Dirty Dollars

Money-launderers have had a prominent role in El Universal over the last couple of days. Yesterday, it reported about the increase of money-laundering investigations: from 2004 to 2007, the PGR (Mexico's DoJ) carried out 149 investigations. Right now, it has 450 investigations open. (It's not clear how many of those are carryovers from 2004 to 2007.) Also, from 1987 to 2007, two decades which coincided with the emergence of Mexican drug gangs as the hemisphere's most powerful, only 25 convictions for laundering cash were handed out. Of those, 14 were in 2007. 

Also, today El Universal provides an update on Blanca Margarita Cázares Salazar, who was singled out by the DEA in 2007 as one of the nation's most important launders, and who has since vanished. One detail in that story jumped out: evidently, everyone who knows her calls Cázares "La Chiquis," an anodyne nickname roughly equivalent to "The Cutie." When the DEA made its announcement, it called her "The Empress." Why are we giving drug dealers highfalutin, reputation-inflating nicknames that the don't even give themselves? It's a small point, but why build criminals up? Especially considering that one of the biggest problems in Mexico is the perception that the dealers are all-powerful and the government impotent.