The City of Guadalajara Is the Money Laundering Capital of Mexico Duncan Tucker - VICE News
go to original June 14, 2015

Clemente, a Guadalajara restaurant that has changed names several times, is allegedly linked to Rafael Caro Quintero's money laundering network. (Duncan Tucker)

Money laundering in Guadalajara has crept into people's minds because of a recent wave of violence in and around the metropolitan area that has included deadly ambushes of police patrols, assassinations, and the downing of a military helicopter on May 1.

The Pearl of the West, as Guadalajara is sometimes hyperbolically known, has been flooded with dirty money since the late 1970s, when powerful drug traffickers from the state of Sinaloa moved into the city and formed the Guadalajara cartel, then Mexico's dominant criminal enterprise.

Three western states in particular are awash with drug money. Jalisco, Sinaloa, and Baja California states account for 163 of the businesses blacklisted from 2002 to 2014 by the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. Guadalajara, the Jalisco state capital and an important financial hub located relatively near to the major opium and marijuana cultivating region known as the "Golden Triangle," is home to 89 of the 216 blacklisted firms, more than anywhere else in the country.

When VICE News tried to contact the blacklisted Guadalajara businesses, we discovered numerous empty offices and out-of-service phone numbers. Most employees who could be reached claimed to have no knowledge of the allegations against their bosses, while management figures were typically unavailable for comment.

Read the whole story at VICE News

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