These are the 2 classic ways Mexican cartels launder money

Business Insider: Mexico is home to several drug trafficking organizations (DTOs): the Sinaloa cartel, La Familia cartel, Knights Templar cartel, Juarez cartel, and others.

Generally, these organizations buy cocaine processed in South America and smuggle it into the United States to sell. After that, however, they need a way to get the money back to Mexico — and secretly. Read more. 

Mexico's Drug War Strategy Remains Unchanged With New Government

Huffington Post
By Katherine Corcoran

Mexico City - With the capture of two top drug lords in little more than a month, the new government of President Enrique Pena Nieto is following an old strategy it openly criticized for causing more violence and crime.

Mario Armando Ramirez Trevino, a top leader of Mexico's Gulf Cartel, was detained Saturday in a military operation near the Texas border, just weeks after the arrest of the leader of the brutal Zetas cartel near another border city, Nuevo Laredo.

Interior Secretary Miguel Angel Osorio Chong took his post in December saying the strategy of former President Felipe Calderon to take out cartel leaders only made drug gangs more dangerous and violent. The new administration would focus less on leaders and more on reducing violence, he said.

Yet the new strategy appears almost identical to the old. The captures of Ramirez and top Zeta Miguel Angel Trevino Morales could cause a new spike in violence with battles over leadership of Mexico's two major cartels.  Read more. 

Mexico Violence: Clashes Between Federal Police, Gunmen Leave 14 Dead

Huffington Post 
April 11, 2013

Morelia, Mexico - At least 14 people died Wednesday in a series of clashes between gunmen and federal police in Michoacan state, a western area that has seen a surge of violence in recent years attributed to drug cartels, authorities said.

Federal police said in a statement the first gunbattle began when officers aboard a helicopter spotted armed men traveling in four vehicles in the town of Gabriel Zamora.

The gunmen opened fire on the agents, who shot back and killed five assailants, the statement said.

It said one of those killed was high in the leadership structure of a Michoacan-based drug cartel, but didn't identify the group.

Hours later in the town of Apatzingan, federal agents were accompanying a caravan of citizens commemorating the anniversary of the death of Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata when gunmen fired shots at some of the participants. Police killed one of the gunmen, authorities said.  Read more. 

Why Killing Kingpins Won't Stop Mexico's Drug Cartels

The Atlantic
By Keegan Hamilton
February 27, 2013

The rumor started Thursday afternoon when the newspaper Prensa Libre reported that several narcos were killed during shootout in Guatemala's remote Petén region. Interior Minister Mauricio Lopez said one of the corpses was "physically very similar" to Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán, top boss of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel. Other outlets, including the unfiltered drug war diary Blog del Narco, spread the word on Twitter, piquing the interest of the international press, and sending Mexican and Guatemalan officials scrambling to confirm the powerful drug lord's purported demise.

The rumor was soon thoroughly debunked. There was no shootout, let alone one that claimed the life of the modern day Pablo Escobar. (Lopez, the Interior Minister, later apologized for the "misunderstanding" and blamed contradictory reports for the confusion.) Not only is El Chapo still very much alive, his legend has grown larger than ever. Already a billionaire according to Forbes, the Sinaloa capo has supplanted Osama bin Laden as the State Department's top international target, and the Chicago Crime Commission recently named him Public Enemy No. 1, a title originally reserved for Al Capone.  Read more. 

Mesoamerican Migrant Movement Press Release

Mesoamerican Migrant Movement
Original Americas Program Translation 

Mexico City, January 21, 2013. – Forty-four years since his assassination, we remember Martin Luther King’s dream of a day when his four children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Today more than 11 million undocumented migrants will have to wait for a tortuously slow legislative process to recognize their contributions, from political to fiscal, in the United States.

Barak Obama, thanks to the Latino vote, will be sworn in for the second time as President. The Latino vote was the pointer on the scale that weighed in Obama’s favor and granted him victory after a dead heat election. During his inauguration, thousands of voters will be protesting in Chicago, demanding an immediate moratorium on deportations and separation of families: While Obama orates promises of immigration reform, undocumented migrants in the United States are being harassed by a new wave of attacks, raids on workplaces, arrests and deportations carried out in the days and weeks subsequent to his reelection.

During Obama’s first administration, the numbers of deportations add up to more than 1.5 million in four years. From now until the long awaited immigration reform materializes, an estimated half a million more people will be deported unless Obama changes the current policy. It is therefore urgent to establish the moratorium on deportations and separation of families meanwhile the immigration reform law is approved and regulated for its implementation.   It is difficult to understand why the President is deporting the hundreds of thousands of people he wants to legalize.  The unconstitutional mass deportations have caused the painful separation of hundreds of thousands of families whose children are citizens and have lived in the United States for years.

'Sick And Tired,' Residents In Southern Mexico Defend Themselves

NPR by CARRIE KAHN
January 27, 2013

On the main road into the Mexican town of Ayutla, about 75 miles southeast of Acapulco, about a dozen men cradling shotguns and rusted machetes stand guard on a street corner. Their faces are covered in black ski masks.

The men are part of a network of self-defense brigades, formed in the southern state of Guerrero to combat the drug traffickers and organized crime gangs that terrorize residents.

The brigades have set up roadblocks, arrested suspects and are set on running the criminals out of town.

Taking Control

They go over patrol shifts schedules, handwritten on wrinkled papers, and communicate with other checkpoints in town via walkie-talkies. One man, who wouldn't give his name but identified himself as a "lower commander," said the townspeople had no choice but to take up arms. Read more.

Mexican drug gangs dig into mining industry

The Zetas cartel, one of Mexico's most violent groups, has moved into coal mining as it's "more lucrative than drugs".

Aljazeera: John Holman, Jan 04, 2013.

On October 7, Mexican marines swooped in on one of the most powerful men in organised crime. But as the navy triumphantly announced the death of Heriberto Lazcano, leader of the Zetas gang, there was puzzlement over where he had been found. Far from the Zeta's strongholds and practically unprotected, he had been watching a baseball game in the small mining village of Progreso.

Theories abounded as to what exactly Lazcano had been doing in Progreso, a one horse town in the wide open spaces of the sorthern state of Coahuila. Humberto Moreira, ex-governor of Coahuila says that he has the answer: "Heriberto Lazcano changed from being a killer, kidnapper and drug dealer to something still more lucrative: mining coal. That’s why he lived in the coal region, in a little village called Progreso."

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Moreira says that the Zetas gang is fast discovering that illegal mining is an even more lucrative venture than drug running.

"They discover a mine, extract the coal, sell it at $30, pay the miners a miserable salary... It's more lucrative than selling drugs." Read more. 

How the Militarized War on Drugs in Latin America Benefits Transnational Corporations and Undermines Democracy

Sunday, 05 August 2012 00:00
By Mark Karlin, Truthout | News Analysis

Is the So-Called War on Drugs in Mexico and Latin America Being Used to Advance US Military and Economic Interests?

In an article that explored myths about the war on illegal narcotics, "Drug War Capitalism," Canadian journalist Dawn Paley dispels the notion that nearly a trillion dollars spent on eradicating illegal drug trafficking (since Richard Nixon's administration) has shown any serious success.

Paley noted, "In the 11 years since Plan Colombia was launched [for example], the US government has spent over $3.6 billion on narcotics and law enforcement initiatives. Yet the US government reports that 'Colombia remains one of the world's largest producers and exporters of cocaine, as well as a source country for heroin and marijuana.'" Indeed, Paley cited a 2008 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that found the "estimated flow of cocaine towards the United States from South America rising from 2000-2006."

As Truthout pointed out in "The US War on Drug Cartels in Mexico Is a Deadly Failure," the attempt to curtail trafficking in narcotics "in many of the southern nations of the Western Hemisphere is basically a bloody game of whack-a-mole.... There is no measurable indicator that the supply of illicit drugs into the United States is decreasing as a result. So, there is no end game here."

Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, professor of international relations at the Universidad de Di Tella, Argentina, substantiated this failure in an article, "Beating the Drug-War Addiction": "Indeed, USSOUTHCOM [United States Southern Command, headquartered in Miami, which oversees the US military in Latin America] has controlled 75% of the more than $12 billion that the US government has allocated to anti-drug activities in Latin America and the Caribbean since 2000. But, despite this expensive military campaign, all evidence shows that the 'war on drugs' has been a fiasco." Read more. 

Cocaine Incorporated: How the World's Most Powerful Drug Traffickers Run Their Business

NY Times: One afternoon last August, at a hospital on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a former beauty queen named Emma Coronel gave birth to a pair of heiresses. The twins, who were delivered at 3:50 and 3:51, respectively, stand to inherit some share of a fortune that Forbes estimates is worth a billion dollars. Coronel’s husband, who was not present for the birth, is a legendary tycoon who overcame a penurious rural childhood to establish a wildly successful multinational business. If Coronel elected to leave the entry for “Father” on the birth certificates blank, it was not because of any dispute over patrimony. More likely, she was just skittish about the fact that her husband, Joaquín Guzmán, is the C.E.O. of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, a man the Treasury Department recently described as the world’s most powerful drug trafficker. Guzmán’s organization is responsible for as much as half of the illegal narcotics imported into the United States from Mexico each year; he may well be the most-wanted criminal in this post-Bin Laden world. But his bride is a U.S. citizen with no charges against her. So authorities could only watch as she bundled up her daughters and slipped back across the border to introduce them to their dad. Read more.

Peña Nieto: I back continuing role for army in Mexico's drug war

Fox News Latino: Enrique Peña Nieto, the frontrunner in Mexico's presidential election, said in an interview with Efe that he supported a "gradual" withdrawal of the army from the fight against drug trafficking, but he refused to give a time frame within which the military should return to the barracks.

"The army must keep on because it's a demand and acclamation from the societies of several of the country's entities (states)," Peña Nieto, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, told Efe in this northwestern Mexican border city.

"As long as we do not have conditions ... of peace and tranquility, it would be difficult for us to make the decision for the army to return to the barracks. It must be done in a gradual manner," Peña Nieto said. Read more.

Mexico drug war displaces families in Sinaloa highlands

latimes.com: CULIACAN, Mexico — For generations, the extended Hernandez family tended fields of marijuana high in Sinaloa's western Sierra Madre highlands.

They sold their crops to representatives of the Sinaloa cartel for a fraction of what the drug would bring at the U.S. border and eked out a pittance.

Barefoot children never went to school; they just helped their dads with the planting and harvest. Women washed clothes in the river. They burned pine sap for light at night because there was no electricity.

But a couple of weeks ago, the fighting that has raged as the Zeta paramilitary force tries to encroach on the Sinaloa cartel's turf reached the string of ranchitos where the Hernandezes and scores of other families farmed. Read more. 

Drug Probe Targets Mexican Army

WSJ.com: MEXICO CITY—The arrest of a former deputy defense minister and three other retired and active high-ranking Mexican army officers on suspicion of having been in the pay of a drug cartel is shaping up as the biggest scandal to hit the army in years.

Last week, a judge issued preliminary detention orders for three generals and a lieutenant colonel. The move allows prosecutors from the organized-crime division of the Attorney General's Office to question the men for up to 40 days before formal charges would need to be filed.

Officials haven't said why the men are being held. But according to the men's relatives, a person familiar with the legal proceedings and media accounts citing unnamed sources in the Attorney General's Office, the four are being questioned over allegations they were in the pay of one of Mexico's leading organized crime groups, the Beltran Leyva cartel. Read more. 

Drug War: Organized Crime Beyond Drug Trafficking

Latin America's Moment: "Harvard’s winter 2012 ReVista magazine focuses on crime and violence primarily in Mexico and Central America. Many of the authors were participants in a Harvard-sponsored working group, bringing together scholars and researchers from the university, as well as from other institutions in the United States and throughout the region to delve into the many complicated issues surrounding these themes. The articles are short, well-written, and quite useful to get a broad overview of the various perspectives on the reasons behind the rising tide of violence and of what may lay ahead." read more

Drug War: Shifting Alliances Cannot Halt Weakening of Mexico Cartels

InSight Crime- A recent article published by Proceso argues that Calderon’s crime policy has not only coincided with a dramatic increase in the number of murders linked to organized crime, but has also had the perverse effect of strengthening the very gangs it should be weakening. Written by the longtime drug war chronicler Ricardo Ravelo, it states that:

A bit more than five years after Calderon ordered the militarization of the country, the criminal networks of five cartels -- the Zetas, the Familia Michoacana, and the Sinaloa, Juarez, and Gulf Cartels -- now dominate more than half of the national territory. This expansion has occurred despite the blows these organizations have suffered through arrests or deaths of their leaders.

read more

Drug War: Mexico Says Prison Riot Masked Escape of Drug-Gang Members

Wall Street Journal—A day after 44 inmates died in Mexico's worst prison riot, authorities said they believed the massacre was a cover for the escape of 30 drug-gang members.

Nuevo León Gov. Rodrigo Medina said that 30 inmates, all members of the Zetas drug cartel, used the massacre on Sunday as cover for an escape from Apodaca state prison, a few miles from the state capital of Monterrey. "Without a doubt there was premeditation," said Mr. Medina, speaking at a news conference. "This was planned."

Mr. Medina said all the dead prisoners were members of the rival Gulf Cartel. The Zetas and the Gulf Cartel have been warring for two years for control of drug routes and lucrative drug markets, especially in the northeastern Mexican states of Nuevo León and Tamaulipas.

Mr. Medina said prison personnel appeared to have been involved in the massacre and escapes. He said four top prison officials had been fired from their jobs, as had 18 guards on duty at the time of the incident. All were being investigated for complicity, he said. As police and soldiers combed the state searching for the escaped prisoners, Mr. Medina said the state was offering a reward of about $800,000 for information leading to their capture. read more

Drug War: The ‘Fantasia’ effect and the emergence of Mexico’s new cartels

Justice in Mexico: "Experts point out that the militarized strategy pursued by President Felipe Calderón that focuses on destroying leadership within cartels is not having a real effect in the fight against drug trafficking and violence. They argue that while the arrest of top cartel bosses disrupts their operations, it consequentially contributes to greater infighting between and within competing organized crime groups.

This strategy of breaking cartels into smaller, more manageable pieces seems to be causing a “Fantasia” effect (Shirk, 2011), a name that is inspired by the animated Disney film where a wizard trying to control an animated broom destroys it, but every fragment of the broken broom thereby becomes its own uncontrollable tiny broom. The comparison is that breaking down organizations and cartels does not necessarily destroy them, but rather creates divisions that lead to the emergence of much smaller organizations that operate in lower, less manageable, and more violent levels." read more

Drug War: What Jalisco's Constellation of Gangs Shows about Mexico Cartel Battles

InSight Crime: "The Mexican Army says that six different gangs are currently fighting for control of Jalisco, making the populous Pacific state a microcosm of the shifting alliances and ever-changing fronts of battles raging across the nation." read more

Mexico Politics: Peña Nieto suggests efficacy against crime and gradual withdrawal of the Army

Excelsior: "The presidential candidate of PRI, Enrique Peña Nieto, called for more effective strategies in combating organized crime by strengthening the work of intelligence. The former governor of Mexico State stressed that combating organized crime is an undeniable power of the state and he acknowledged that while some of the actions implemented have been successful, the strategy requires review and revision to achieve greater efficiency.

"I think there are several actions undertaken so far by states and the federal government that are paying off. I think that what works well be kept. I am committed to Mexicans to design and achieve greater efficiency," he said. In this regard, the former governor is in favor of strengthening the work of the areas of intelligence in order to strike blows with greater precision against organized crime." Spanish original

Mexico Drug War: Narcos accept "papal truce" according to banners hung in Guanajuato

Excelsior: "Yesterday, an alleged organized crime group hung 11 banners in seven municipalities of the state of Guanajuato, accepting the request made by Archbishop Jose Guadalupe Martin Rabago on January  22, when he called upon the criminals to reduce violence during the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Mexico, which will be held from March 23 to 26.

However, sources with the State Attorney General said that the criminal group conditioned the truce upon its also being accepted by a rival cartel operating in Guanajuato. On January 22, Martin Rabago made his request to members of organized crime: "That they may at least cooperate, allowing all these people to come to a totally respectable event. They won't benefit by doing something that might lead to an experience of grief and death," he said." Spanish original

Mexico Drug War: Veracruz: More than a Temporary Calm?

InSight Cime: "Mexico's authorities have claimed a recent drop in violence in crime-ridden Veracruz as the fruit of military operations, but given the preceding months of spiralling violence, it remains unclear if this more than a blip." read more