U.S., Mexico press effort to freeze kingpins’ cash

Source: The Washington Post

MEXICO CITY — An aggressive U.S.-led effort to pursue money-laundering cases against Mexican cartels is inflicting only fleeting damage on the trafficking organizations, which have grown sensationally rich on drug profits from American consumers.

For the first time, U.S. Treasury agents have begun to share with their Mexican counterparts financial data on drug kingpins that are gleaned from wiretaps, informants and cyberspace probes. The United States has now designated more than 300 people and 180 companies as “significant narcotics traffickers,” which freezes their U.S. assets and bans Americans from doing business with them.

But while President Obama has boasted of “putting unprecedented pressure on cartels and their finances,” the U.S.-Mexican effort has produced little in the way of arrests or seizures. During the past 11 years, only $16 million tied to suspected Mexican traffickers has been blocked in the United States, or one dollar for every $20,000 estimated by the Congressional Research Service to flow southward from the United States to organized-crime groups in Mexico each year.

Mexican officials complain that the financial intelligence the United States shares with them is of little use, and that the information included in kingpin designations is unsupported by evidence that would allow Mexican courts to go after launderers.

Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/americas/us-mexico-start-joint-effort-to-freeze-drug-kingpins-cash/2011/05/17/AGNawHCH_singlePage.html