Money-Laundering Stats

Over the weekend, Reforma published a note about a PGR spokesman's defense of Mexico's efforts to attack money laundering. Here's a highlight:

[I]n the almost 38 months of Calderón's term, federal authorities have seized $380 million, 280 million Mexican pesos, 470 airplanes, and 25,000 vehicles used by organized crime groups, but [the official] didn't provide figures from previous terms.

More than half of the American funds were recovered in a single operation: that of March 2007 in a house in Las Lomas de Chapultepec, the property of Chinese-Mexican Zhenli Ye Gon, where the Federal Police found $205 million.

According to the last report available from the PGR, between September 2008 and July 2009, only $2.9 million and 4 million pesos through judicial processes...

Without having any basis of comparison, it's hard to draw concrete conclusions, but that's certainly not as high a sum as would be possible from a really determined attack on money-laundering; since Calderón arrived in office, Mexican traffickers have earned (and presumably laundered) some $40 billion, and you can hardly sneeze in many Mexican towns without hitting a handful of businesses with a relationship with organized crime. Of course, the division between dirty and legitimate businesses is vague, and a determined attack on dirty money would also anger the law-abiding business class, which is probably why under Calderón, his money-laundering policy has been more a flurry of talk at the beginning of his term backed up by little sustained action.

The fact that the official can provide no figures from other administrations is inexcusable, and something that happens far too often in Mexico.