Southwest Border Anti-Money Laundering Alliance

El Diario/Milenio (5-12-2013)

Translated for Borderland Beat by un vato

Modus operandi

Where the crime is located

They say necessity is the mother of invention. And when it comes to moving money across borders, criminals sure are inventive. Especially, it would seem, the ones in America and its southern neighbor.

There is a huge volume of drug trade that flows between these two countries—Mexico is a major supplier of the United States’ consumption of heroin and the largest foreign supplier of methamphetamine and marijuana. Since the drugs flow north, the money has to flow south. But since the government of Mexico has become particularly relentless on both cutting down drug trafficking and oversight of money laundering, getting money from the United States to Mexico has become more difficult. For example, former Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who called illicit money “vital for criminals,” crafted a variety of money-laundering laws to help stem the flow of dirty money. Some of his reforms bar cash purchases of real estate and limit cash purchases of items like cars and planes with a price tag that exceeds $10,000.

And given the United States’ intense oversight of its banks, and its keen eye for dirty money, depositing those sums in U.S. banks is more difficult still.

As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, so those criminals have invented some new ways of moving money.

Traditionally, drug traffickers move cash carried in suitcases. Federal authorities estimate that between $18 and $39 billion in illicit cash is laundered across the southwestern border between the U.S. and Mexico every year. And as we step up our scrutiny of banks, expect criminals to increasingly resort to physically moving money.

In other more “traditional” systems that don’t involve cash movements, Mexican criminals launder money through trade-based mechanisms—either by trade mispricing or legitimate exports. In the first method, a Mexican front company can ship, say, computers to the United States and, by over-invoicing the goods, can include in the invoice enough for both the merchandise and the extra laundered funds. The buyer on the other side, whose holding the illicit cash, remits the payment for the computers and sends the funds, which are in the banking system as a formal, legal transaction, to the Mexican company’s account. This method skirts the warning flags provided by most laws and regulations.

In a new method, criminals in the United States buy actual goods with dollars, export them to Mexico and then sell them for pesos. Often this method requires a complicit legitimate business, which earns a cut of the proceeds. This accomplishes two goals at once: criminals are able to transfer illicit funds between boarders and convert dollars to pesos without raising any of the normal red flags. In a recent example, the owners of a U.S. toy company, called Woody’s Toys Inc., were recently sentenced for depositing about $3 million of drug proceeds into their bank accounts. They made small deposits to avoid scrutiny and then purchased merchandise from “legitimate” companies in Mexico, funneling the money back to the drug traffickers.

Tom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles called the method a “growing phenomenon.” Increasingly, he says, drug traffickers “are using legitimate businesses to launder money as opposed to literally smuggling giant bricks of cash back to Mexico.”

Other criminals have found the money laundering restrictions in both the United States and Mexico are too stringent (by law  Mexicans with bank accounts can deposit up to $4,000 in cash per month, but Mexicans without accounts can exchange only $300 a day up to $1,500 a month). Coming up against this wall, those Mexicans have devised another work around. First they smuggle the drug proceeds into Mexico (as cash). Then they bring the money back across the U.S. border as a financial-services business, deposit the cash into U.S. banks, and wire the money wherever they’d like.

Invention, indeed.

People cross from the US to Mexico at the international border station in Calexico, California, adjacent to the Mexican border town of Mexicali, November 3, 2009 (Lucy Nicholson/Courtesy Reuters).

As President Barack Obama meets today with his counterpart, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, he is navigating one of America’s broadest and most complex bilateral relationships. In this op-ed for the BBC (you can read here and below), I argue that it is important for Obama and his team to take into account the fundamental transformations that Mexico has undergone over the past thirty years—since it is these new realities that will shape both the substance and nature of U.S.-Mexico relations far into the future.

President Obama’s visit to Mexico is part of a long tradition of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and its neighbor to the south. But while many Americans feel that they understand the basic economic and social forces that drive Mexico, the realities are much more interesting. Here five myths about Mexico, that have a direct impact on American foreign policy, are debunked.

Mexico is no longer a poor country

Though many Americans think of Mexico as a country of either wealth or poverty, by most accounts it is now a middle-class country. A majority of Mexican households—incorporating roughly sixty million people—now have disposable income. Half of the people in Mexico own their own car, and one-third own a computer. Nearly everyone has a television and mobile phone.

These new urban middle-class Mexicans are also investing in their children’s education. There are now 45,000 private schools, comprising nearly a third of all Mexico’s schools. Student enrollment in universities and beyond has tripled in the past thirty years, from under a million in 1980 to almost three million today.

The rise of the middle class has affected Mexico’s politics, too, with this segment pivotal in voting out the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 2000, and then voting it back in to Los Pinos, Mexico’s White House, last year. This crucial voting bloc is increasingly up for grabs, rapidly joining the ranks of Mexico’s proclaimed political independents. They mirror the U.S. middle class in their concerns, paying close attention to economic opportunities and security, two important issues in U.S.-Mexico relations.

Mexican manufacturing doesn’t harm U.S. workers

For Mexico, the biggest issues in the U.S.-Mexico relationship are economic, and President Enrique Peña Nieto is hoping to deepen commercial ties between the two nations.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama praised Ford Motor Company for bringing jobs back from Mexico as part of a strategy to make “America a magnet for new jobs and manufacturing”. Yet this statement, at least with regard to Mexico, is mistaken. It isn’t that globalization doesn’t lead some jobs to foreign lands. It does. But by expanding abroad, companies become more competitive, supporting and creating jobs at home.

Ford increased its U.S. workforce (and plans on adding thousands more jobs by 2015), but it hasn’t stopped hiring in Mexico. It is expanding a plant in Hermosillo and adding over 1,000 positions in the last few years in the state of Sonora. A study by two Harvard business professors and a University of Michigan colleague shows that for every ten people hired overseas by American corporations, two new jobs are created in the United States.

Mexican immigrants are not going to keep flooding the U.S.

The estimated numbers coming north each year are down to levels last seen in the 1970s. In fact, a 2012 Pew Hispanic Report noted that the net immigration for Mexicans in and out of the United States was “zero”. In other words the same numbers of Mexicans entered and left.

This can in part be explained by the U.S. recession, but it also reflects changes within Mexico. Mexico has undergone a major demographic shift in the last generation. In the 1970s, women were having an average of seven children, but today that number is closer to two—the same as the U.S. With fewer citizens coming of age each year relative to the overall population, the decades where Mexico’s “extra youths” headed to the U.S. are over.

Mexico’s democracy is not weakening

Although many feared that the 2012 return of the PRI would push Mexico back into its authoritarian past, checks and balances now exist and constrain whomever wears the presidential sash.

In Mexico’s Congress, the three major political parties must negotiate to get any bill passed, and the nation’s Supreme Court has increasingly exercised its autonomy to restrain both political officials and vested interests.

The country’s media and civil society groups more generally are beginning to play an important watchdog role, questioning policies and exposing bad behavior. And finally, Mexico has reached a relatively enviable space, ranking in the upper tiers of nearly all relative international measures of democracy.

Mexico is not at risk of becoming a failed state

Over the last six years, some 70,000 Mexicans have been killed in drug-related violence, and tens of thousands more have disappeared. Mexico’s police have often been unwilling or unable to stem the bloodshed, and the judicial system too has failed—with just 2 percent of all crimes ending in convictions.

But while Mexico faces a serious security threat from organized criminal groups, the country continues to collect taxes, build roads, run schools, expand social welfare programs and hold free and fair elections. Its economy has grown steadily, if somewhat slowly, and Mexico maintains an important presence in multilateral groups and summits. It has also begun the long and arduous path of professionalizing its police forces and transforming its courts to create a democratic rule of law.

One thing about Mexico that remains true is the deep and now permanent economic, political, security, and personal links between Mexico and the United States. For Presidents Obama and Peña Nieto, there is much to gain from a better understanding of each other’s country.

Published in conjunction with Latin America’s Moment at the Council on Foreign Relations.