{"id":16195,"date":"2011-12-05T12:00:51","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T12:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=16195"},"modified":"2011-12-05T01:00:19","modified_gmt":"2011-12-05T01:00:19","slug":"u-s-agents-launder-mexican-profits-of-drug-cartels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2011\/12\/u-s-agents-launder-mexican-profits-of-drug-cartels\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Agents Launder Mexican Profits of Drug Cartels"},"content":{"rendered":"

Undercover American narcotics agents have laundered or smuggled millions of dollars in drug proceeds as part of Washington\u2019s expanding role in Mexico<\/a>\u2019s fight against drug cartels<\/a>, according to current and former federal law enforcement officials.<\/p>\n

The agents, primarily with the Drug Enforcement Administration<\/a>, have handled shipments of hundreds of thousands of dollars in illegal cash across borders, those officials said, to identify how criminal organizations move their money, where they keep their assets and, most important, who their leaders are.<\/p>\n

They said agents had deposited the drug proceeds in accounts designated by traffickers, or in shell accounts set up by agents.<\/p>\n

The officials said that while the D.E.A. conducted such operations in other countries, it began doing so in Mexico only in the past few years. The high-risk activities raise delicate questions about the agency\u2019s effectiveness in bringing down drug kingpins, underscore diplomatic concerns about Mexican sovereignty, and blur the line between surveillance and facilitating crime. As it launders drug money, the agency often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests.<\/p>\n

Agency officials declined to publicly discuss details of their work, citing concerns about compromising their investigations. But Michael S. Vigil, a former senior agency official who is currently working for a private contracting company called Mission Essential Personnel, said, \u201cWe tried to make sure there was always close supervision of these operations so that we were accomplishing our objectives, and agents weren\u2019t laundering money for the sake of laundering money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another former agency official, who asked not to be identified speaking publicly about delicate operations, said, \u201cMy rule was that if we are going to launder money, we better show results. Otherwise, the D.E.A. could wind up being the largest money launderer in the business, and that money results in violence and deaths.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those are precisely the kinds of concerns members of Congress have raised about a gun-smuggling operation known as Fast and Furious, in which agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives allowed people suspected of being low-level smugglers to buy and transport guns across the border in the hope that they would lead to higher-level operatives working for Mexican cartels. After the agency lost track of hundreds of weapons, some later turned up in Mexico; two were found on the United States side of the border where an American Border Patrol agent had been shot to death.<\/p>\n

Former D.E.A. officials rejected comparisons between letting guns and money walk away. Money, they said, poses far less of a threat to public safety. And unlike guns, it can lead more directly to the top ranks of criminal organizations.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese are not the people whose faces are known on the street,\u201d said Robert Mazur, a former D.E.A. agent and the author of a book about his years as an undercover agent inside the Medell\u00edn cartel in Colombia. \u201cThey are super-insulated. And the only way to get to them is to follow their money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another former drug agency official offered this explanation for the laundering operations: \u201cBuilding up the evidence to connect the cash to drugs, and connect the first cash pickup to a cartel\u2019s command and control, is a very time consuming process. These people aren\u2019t running a drugstore in downtown L.A. that we can go and lock the doors and place a seizure sticker on the window. These are sophisticated, international operations that practice very tight security. And as far as the Mexican cartels go, they operate in a corrupt country, from cities that the cops can\u2019t even go into.\u201d<\/p>\n

The laundering operations that the United States conducts elsewhere \u2014 about 50 so-called Attorney General Exempt Operations are under way around the world \u2014 had been forbidden in Mexico after American customs agents conducted a cross-border sting without notifying Mexican authorities in 1998, which was how most American undercover work was conducted there up to that point.<\/p>\n

But that changed in recent years after President Felipe Calder\u00f3n<\/a> declared war against the country\u2019s drug cartels and enlisted the United States to play a leading role in fighting them because of concerns that his security forces had little experience and long histories of corruption.<\/p>\n

Today, in operations supervised by the Justice Department and orchestrated to get around sovereignty restrictions, the United States is running numerous undercover laundering investigations against Mexico\u2019s most powerful cartels. One D.E.A. official said it was not unusual for American agents to pick up two or three loads of Mexican drug money each week. A second official said that as Mexican cartels extended their operations from Latin America to Africa, Europe and the Middle East, the reach of the operations had grown as well. When asked how much money had been laundered as a part of the operations, the official would only say, \u201cA lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re going to get into the business of laundering money,\u201d the official added, \u201cthen you have to be able to launder money.\u201d<\/p>\n

Former counternarcotics officials, who also would speak only on the condition of anonymity about clandestine operations, offered a clearer glimpse of their scale and how they worked. In some cases, the officials said, Mexican agents, posing as smugglers and accompanied by American authorities, pick up traffickers\u2019 cash in Mexico. American agents transport the cash on government flights to the United States, where it is deposited into traffickers\u2019 accounts, and then wired to companies that provide goods and services to the cartel.<\/p>\n

In other cases, D.E.A. agents, posing as launderers, pick up drug proceeds in the United States, deposit them in banks in this country and then wire them to the traffickers in Mexico.<\/p>\n

The former officials said that the drug agency tried to seize as much money as it laundered \u2014 partly in the fees the operatives charged traffickers for their services and another part in carefully choreographed arrests at pickup points identified by their undercover operatives.<\/p>\n

And the former officials said that federal law enforcement agencies had to seek Justice Department approval to launder amounts greater than $10 million in any single operation. But they said that the cap was treated more as a guideline than a rule, and that it had been waived on many occasions to attract the interest of high-value targets.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey tell you they\u2019re bringing you $250,000, and they bring you a million,\u201d one former agent said of the traffickers. \u201cWhat\u2019s the agent supposed to do then, tell them no, he can\u2019t do it? They\u2019ll kill him.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is not clear whether such operations are worth the risks. So far there are few signs that following the money has disrupted the cartels\u2019 operations, and little evidence that Mexican drug traffickers are feeling any serious financial pain. Last year, the D.E.A. seized about $1 billion in cash and drug assets, while Mexico seized an estimated $26 million in money laundering investigations, a tiny fraction of the estimated $18 billion to $39 billion in drug money that flows between the countries each year.<\/p>\n

Mexico has tightened restrictions on large cash purchases and on bank deposits in dollars in the past five years. But a proposed overhaul of the Mexican attorney general\u2019s office has stalled, its architects said, as have proposed laws that would crack down on money laundered through big corporations and retail chains.<\/p>\n

\u201cMexico still thinks the best way to seize dirty money is to arrest a trafficker, then turn him upside down to see how much change falls out of his pockets,\u201d said Sergio Ferragut, a professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and the author of a book on money laundering, which he said was \u201cstill a sensitive subject for Mexican authorities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Calder\u00f3n boasts that his government\u2019s efforts \u2014 deploying the military across the country \u2014 have fractured many of the country\u2019s powerful cartels and led to the arrests of about two dozen high-level and midlevel traffickers.<\/p>\n

But there has been no significant dip in the volume of drugs moving across the country. Reports of human rights violations by police officers and soldiers have soared. And drug-related violence has left more than 40,000 people dead since Mr. Calder\u00f3n took office in December 2006.<\/p>\n

The death toll is greater than in any period since Mexico\u2019s revolution a century ago, and the policy of close cooperation with Washington may not survive.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to concentrate all our efforts on combating violence and crime that affects people, instead of concentrating on the drug issue,\u201d said a former foreign minister, Jorge G. Casta\u00f1eda, at a conference<\/a> hosted last month by the Cato Institute in Washington. \u201cIt makes absolutely no sense for us to put up 50,000 body bags to stop drugs from entering the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 nytimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The high-risk activities raise delicate questions about the agency\u2019s effectiveness in bringing down drug kingpins, underscore diplomatic concerns about Mexican sovereignty, and blur the line between surveillance and facilitating crime. As it launders drug money, the agency often allows cartels to continue their operations over months or even years before making seizures or arrests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16195","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16195","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}