Financial Transparency Coalition

As the violence spread, billions of dollars of cartel cash began to seep into the global financial system. But a special investigation by the Observer reveals how the increasingly frantic warnings of one London whistleblower were ignored

In August 2010, the bodies of 72 immigrants were discovered in Tamaulipas, a state in northeastern Mexico. While nobody knows the sequence of events that led to this massacre, it is well known that Tamaulipas is at the center of a turf war between two powerful drug cartels, the Zetas and the Gulf Cartel. Control of territory and trafficking routes is critical as it enables the cartels to expand their criminal operations to include other moneymaking endeavors like fuel bunkering, prostitution, kidnapping, and even software piracy. Across the Atlantic, a recent report for the Council of Europe...

“Coffee shops” are causing trouble and increasing crime rates in small Dutch towns that border neighboring countries. To some degree it’s drug tourism, visitors coming from other countries to engage in infamous Dutch, legal pastimes. However, these “coffee shops” that sell drugs are also facilitating the expansion of organized crime and of the underground economies both in the Netherlands and in neighboring states. As the underground economy grows, the government’s ability to govern slowly erodes, and the bigger fish become harder to track and catch. While drug tourism is a small problem compared to, for example, a corrupt African official...