Mexican cartels turn to human trafficking (UIF)
MEXICO CITY, April 29 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – O rganized crime is mutating in Mexico as gangs who steal oil and sell drugs try a lucrative new line of work trafficking people, according to a top official fighting money laundering.
Santiago Nieto, head of Mexico’s financial intelligence unit (UIF), said his team had discovered that some of the country’s most notorious cartels had branched out into sex trafficking, especially ones whose core business faced disruption.
“A lot of criminal groups are mutating,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the unmarked office building that houses the UIF, responsible for unearthing illicit funds.
“When one possibility ends … they start to link up with other kinds of criminal activities,” Nieto said in an interview conducted at distance in his office.
Mexico is an origin, transit and destination country for human trafficking, a global business estimated to be worth $150 billion a year.
Yet relative to the drugs trade, little is known about the shadowy groups in Mexico that deal in people.
High-profile cases often involve smaller, family-based U.S.-Mexico networks rather than the big cartels that grab headlines.
The Guanajuato-based Santa Rosa de Lima gang dedicated to tapping oil pipelines later turned to extortion and got involved in a table dancing bar staffed by trafficked women, Nieto said.
He said the Mexico City Tepito Union drug gang had similarly branched out to guard women forced into commercial sex.
Nieto traced the web of criminal activities across a meter-wide sheet of paper with a complex diagram linking bank transfers, trips and shell companies that supported the rackets.
Human trafficking may be the third-largest illicit activity in Mexico, after drugs and guns, he estimated.
To help combat what is a fast-growing crime, Nieto said U.S., Canadian and Mexican financial intelligence teams had planned joint meetings, but the pandemic had put that on hold.
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