Fomenting Bitterness

This is a pretty good example of why people in Mexico are a bit defensive about American pronouncements on the drug trade: yesterday, there was a piece about the Justice Department reporting that since January 2007, $17 billion have been laundered in Mexico. First of all, drug war reports rarely include anything about the methodology that leads to their statistics, which is a bit problematic, since we're necessarily talking about estimations of hidden activities. Second, money-laundering is not exclusive to Mexico, so why doesn't the Department of Justice simultaneously release reports about the quantity of drug money laundered in American banks?