Photo: Photo by ENRIQUE CASTRO / AFP. / AFP
The Jalisco cartel, a criminal organization dedicated to drug trafficking used small businesses in Texas, Ohio and Virginia and disguising money transfers as remittances, they laundered about $ 58 million dollars.
Coincidentally, the month of March had a record in the amount sent in remittances from the United States to Mexico for a total of 82, 000 million dollars, the highest figure for a month of March, compared to previous years.
The modus operandi used by the criminal cartel was to move its millionaire earnings camouflaged in that large amount of remittances sent by Mexican migrants in the United States.
Criminal investigations indicate that at least 7 small companies, popular with Hispanics, were used for money laundering. Stand out among the names of the remittance companies: Intermex, Boos Revolution, Omnex, TransFast, Sigue, Girosol and Ría.
In this regard, the Department of Justice of the Southern District of Ohio reported, in a statement on its website, that 8 individuals were sentenced to prison for laundering $ 44 million dollars in a cell phone store for the Mexican criminal group. The sentences received range between 5 and 18 years in prison.
For its part, in the Western District of Virginia , the owner of a Carnage laundered more than $ 4 million for the cartel and for this she was sentenced to eight years in prison.
While In Dallas, Texas , a clothing store owner was paid to wash more than 10 millions of dollars to the Jalisco cartel. This case has not yet received a sentence, but it involves a complete family, which participated in the crime of laundering.
In all cases, the stores had a branch of one of the companies specializing in remittances, mentioned above, and from there many illegal transfers were made.
The modus operandi used by the Jalisco cartel was to recruit these Hispanic business owners, to send money from their stores from fake accounts created by business owners; and in exchange they offered a commission based on a percentage of the amount sent.
Usually they made several shipments a day for less than $ 1, 000. And for every thousand they received up to 100 commission dollars, approximately.
In the Administration for Drug Control, exposed two investigations with large sums of money laundering, at the time there was talk of shipments to Nayarit, Jalisco and Sinaloa. In fact in 2020, Jalisco was the first place in attracting remittances in 2020 with a total of 4, 153 million dollars, that is to say more than 82 billion pesos in receipt of US currency.
Statistics show that in a decade, between 2010 and 2020 remittances to Jalisco have doubled and that caused money laundering alarms to go off .
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