a nutshell, is the modern-day aristocratic principle that
prevails behind the threadbare trappings of “democracy.” The financial robber
barons of today are a law unto themselves. They can steal, plunder, even murder
at will, without fear of being called to account. They devote a portion of
their fabulous wealth to bribing politicians, regulators, judges and
police—from the heights of power in Washington down to the local police
precinct—to make sure their wealth is protected and they remain immune from
criminal prosecution.
The role of so-called “regulators” such as the Federal Reserve,
the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Office of the Comptroller
of the Currency is to run interference for the bankers. They are well aware that
crimes are being committed on a daily basis, but turn a blind eye because
criminality is intrinsic to the operations of Wall Street and the profits it
takes in.
There is evidence that HSBC and other major banks stepped up their
money laundering for drug cartels and other criminal outfits in response to the
financial crisis that began to emerge in earnest in 2007 and exploded in
September of 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Following a similar “deferred prosecution” deal with Wachovia Bank
in 2010 for its drug money laundering operations, Antonio Maria Costa, who then
headed the United Nations office on drugs and crime, said that the flow of
crime syndicate money represented the only “liquid investment capital”
available to the banks at the height of the crisis. “Inter-bank loans were
funded by money that originated from the drugs trade,” he said.
There can be little doubt that US regulators and political leaders
gave their tacit consent to these operations as part of their rush to rescue
Wall Street from the consequences of its own money-mad speculative binge.
The incestuous relationship between bank regulators and the banks
comes into full view in the case of another recent bank scandal. Last week,
Deutsche Bank was named by three ex-employees in a complaint to the SEC
alleging that it fraudulently concealed $12 billion in losses between 2007 and
2009.
The Financial Times noted in passing that Robert Khuzami,
the head of enforcement at the SEC, has recused himself from the probe because,
before taking his post at the federal agency, he was Deutsche Bank’s general
counsel for the Americas from 2004 to 2009. In other words, he was in charge of
legally defending the bank at the very time it was, according to whistle
blowers, engaging in accounting fraud.
This was also the period when Deutsche Bank and other major banks
were making billions by poisoning the world financial system with toxic
mortgage-backed securities. Last year, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations devoted 45 pages of a voluminous report on the financial crash
to the fraudulent activities of Deutsche Bank.
The report noted that the bank’s top trader in collateralized debt
obligations had referred to securities the bank was selling as “crap” and
“pigs,” and called the banking industry’s CDO operations a “Ponzi scheme.”
That such a man should be put in charge of policing the banks is,
in fact, par for the course. The man who recommended that the Obama
administration give Khuzami the job, Richard Walker, the current chief counsel
at Deutsche Bank, was himself a former head of enforcement at the SEC.
Last June, when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon testified before
the Senate on unreported losses of at least $5 billion, sitting behind him was
the bank’s chief counsel, Stephen Cutler, who had graduated to that post after
serving as SEC enforcement chief.
This Augean stable of crime and corruption, which involves every
official institution of American capitalism, cannot be reformed. The
stranglehold of the financial aristocracy over economic life can be ended only
through the mass mobilization of the working class to expropriate the bankers
and place the major banks and financial institutions under public ownership and
democratic control.
Barry Grey
The author also recommends:
A law unto themselves
[15 August 2012]
[15 August 2012]
Barry Grey
HE PUNKED THE
AMERICAN PEOPLE TWICE BUT WILL STILL GO DOWN IN HISTORY HAS ONE OF AMERICA’S
WORST AND MOST CORRUPT PRESIDENTS.
“I’m not here to
punish banks!” Bankster-owned Barack Obama from the floor of the Senate, State
of the Union Message.
During Obama’s
first two years alone, banks made more profits than under all eight years of
Bush. The Obama bank’s profits and crimes soared, as did foreclosures.
MEXICAN DRUG
DEALER OPERATES IN OUR BORDERS
THE MEXICAN
DRUG CARTELS OPERATE IN 2,500 AMERICAN CITIES AND WHOLEHEARTEDLY ENDORSE
OBAMA’S OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS AGENDA.
“Oropeza,
48, was arrested May 31, 2007, by police in Saraland, Ala., who stopped him on
a traffic violation. Checking his record, they learned of the investigation in
Texas.
They
searched the van and discovered 185 pounds of cocaine hidden under a false
floor. That allowed federal agents to freeze Oropeza's bank accounts and search
his marble-floored home in Brownsville, Robinette says.”
The
government, like the banks, had a vested interest in shutting down the
investigation, as the results of any genuine inquiry would have exposed
negligence and collusion on the part of the regulators as well as gross
violations of law by the banks that would have made it more difficult for the
Obama administration to avoid criminal prosecutions.
The Times also reported that such “independent
investigators” played a key role in the HSBC money laundering scandal, helping
cover up the extent of the British-based bank’s money laundering operation for
Mexican drug cartels.
*
RESULTING
FROM THE OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS PERPETRATED ON THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BY
OBAMA’S LA RAZA INFESTED ADMINISTRATION, THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS NOW OPERATE
FROM 2,500 AMERICAN CITIES!
VIVA LA
RAZA?
LA RAZA DEMS
LIKE OBAMA, FEINSTEIN, BOXER, PELOSI and REID, A WHO’S-WHO OF CORRUPTION, HAVE
WORKED TIRELESSLY ADVANCING THE INTERESTS OF THE MEXICAN FASCIST PARTY of LA
RAZA. TO THESE LA RAZA DEMS, KEEPING OUR BORDERS WIDE OPEN KEEPS WAGES
DEPRESSED AND PUTS MONEY IN THEIR POCKETS.
YOU CAN NOT
SEPARATE THE CORRUPTION OF THESE POLITICIANS, THE LA RAZA OCCUPATION, AND THE
LOOTING OF THE NATION BY THEIR BANKSTER DONORS!
MEXICAN DRUG
DEALER OPERATES IN OUR BORDERS
THE MEXICAN
DRUG CARTELS OPERATE IN 2,500 AMERICAN CITIES AND WHOLEHEARTEDLY ENDORSE
OBAMA’S OPEN AND UNDEFENDED BORDERS AGENDA.
Mexico seeks to fill drug war gap with focus on dirty money
The evolving anti-laundering campaign could change the tone of the Mexican
government's battle by striking at the heart of the cartels' financial empire,
analysts say.
By Ken Ellingwood and Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times
November 27, 2011
|
Reporting from Mexico City
|
|
|
Tainted drug money runs like whispered rumors
all over Mexico's economy — in gleaming high-rises in beach resorts such as
Cancun, in bustling casinos in Monterrey, in skyscrapers and restaurants in
Mexico City that sit empty for months. It seeps into the construction sector,
the night-life industry, even political campaigns.
Piles of greenbacks, enough to fill dump trucks, are transformed into gold watches, showrooms full of Hummers, aviation schools, yachts, thoroughbred horses and warehouses full of imported fabric.
Officials here say the tide of laundered money could reach as high as $50 billion, a staggering sum equal to about 3% of Mexico's legitimate economy, or more than all its oil exports or spending on prime social programs.
Mexican leaders often trumpet their deadly crackdown against drug traffickers as an all-out battle involving tens of thousands of troops and police, high-profile arrests and record-setting narcotics seizures. The 5-year-old offensive, however, has done little to attack a chief source of the cartels' might: their money.
Even President Felipe Calderon, who sent the army into the streets to chase traffickers after taking office in 2006, an offensive that has seen 43,000 people die since, concedes that Mexico has fallen short in attacking the financial strength of organized crime.
"Without question, we have been at fault," Calderon said during a meeting last month with drug-war victims. "The truth is that the existing structures for detecting money-laundering were simply overwhelmed by reality."
Experts say the unchecked flow of dirty money feeds a widening range of criminal activity as cartels branch into other enterprises, such as producing and trading in pirated merchandise.
"All this generates more crime," said Ramon Garcia Gibson, a former compliance officer at Citibank and an expert in money-laundering. "At the end of the day, this isn't good for anyone."
Officials on both sides of the border have begun taking tentative steps to stem the flow of dirty money. For Instance, last year Calderon proposed anti-laundering legislation, after earlier announcing restrictions on cash transactions in Mexico that used U.S. dollars.
The evolving anti-laundering campaign could change the tone of the government's military-led crime crusade by striking at the heart of the cartels' financial empire, analysts say. But the effort will have to overcome a longtime lack of political will and poor coordination among Mexican law enforcement agencies that have only aggravated the complexity of the task at hand now.
"If you don't take away their property, winning this war is impossible," said Sen. Ricardo Garcia Cervantes of the Senate security committee and Calderon's conservative National Action Party. "You are not going to win this war with bullets."
++
The good news for Mexican and Colombian traffickers is that drug sales in the United States generate enormous income, nearly all of it in readily spendable cash. The bad news is that this creates a towering logistical challenge: getting the proceeds back home to pay bills, buy supplies — from guns to chemicals to trucks — and build up the cartels' empires without detection.
Laundering allows traffickers to disguise the illicit earnings as legitimate through any number of transactions, such as cash transfers, big-ticket purchases, currency exchanges and deposits.
Much of that money still makes its way back into Mexico the old-fashioned way: in duffels stuffed into the trunks of cars. But Mexican drug traffickers are among the world's most savvy entrepreneurs, and launderers have proved nimble in evading authorities' efforts to catch them, adopting a host of new techniques to move the ill-gotten wealth.
For example, Mexican traffickers are taking advantage of blind spots in monitoring the nearly $400 billion of legal commerce between the two countries. The so-called trade-based laundering allows crime groups to disguise millions of dollars in tainted funds as ordinary merchandise — say, onions or precious metals, as they are trucked across the border.
In one case, the merchandise of choice was tons of polypropylene pellets used for making plastic. Exports of the product from the United States to Mexico appeared legitimate, but law enforcement officials say that by declaring a slightly inflated value, traders were able to hide an average of more than $1 million a month, until suspicious banks shut down the operation.
The inventive ploys even include gift cards, such as the kind you get your nephew for graduation. A drug-trafficking foot soldier simply loads up a prepaid card with dollars and walks across the border without having to declare sums over the usual $10,000 reporting requirement, thus carrying a car trunk's worth of cargo in his wallet.
Tainted cash is almost everywhere. In western Mexico, a minor-league soccer club known as the Raccoons was part of a sprawling cross-border empire — including car dealerships, an avocado export firm, hotels and restaurants — that U.S. officials said was used by suspect Wenceslao Alvarez to launder money for the Gulf cartel. Alvarez was arrested by Mexican authorities in 2008 in a rare blow against laundering and remains in prison while fighting the charges.
Even the most unlikely street-corner businesses may be used to scrub money. A pair of tanning salons in the western state of Jalisco were among 225 properties seized from drug suspect Sandra Avila Beltran, the so-called Queen of the Pacific and one of the few women allegedly to reach upper cartel echelons.
Avila, arrested in 2007, is still behind bars on the money-laundering charges as she also fights extradition to the U.S., but she has been exonerated of organized-crime and weapons charges.
The salons, with their all-cash, high-volume turnover, were allegedly used to hide drug money. The chain, called Electric Beach, has outlets all over Mexico City.
++
Mexico's efforts against money-laundering are hobbled by staff shortages, a failure to investigate adequately and skimpy laws that have exempted from scrutiny a number of industries often used to clean dirty money, independent assessments by financial experts and academics have found.
Javier Laynez Potisek, Mexico's fiscal prosecutor, lamented during a September conference on money-laundering, "Our system allows someone to come in with a suitcase full of money and buy four armored pickups for 600,000 pesos [about $42,000], and we don't have a minimum requirement to identify or report them."
A 2009 report issued by the Financial Action Task Force, an international anti-money-laundering agency, noted that Mexican authorities had won only 25 convictions for money-laundering in the two decades it has been a crime. From the beginning of 2009 to mid-2010, as overall drug-war arrests soared, prosecutors won convictions of only 37 people for money-laundering.
Part of the problem is that only Mexico's Finance Ministry has had access to financial data crucial to potential money-laundering inquiries, and prosecutors have not been allowed to open their own money-laundering investigations without a complaint from finance officials.
There is also stubborn resistance among those who profit from their role as middlemen for big transactions.
One such group is notaries, who in Mexico have a function much like attorneys in the U.S. They handle nearly all real estate transactions and have battled a proposal that would require them to report how each purchase was paid for. Notaries say launderers would probably respond by skipping the paperwork altogether when buying cars and houses, only adding to the black-market economy.
"The only thing that worries us notaries is that [the proposed reporting requirements] would create an alternative market … that brings benefits to no one," said Hector Galeano, finance secretary of Mexico's notaries association.
Some observers suggest that one reason previous Mexican governments were slow to attack money-laundering was fear of harming the rest of the economy.
Edgardo Buscaglia, a scholar who studies organized crime, estimates that in a nation where three-quarters of all transactions are cash, drug money has infiltrated 78% of the sectors constituting the formal economy.
In Sinaloa, the prosperous coastal state considered the cradle of the Mexican narcotics trade, economist Guillermo Ibarra estimates that drug money sustains nearly a fifth of the region's economy, from fancy subdivisions dotted with "narco-mansions" to vast farms.
Sinaloa is a well-known produce grower; in fact, its license plate features a tomato. But it would take an awful lot of tomatoes to account for the kind of over-the-top opulence on display in the state.
++
The moves to turn the tide in dirty money have generally taken place out of public view. But they could mark an important shift in the drug-war strategy.
A year ago, a small group of Mexican officials and U.S. counterparts met and selected six money-laundering cases to investigate jointly in an experimental offensive. U.S. agents here say the first arrests, involving a network in the northern border state of Chihuahua, could come by year's end.
Separately, U.S. Customs officials familiar with sophisticated money-laundering techniques have begun training Mexican tax inspectors who will be assigned to ferret out launderers. In addition, nearly 500 individuals and Mexican companies, from mines to milk producers, have been placed on a U.S. Treasury Department blacklist for alleged laundering activities.
And the Mexican Congress, after years of government inaction on the issue, is weighing a series of legislative proposals based on Calderon's anti-laundering package that would make it more difficult to cleanse dirty money. In the meantime, the restrictions on the use of U.S. cash in Mexico appear to be altering the flow of drug-tainted dollars for the first time, officials on both sides of the border say.
Under the proposed legislation, a specialized unit added to the attorney general's office, with advice from U.S. officials, would be authorized to take the lead in money-laundering cases and inspect a wide variety of businesses in search of illicit profits.
In addition, the government nearly a year ago replaced the Finance Ministry official in charge of such cases with a veteran Washington-based diplomat, Jose Alberto Balbuena, who had spent many months working with U.S. financial officials and is said to have a better grasp of what's at stake and a good working relationship with top prosecutors.
To date, Mexican reporting requirements have applied only to banks. Under legislation approved by the Senate last year and now before the lower Chamber of Deputies, a range of other industries would also be required to report large cash or suspicious transactions using unexplained funds.
These include real estate, car dealerships, betting parlors, art galleries, notaries, and, possibly, religious institutions. Mirroring "know your customer" regulations in the banking world, the rules would require disclosure of cash purchases for more than 200,000 pesos, or about $14,000, of numerous goods and place a cap of 1 million pesos, or about $70,000, on cash purchases of real estate.
Law enforcement experts say the proposed legislation could fill a yawning gap in Mexico's crime fight.
"It's going to counteract the financial and economic power of the criminals," said Ricardo Gluyas, a professor at the National Institute of Criminal Sciences, which trains Mexico's organized-crime prosecutors. "The new law has teeth. It covers a broad spectrum."
One potentially powerful tool, an asset-forfeiture law that allows authorities to seize property and accounts of traffickers and launderers, was approved by Congress in 2008. A similar law made a big difference in crime fights in Colombia and Italy, allowing authorities in those countries to confiscate and resell properties of drug traffickers and Mafiosi.
"Without firing a shot, you can generate a lot more results by seizing the fortunes of the big capos," Gluyas said.
But critics say the Mexican asset-forfeiture law threatens the due-process rights of owners. So far, it has been little used: Courts had approved only two cases by late this summer, with more than a dozen pending.
Perhaps more than any other measure, the government's move last year to restrict bank deposits of U.S. cash appears to have slowed the entry of dollars to Mexico's financial system. Bank-account holders were no longer allowed to deposit more than $4,000 a month.
In response, traffickers and their launderers are shifting tactics, including keeping money in the United States, officials say. And U.S. officials say that since Mexico announced the new rules, more money appears to be going elsewhere, especially to the Caribbean and Guatemala, where officials have detected a surge in circulating U.S. bank notes.
"That's the big question," Balbuena said. "Where is the money?"
A possible explanation can perhaps be gleaned from an Oct. 5 incident: Customs inspectors in Tijuana stopped an armored car full of plastic bags stuffed with $915,000 in cash. There was no documentation for the money, law enforcement sources familiar with the discovery said.
But it wasn't headed into Mexico. It was headed north, into San Diego.
Piles of greenbacks, enough to fill dump trucks, are transformed into gold watches, showrooms full of Hummers, aviation schools, yachts, thoroughbred horses and warehouses full of imported fabric.
Officials here say the tide of laundered money could reach as high as $50 billion, a staggering sum equal to about 3% of Mexico's legitimate economy, or more than all its oil exports or spending on prime social programs.
Mexican leaders often trumpet their deadly crackdown against drug traffickers as an all-out battle involving tens of thousands of troops and police, high-profile arrests and record-setting narcotics seizures. The 5-year-old offensive, however, has done little to attack a chief source of the cartels' might: their money.
Even President Felipe Calderon, who sent the army into the streets to chase traffickers after taking office in 2006, an offensive that has seen 43,000 people die since, concedes that Mexico has fallen short in attacking the financial strength of organized crime.
"Without question, we have been at fault," Calderon said during a meeting last month with drug-war victims. "The truth is that the existing structures for detecting money-laundering were simply overwhelmed by reality."
Experts say the unchecked flow of dirty money feeds a widening range of criminal activity as cartels branch into other enterprises, such as producing and trading in pirated merchandise.
"All this generates more crime," said Ramon Garcia Gibson, a former compliance officer at Citibank and an expert in money-laundering. "At the end of the day, this isn't good for anyone."
Officials on both sides of the border have begun taking tentative steps to stem the flow of dirty money. For Instance, last year Calderon proposed anti-laundering legislation, after earlier announcing restrictions on cash transactions in Mexico that used U.S. dollars.
The evolving anti-laundering campaign could change the tone of the government's military-led crime crusade by striking at the heart of the cartels' financial empire, analysts say. But the effort will have to overcome a longtime lack of political will and poor coordination among Mexican law enforcement agencies that have only aggravated the complexity of the task at hand now.
"If you don't take away their property, winning this war is impossible," said Sen. Ricardo Garcia Cervantes of the Senate security committee and Calderon's conservative National Action Party. "You are not going to win this war with bullets."
++
The good news for Mexican and Colombian traffickers is that drug sales in the United States generate enormous income, nearly all of it in readily spendable cash. The bad news is that this creates a towering logistical challenge: getting the proceeds back home to pay bills, buy supplies — from guns to chemicals to trucks — and build up the cartels' empires without detection.
Laundering allows traffickers to disguise the illicit earnings as legitimate through any number of transactions, such as cash transfers, big-ticket purchases, currency exchanges and deposits.
Much of that money still makes its way back into Mexico the old-fashioned way: in duffels stuffed into the trunks of cars. But Mexican drug traffickers are among the world's most savvy entrepreneurs, and launderers have proved nimble in evading authorities' efforts to catch them, adopting a host of new techniques to move the ill-gotten wealth.
For example, Mexican traffickers are taking advantage of blind spots in monitoring the nearly $400 billion of legal commerce between the two countries. The so-called trade-based laundering allows crime groups to disguise millions of dollars in tainted funds as ordinary merchandise — say, onions or precious metals, as they are trucked across the border.
In one case, the merchandise of choice was tons of polypropylene pellets used for making plastic. Exports of the product from the United States to Mexico appeared legitimate, but law enforcement officials say that by declaring a slightly inflated value, traders were able to hide an average of more than $1 million a month, until suspicious banks shut down the operation.
The inventive ploys even include gift cards, such as the kind you get your nephew for graduation. A drug-trafficking foot soldier simply loads up a prepaid card with dollars and walks across the border without having to declare sums over the usual $10,000 reporting requirement, thus carrying a car trunk's worth of cargo in his wallet.
Tainted cash is almost everywhere. In western Mexico, a minor-league soccer club known as the Raccoons was part of a sprawling cross-border empire — including car dealerships, an avocado export firm, hotels and restaurants — that U.S. officials said was used by suspect Wenceslao Alvarez to launder money for the Gulf cartel. Alvarez was arrested by Mexican authorities in 2008 in a rare blow against laundering and remains in prison while fighting the charges.
Even the most unlikely street-corner businesses may be used to scrub money. A pair of tanning salons in the western state of Jalisco were among 225 properties seized from drug suspect Sandra Avila Beltran, the so-called Queen of the Pacific and one of the few women allegedly to reach upper cartel echelons.
Avila, arrested in 2007, is still behind bars on the money-laundering charges as she also fights extradition to the U.S., but she has been exonerated of organized-crime and weapons charges.
The salons, with their all-cash, high-volume turnover, were allegedly used to hide drug money. The chain, called Electric Beach, has outlets all over Mexico City.
++
Mexico's efforts against money-laundering are hobbled by staff shortages, a failure to investigate adequately and skimpy laws that have exempted from scrutiny a number of industries often used to clean dirty money, independent assessments by financial experts and academics have found.
Javier Laynez Potisek, Mexico's fiscal prosecutor, lamented during a September conference on money-laundering, "Our system allows someone to come in with a suitcase full of money and buy four armored pickups for 600,000 pesos [about $42,000], and we don't have a minimum requirement to identify or report them."
A 2009 report issued by the Financial Action Task Force, an international anti-money-laundering agency, noted that Mexican authorities had won only 25 convictions for money-laundering in the two decades it has been a crime. From the beginning of 2009 to mid-2010, as overall drug-war arrests soared, prosecutors won convictions of only 37 people for money-laundering.
Part of the problem is that only Mexico's Finance Ministry has had access to financial data crucial to potential money-laundering inquiries, and prosecutors have not been allowed to open their own money-laundering investigations without a complaint from finance officials.
There is also stubborn resistance among those who profit from their role as middlemen for big transactions.
One such group is notaries, who in Mexico have a function much like attorneys in the U.S. They handle nearly all real estate transactions and have battled a proposal that would require them to report how each purchase was paid for. Notaries say launderers would probably respond by skipping the paperwork altogether when buying cars and houses, only adding to the black-market economy.
"The only thing that worries us notaries is that [the proposed reporting requirements] would create an alternative market … that brings benefits to no one," said Hector Galeano, finance secretary of Mexico's notaries association.
Some observers suggest that one reason previous Mexican governments were slow to attack money-laundering was fear of harming the rest of the economy.
Edgardo Buscaglia, a scholar who studies organized crime, estimates that in a nation where three-quarters of all transactions are cash, drug money has infiltrated 78% of the sectors constituting the formal economy.
In Sinaloa, the prosperous coastal state considered the cradle of the Mexican narcotics trade, economist Guillermo Ibarra estimates that drug money sustains nearly a fifth of the region's economy, from fancy subdivisions dotted with "narco-mansions" to vast farms.
Sinaloa is a well-known produce grower; in fact, its license plate features a tomato. But it would take an awful lot of tomatoes to account for the kind of over-the-top opulence on display in the state.
++
The moves to turn the tide in dirty money have generally taken place out of public view. But they could mark an important shift in the drug-war strategy.
A year ago, a small group of Mexican officials and U.S. counterparts met and selected six money-laundering cases to investigate jointly in an experimental offensive. U.S. agents here say the first arrests, involving a network in the northern border state of Chihuahua, could come by year's end.
Separately, U.S. Customs officials familiar with sophisticated money-laundering techniques have begun training Mexican tax inspectors who will be assigned to ferret out launderers. In addition, nearly 500 individuals and Mexican companies, from mines to milk producers, have been placed on a U.S. Treasury Department blacklist for alleged laundering activities.
And the Mexican Congress, after years of government inaction on the issue, is weighing a series of legislative proposals based on Calderon's anti-laundering package that would make it more difficult to cleanse dirty money. In the meantime, the restrictions on the use of U.S. cash in Mexico appear to be altering the flow of drug-tainted dollars for the first time, officials on both sides of the border say.
Under the proposed legislation, a specialized unit added to the attorney general's office, with advice from U.S. officials, would be authorized to take the lead in money-laundering cases and inspect a wide variety of businesses in search of illicit profits.
In addition, the government nearly a year ago replaced the Finance Ministry official in charge of such cases with a veteran Washington-based diplomat, Jose Alberto Balbuena, who had spent many months working with U.S. financial officials and is said to have a better grasp of what's at stake and a good working relationship with top prosecutors.
To date, Mexican reporting requirements have applied only to banks. Under legislation approved by the Senate last year and now before the lower Chamber of Deputies, a range of other industries would also be required to report large cash or suspicious transactions using unexplained funds.
These include real estate, car dealerships, betting parlors, art galleries, notaries, and, possibly, religious institutions. Mirroring "know your customer" regulations in the banking world, the rules would require disclosure of cash purchases for more than 200,000 pesos, or about $14,000, of numerous goods and place a cap of 1 million pesos, or about $70,000, on cash purchases of real estate.
Law enforcement experts say the proposed legislation could fill a yawning gap in Mexico's crime fight.
"It's going to counteract the financial and economic power of the criminals," said Ricardo Gluyas, a professor at the National Institute of Criminal Sciences, which trains Mexico's organized-crime prosecutors. "The new law has teeth. It covers a broad spectrum."
One potentially powerful tool, an asset-forfeiture law that allows authorities to seize property and accounts of traffickers and launderers, was approved by Congress in 2008. A similar law made a big difference in crime fights in Colombia and Italy, allowing authorities in those countries to confiscate and resell properties of drug traffickers and Mafiosi.
"Without firing a shot, you can generate a lot more results by seizing the fortunes of the big capos," Gluyas said.
But critics say the Mexican asset-forfeiture law threatens the due-process rights of owners. So far, it has been little used: Courts had approved only two cases by late this summer, with more than a dozen pending.
Perhaps more than any other measure, the government's move last year to restrict bank deposits of U.S. cash appears to have slowed the entry of dollars to Mexico's financial system. Bank-account holders were no longer allowed to deposit more than $4,000 a month.
In response, traffickers and their launderers are shifting tactics, including keeping money in the United States, officials say. And U.S. officials say that since Mexico announced the new rules, more money appears to be going elsewhere, especially to the Caribbean and Guatemala, where officials have detected a surge in circulating U.S. bank notes.
"That's the big question," Balbuena said. "Where is the money?"
A possible explanation can perhaps be gleaned from an Oct. 5 incident: Customs inspectors in Tijuana stopped an armored car full of plastic bags stuffed with $915,000 in cash. There was no documentation for the money, law enforcement sources familiar with the discovery said.
But it wasn't headed into Mexico. It was headed north, into San Diego.
BUT THE PROBLEM IS… criminal
banksters like LA RAZA DONORS WELLS FARGO are servicing the MEXICAN DRUG CARTEL
as fast as they illegally open bank accounts for illegals!
“Officials said stemming the
flow of this cash is essential if Mexico
and the United States hope to disrupt powerful transnational criminal
organizations that are using their wealth to corrupt, terrorize and kill.”
HEY, ANYONE ACTUALLY BELIEVE FOX IS NOT IN ON MEX DRUG
CARTEL MONEY? HE’S A FREAKING MEX!
Wells Fargo, which
owns Wachovia, immediately entered into a deferred prosecution agreement and
paid the federal government $160 million in fines.
Several other U.S. banks have also been discovered flouting
money-laundering laws.
No wonder former Mexican president Vicente Fox, a conservative businessman, is
urging his country to legalize the production, sale and
distribution of drugs
"as a strategy to weaken and break the economic system
that allows cartels to earn
huge profits."
Calderon's military surge was backed by more than $1.2
billion in drug war aid from former President Bush, and by several hundred
million more from the Obama administration.
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2010/08/20/2010-08-20_mexico_drug_war_boosts_us_firms.html#ixzz0xaCMzkz0
Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/2010/08/20/2010-08-20_mexico_drug_war_boosts_us_firms.html#ixzz0xaCMzkz0
*
Stepped-up
efforts by U.S., Mexico fail to stem flow of drug money south
By
William Booth and Nick Miroff
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 25, 2010; 7:12 PM
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, August 25, 2010; 7:12 PM
LAREDO,
TEX. - Stashing cash in spare tires, engine transmissions and truckloads of
baby diapers, couriers for Mexican drug cartels are moving tens of billions of
dollars in profits south across the border each year, a river of dirty money
that has overwhelmed U.S. and Mexican customs agents.
Officials
said stemming the flow of this cash is essential if Mexico and the
United States hope to disrupt powerful transnational criminal organizations
that are using their wealth to corrupt, terrorize and kill.
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