Organized Crime in Mexico ― Assessing the Threat to North American Economies

Author Holmes, who died in 2013, spent his career in drug enforcement, as director of the Southwest Border Anti-Money Laundering Alliance, and chief of the Financial Remedies Section of the Arizona attorney general's office. In this book, he sounds an alarm that the escalating power of Mexican criminal enterprises threatens the continued existence of legitimate commerce in Mexico. Holmes believed that the criminal enterprises (CEs) are winning a long-standing struggle with the representative government for control of commercial activity. He lines up significant evidence for this belief, citing the CEs' diversification, employment of elite mercenaries, use of military weaponry, murders with impunity, and extensive shadow government; this power in turn threatens the viability of the government, and could eventually undermine the United States economy. Holmes dismisses measures such as drug legalization, sealing the border, and other containment efforts as irrelevant. He lays out a program of long-term goals, the central one being to reduce corruption by reform of the Mexican judicial system. Aggressive U.S. and international support would be integral to this goal. Another long-term goal would be to control the illicit flow of money from Mexico. The author also proposes short-term countermeasures. These include cutting off money laundering operations, investigating and prosecuting criminal incursion into legitimate business, and mounting a public information campaign to reduce the use of Mexican-sourced drugs. Potomac Books is an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press. Annotation c2014 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)

CAMERON H. HOLMES (1949–2013) was the director of the Southwest Border Anti–Money Laundering Alliance and served as chief of the Financial Remedies Section of the Arizona attorney general’s office for twenty-one years. DENNIS LORMEL is the managing director of the Anti–Money Laundering Practice at ISPA International. He served for twenty-eight years as a special agent in the Federal Bureau of Investigation before retiring.