More on Chapo

The Televisa news last night featured a handful of disdainful comments about the Forbes list from Mexican politicians. Aside from the general displeasure with giving a criminal a spot on a list of financial luminaries, many of the questioners wondered, like me, how the magazine managed to calculate his fortune. Luisa Kroll's explanation on behalf of Forbes does not leave you feeling more enlightened:

There are people who are dedicated to following this money trail, and we have a reporter who speaks Spanish that spent a lot of time in Mexico and has a lot of sources, whether in the DEA or consulting firms that helped him track and locate and speak with the right people, to track the drug money, but because it's such a big problem, definitely there are lots of people following the money trail that's flowing through the drugs.*

Kroll uses the same argumentative tactics I might have employed a decade and a half ago when I was caught with a beer in my hand but I wanted to convince my mom that, despite the preponderance of evidence that I was, in fact I wasn't drinking. I need the old lady from Airplane to tap me on the shoulder and say, "Excuse me, I speak bullshit."

*I was translating the translation here so there are probably some words that are different from her original comments, but I saw the interview and this is a pretty close facsimile.