Mexican Money Laundering in the United States: Analysis and Proposals for Reform
Authors:
Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera
Charles Lewis
William Yaworsky
Abstract
This article explains some of the mechanisms through which corruption by high-level Mexican politicians and other organized crime members is facilitated in the United States through money laundering operations. The analysis is based on information contained in court records related to key money laundering cases, as well as in news articles and reports from law enforcement agencies. These materials highlight the interrelationships among U.S. drug use, cartel activities in Mexico, human rights abuses, Mexican political corruption, and money laundering in the United States. This work demonstrates the pervasive use of legitimate businesses and fronts in the United States as a disguise for criminal activity. Finally, it provides recommendations for a reformation of policies and penalties directed toward U.S. institutions and persons that facilitate money laundering.
Keywords:
Money launderingcorruptiondrug cartelsMexicoUnited States
Year: 2024
Volume: 6 Issue: 1
Page/Article: 64–78
DOI: 10.31389/jied.224
Submitted on 3 Sep 2023
Accepted on 12 Apr 2024
Published on 6 May 2024
Peer Reviewed
Organized crime, corrupt politicians, and associated entrepreneurs involved in these activities have been routinely laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in the United States of America. These criminal acts include those by governors of several Mexican states, as shown by U.S. federal court actions in Texas and New York over the last 25 years, Mexican investigations and prosecutions, and by public media accounts, but the illegality is not limited to regional actors. Recent court actions have reached into the upper levels of the Mexican national security apparatus, as shown by the conviction of Genaro Garcia Luna, the Secretary of Public Security from 2006–2012, in US District Court in Brooklyn, New York, in 2023 (Halpert and Debusmann 2023).
Unfortunately, the Garcia Luna scandal was not the first to reach the upper echelons of Mexican political power. The first Mexican drug czar, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was arrested in Mexico in February 1997 for accepting cartel1 bribes and was later convicted in Mexico (CNN 1997). The ‘bribe notebook’ seized in Mexico with the arrest of Gulf Cartel boss Juan Garcia Abrego in 1996 indicated multiple bribes at the federal level of law enforcement in Mexico, of up to a million dollars, that included the head of the Federal Judicial Police, the chief of operations, and the federal police commander in Matamoros, Garcia Abrego’s home turf (Dillon 1996). Testimony from a cartel witness in the 2018–2019 New York federal trial of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman2 included sworn statements from the witness stand that the immediate past president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, requested a Sinaloa Cartel bribe in the range of $250 million but settled on a bribe amount of $100 million (Feuer 2019). Peña Nieto denies the accusation. The New York Times has published additional information about other bribery allegations involving Peña Nieto (Kitroeff and Lopez 2022).
https://jied.lse.ac.uk/articles/10.31389/jied.224
