❓WHAT HAPPENED: The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is targeting financial networks of Mexico’s violent drug cartels, focusing on money brokers who launder drug profits through cryptocurrency.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: U.S. prosecutors, Mexican authorities, and defendants, including Eduardo Rigoberto Velasco Calderon, Eliomar Segura Torres, Manuel Ignacio Correa, and Cesar Linares-Orozco.
📍WHEN & WHERE: The transfer of high-level cartel operatives from Mexico to the U.S. began in January 2024 and remains ongoing, with 37 new defendants handed over to the DOJ last month.
💬KEY QUOTE: “If you cut off the money, you hurt the cartels, and that’s what we’re trying to do.” — U.S. Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva
🎯IMPACT: The focus on financial networks aims to disrupt cartel operations, leading to potential indictments of higher-level leaders.
The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) is opening a new front in the Trump administration’s efforts to destroy Mexico’s drug cartels with an initiative focused on dismantling the financial networks utilized by money brokers who use cryptocurrencies to launder illicit profits. These brokers, according to the DOJ, use cryptocurrencies to move the profits from drug sales in the United States back to Mexico and to cartel leaders.
“If you cut off the money, you hurt the cartels, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva said, explaining the DOJ’s new strategy. Federal prosecutors believe that shutting down the cryptocurrency money brokers in the U.S. will cut off a critical point in the cartels’ financial system, potentially crippling their operations.
Mexico has already handed over around 90 high-level cartel operatives to the U.S. as part of the DOJ effort. The defendants, of whom 37 were transferred to the DOJ this past January alone, are each believed to have direct knowledge of cartel distribution networks and money laundering methods. Critically, the four most recent cases filed by the DOJ include alleged money brokers, Eduardo Rigoberto Velasco Calderon, Eliomar Segura Torres, Manuel Ignacio Correa, and Cesar Linares-Orozco.
The DOJ says it will use the prosecutions as leverage to obtain intelligence and detailed knowledge of how the cartels are evolving and utilizing alternative financial networks to avoid law enforcement detection. Assistant Attorney General Duva says federal prosecutors “want to hear on the distribution side how it works, who is involved, and seek additional indictments, and on the money laundering side, exactly the methods that they are using to get the money out of the United States through the U.S. banks.”
“He added, There’s bulk cash smuggling that has been going on since the beginning of time, and then also sort of the newer trend of taking the cash, buying cryptocurrency, and then trading that cryptocurrency.”
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