2023-12-08 05:30:03
[Bertrand Monnet est professeur à l’Edhec (école de commerce), titulaire de la chaire Management des risques criminels. C’est à ce titre qu’il s’intéresse au cartel de Sinaloa depuis 2014. Il lui a fallu des années pour identifier des intermédiaires capables de garantir à la fois la fiabilité de ses interlocuteurs et sa sécurité. Cette enquête sur le fentanyl, qui a donné lieu à une série vidéo en trois volets diffusée sur Lemonde.fr, a nécessité de nombreux séjours au Mexique et un long travail de mise en confiance. « Les “narcos” ont accepté de témoigner par volonté d’afficher leur puissance sur la scène internationale », estime le chercheur.]
“Dubai is a paradise for us! » In the heart of Business Bay, the emirate’s business district, Eduardo, a Mexican “narco”, interrupts his selfie session in front of the Burj Khalifa tower, the tallest skyscraper in the world, to explain to me how the Sinaloa cartel clans come to launder tens of millions of dollars here. He himself works for one of them, with a dual function: on the one hand the export of tons of drugs, whether cocaine or fentanyl, an opioid thirty times more powerful than heroin; on the other, the laundering of the profits from this particular type of trade.
Several months of investigation in Culiacan, the cartel’s stronghold in Mexico, and then in New York, one of its main markets, allowed me to have a precise idea of the value chain of trafficking in fentanyl, the product flagship of the moment, primary cause of 130,000 overdose deaths in 2022 in the United States. Purchased for 17,000 dollars (15,700 euros) in China, the kilo of fentanyl powder is transformed in clandestine laboratories in Culiacan into blue pellets called “M30”. The clans that make up the organization – several dozen in total – benefit from a form of autonomy to produce this drug and then sell it ($400,000 per kilo) to American traffickers, who themselves will resell it in millions of doses. of a few milligrams, sometimes mixed with other narcotics (heroin, cocaine). For a clan such as Eduardo’s, particularly active in fentanyl, trafficking therefore generates enormous revenue. On the scale of the cartel and its 19,000 members, the profits amount to billions of dollars, which obviously must be “laundered”.
A few weeks earlier, in Culiacan, this same Eduardo gave me a sort of decryption of his organization’s money laundering methods. Nothing very complicated, in fact, nor totally secret. The first phase of the operation, placement, consists of distributing the cash – in concrete terms, piles of notes – across thousands of bank accounts. To do this, the clans inject this money into the treasury of hundreds of companies and businesses that they control or deposit it directly in bank branches whose employees they bribe so that they do not declare these suspicious deposits.
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