Industry sign banking new mexico separation agreement fast
as I was showing you we have this information here for Las Cruces and El Paso but I wanted to take a minute also and talk about the actual particular aspects of licensing money services businesses in New Mexico and Texas and interestingly New Mexico now requires that the money service business operators these are that your check cashers your small loan companies your currency exchangers and your money transmitters to register with the nationwide mortgage licensing system and that kind of struck me as odd because it's something you hear about usually with mortgages and and not something for like money services businesses now what is different between Texas and New Mexico Mexico or Texas also requires that the MSBs registers with the nmls but except for check cashers check cashers and texas do not have two small loan companies do not have to register with the nmls which is different from New Mexico the other sort of distinction is that in Texas the industry is largely unregulated but companies must register with the occc so in Texas they don't register with the nmls they register with the office of the context office of the consumer credit commissioner and I thought the hon Institute was an awkward title but they have to register there instead of the nmls now Texas has no regulation no registration fees interest rates or loan amount restrictions for these small loan companies and check cashers New Mexico on the other hand is much more regulated and but still it's not as regulated as Georgia apparently Georgia doesn't even allow small loan these are check cashers - to operate but New Mexico is making a much stronger push to regulate these companies but interestingly not from a law enforcement or financial inclusion or perhaps a public safety point of view more from a kind of question of social social well-being or social development because these kinds of institutions are often seen as predatory so the the push to regulate them in New Mexico is not from a law enforcement or national security perspective but one for a social well-being in Texas there was been several initiatives most I think dramatically in 2013 to provide some kind of regulatory oversight of small loan companies that did not succeed there's been other legislative attempts recently but they have not succeeded either in in Texas money service businesses in an in addition to these small loan companies the your title and your payday lenders also included money transmitters and money transmitters part of this family and they also provide a critical lifeline for non banked populations but also for the criminal element and so this issue is something that is also under the jurisdiction of Texas and New Mexico and there are different ways that these states govern this activity again and what I wanted to show you guys was that to begin with this is a graph of real remittances to Mexico by type and as we see these electronic money transfers for almost the last 20 years have been dominating the types of remittances to Mexico and it's upwards of twenty five billion dollars a year to to that country now there's something else that I wanted to mention before we get into money service transmitters more deeply and that's this program called the Elector Mexico which is a program sponsored by the Mexican central bank to connect bank accounts in Mexico to bank accounts in the United States this one yes by the way I can make or this this not I can make this presentation is immediately available to you I encourage you to send Vic email after email after email maybe three or four to request this but but this kind of information is immediately available for you in this presentation but also as I was mentioning earlier this is part of a larger banking and finance and national security report that we're doing which will have even more information and even more data in the coming weeks and months towards the beginning of next year also this presentation is relatively general applicability we have people here from different sectors and a different sort of areas in their sectors but if there's anything you need to know more about please let us know as well and we can happily get that information for you okay so there's this program called direct or Mexico and it connects bank account to bank account and that is in many ways advantageous again not only from an economic point of view and a financial point of view and a financial system point of view but also from a national security and public safety point of view because you're transferring money from one bank account to the other through this program and you're going through the formal commercial banking system with your account holders your account numbers and you can trace the amounts that are sent now the other advant advantage of this and you can go on the website directly Mexico yeah I want to probably see Dahlia Stan hablando de que tan cheedo SS del programa you know and a quantity narrow is there a sport participate so the costs associated with the transmission of cash or money through the director Mexico those fees are much much lower than they are for your money service transmitters so again we're seeing throughout this presentation not only a relationship between economic activity that's legal and economic activity that's illegal but we're starting to really see and continually highlight this relationship between financial and market health and also Public Safety so this program I think is a very good step toward that goal now so director on Mexico remittances have been increasing not only in terms of total transactions but in terms of the real dollar amounts and the other thing that's happening with these transactions or transmissions is that the average dollar amount is increasing as well so I think that in many ways this is sort of a good news story or it's something that could really probably be built on and it could be even something like you know a century program for interbank operations between Mexico and the United States so we see a lot of these amounts increasing as well and it's interesting just to think the average transaction is almost $8,000 the average transaction so that's quite a lot of money in the video that I was talking about he was talking about sending money to Swiss cafes and so I was thinking about you know his parents getting you know $8,000 through through this program so I would like to be that child's father so the other so getting back now to real remittances in particular these traditional money transmissions and money services we did an analysis here of the relative position of Chihuahua as a state relative to other border states because we want to see you know one of the major sort of goals of money laundering between US and Mexico is to get that cash that American US dollar cash into the Mexican financial and how does that happen ball cash transfers property acquisitions it could happen through a trade based money laundering schemes it could happen through a variety of ways but one of the ways that again is needs to be of concern to us is how money transmitters work so we can see here sort of where Chihuahua is relative to other cities or other states and it's interesting also to think about throughout this presentation where Chihuahua is relative to thumb out leap us we've sort of seen them sort of right next to each other in in various different analytical lenses in in earlier discussions and so here they are as well but look at the spikes in thumb OFS and and also the spike there within the web early on which neighbors Tamaulipas what was happening there that caused such a spike and it's those kinds of abnormalities that interest us not only as market analysts but also as law enforcement officials you know what's the anomaly what's the red flag what's what doesn't fit here I don't know if you guys have ever played that that game so what we also did was we did this analysis with respect to real remittances at the municipal level on the us-mexico border and again you'll see that in the last slide in this slide as well we do both relative as well as absolute analysis so here we have the room iNSYS to see that Quietus in absolute terms over the last four years more or less but then how they relate to other border cities in Mexico and interestingly Tijuana gets a lot more releases than see that widest almost more than more than two times but Reynosa in Tamaulipas where we saw that spike also is consistent with that spike from the prior slide so something's happening there something happened there that caused that and I think it would be worthwhile to to investigate further then we also have real remittances to border cities versus the rest of Mexico so this is another one of those kind of you know relative analyses of where things are so the real remittances or room iNSYS to Mexico have been increasing well I mean strongly even these last three years but to border cities they've I mean there's been some spikes there but if you take an average line through that it over time I think kind of smoothes out so something's happening where remittances are increasing to the rest of Mexico but they're sort of fluctuating around some kind of average point to - Mexican border cities what we also did and and this is something that we're really interested about and something that I think my staff and students would have a headache if I if they heard it one more time but what we really try to do at the Institute is get local regional data we try to really understand what's happening and what is what's happening in Las Cruces what's happening in white is et cetera etc and so what we have here is we have information about the amount of remittances that are going to cities within Chihuahua and to the state so at the state level Chihuahua has seen a pretty dramatic increase in remittances over the last four years as well as see that widest up to 53 million 50 million dollars now the other thing is that we don't just look at these again as I was saying earlier when we were discussing real deposits in New Mexico and the border counties we don't just do that for major cities we also try to look at the outlying areas and we have remittance data to these places like a llama Chihuahua I don't know if any of you have been there it's not you know a major international gateway but it's important to understand how that money is influencing the region as a whole and perhaps that municipality in particular we've also done the same with Casas Grandes Chihuahua and this is interesting because as law enforcement officers you know that this city Casas Grandes is very important for a lot of reasons and it's important with respect to the Mennonite community it's important with respect to the agricultural sector to migratory flows to smuggling flows and what happened here in Custis grandes that there was such a precipitous decline over a two-year period in in remittances so hopefully you know whether you're a banker in Juarez or Mexico or whether you're law enforcement officer at epic or whether you're working with Department of Justice in Washington hopefully these kinds of data points and these kinds of analyses can help fill out the picture to what you're trying to understand and what you're trying to dismantle and and disrupt because as I was saying earlier I really know how busy things can get and how quickly a day goes by so all this kind of information is here to help you with your your case work so now this section of the presentation is going to get into particular discussion of illicit activity the data around illicit activity in our region and how the governments are structured to to combat that this is a relatively well known map that was published several years ago in a newspaper and I use it really for illustrative purposes and I I was teasing and joking with you guys about wanting to be a cartographer but I think maybe I already am I mean maybe I just am in love with it so much that I can't deny it so this map is trying to recall again where we started with the very first slide of our presentation and the maps that we'll we'll be seeing here in a moment with respect to our region and earlier I was talking about the economic structures of the United States the economic political values of the United States and how that yielded such a strong dynamic market that the world really has never seen and that continues to be the strongest most dynamic market to this day so everything wants to sort of get into the US market whether that's legally or illegally and they want to satisfy market demand in the United States and as I was saying earlier from a north/south perspective there's only a few really viable ways to get those kinds of things into the United States or out of the United States and from a terrestrial point of view you have even fewer and this Paso del Norte region is your most viable route I mean the Spaniards knew it hundreds of years ago and the Native American communities knew it even before then so what that means is just to put it kind of in perspective is that we're literally on the front lines of this kind of activity we're on the front lines of these kinds of pressures we're on the front lines of any kind of binational activity you wish to think of whether it's natural gas pipelines whether it's human smuggling whether it's trans boundary aquifers whether it's supply chains and car parts and the aerospace sector everything has to come through us it reminds me of Sharon and the ancient Greek myth that you know he you had to pay the river man you had to pay the river man to get across so everything is coming across here but as we'll see in a minute not always do our institutions have a strong awareness of this by National activity from a broad unified perspective so I want to start talking about the anti money laundering regime writ large and sort of where it came from and where it is and and what's happening so back way back when in 1989 this group of wealthy countries countries with advanced financial and banking systems advanced financial financial and banking systems got together and created the the Financial Action Task Force and the Financial Action Task Force is headquartered in Paris again another city that knows our community very well I'm sure and the idea behind the Financial Action Task Force was to create voluntary guidelines at an international level that could be implemented by national governments so you could have a kind of harmonized structure of not only anti money laundering rules and laws but operational mechanisms a lot of the work that you guys are doing with law enforcement with the DOJ with ice with CBP now these are voluntary and so there's no just not a treaty with respect to this there's not something that mandates that the countries that participate here have to adopt these these rules now the Financial Action Task Force has been working also with respect to something we haven't talked a lot about today which is terrorist financing and so the Financial Action Task Force doesn't just really have its origin with drug trafficking and illegal sources of money for commercial purposes but also with terrorist financing particularly after September 11th and so these regulations now are used to sort of debilitate illegal money laundering schemes that would benefit both terrorist organizations or transnational criminal organizations so the Financial Action Task Force set standards to promote effective legal and regulatory inflammation and the operational measures to combat money laundering and terrorist financing and the Financial Action Task Force has developed a series of recommendations that are the standard for combating money laundering and terrorist financing and these recommendations were most recently revised in 2012 so this group meets often and it has geographical subgroups within it now the other thing that the Financial Action Task Force does is it it sort of is like a minder it's like a nanny and so it will go around and send delegations to the different countries and basically do a scorecard or a report card how is Mexico doing how's Canada doing how's the u.s. doing how how's England doing and then they published all these things and you can read them and look at them on their website now the alternati
e to that or something that's really not the alternative but the counterpart to that is something that is really at the core of what the Hun Institute is doing it's at the heart of why we all came here together today and this is called information sharing and information sharing is of critical importance again not only for private sector economic development but also for public safety and national security so there's the thing called the Edgemont group and it's based in brussels another city that knows us very well and is a sort of brotherhood or a fraternity of financial intelligence units and we'll get into that in a second but it's a collection of these financial intelligence units from each participating country there's 155 that participate and they get together and not only share information but they also provide a platform for this secure exchange of expertise and financial intelligence so it's not it's it has a very actually I think much more practical mechanism associated with combating money laundering and terrorist financing than eff ATF even though eff ATF is good about creating the political will and the importance of strong regulatory and law enforcement mechanisms so the Edgemont group in its statement says that it recognizes that the sharing of information is paramount is a paramount importance and has become the cornerstone of international efforts to counter money laundering and terrorist financing and when I read that I was there really resonated with me because as as an institute that works in the region as an individual who lives here I find that this sort of opacity that exists across this region between a mek - Co Texas and Chihuahua this uncertainty these cloudy sort of skies is is a challenge but it's also an opportunity for us and if you think about you know how we could come together and work as a region to come up with really innovative or strong cross-border information sharing platforms we're just understanding the different market structures that exist here in the region then we could be a value and use to the broader by national perspective so it's something that is a real opportunity for us that I think we can take advantage of so you know you can find inspiration and a quote from Edgemont group if you look hard enough so now with respect to the Mexican structure of the anti money laundering enterprise again we see these usual suspects because in Mexico the regulator's are relatively few and they have a large portfolio so Secretariat a IC and ie great the portico also which is the agency that is not in charge of but is the sort of parent of the Commission National Bank area works to ensure the integrity of the financial system so there they have all the data Commission Nationale they're the ones who work to make sure that there's no anomalies in the banking system and then the unidade Intelligencia finance sierra this is your financial intelligence unit your FIU for those of you are familiar with that acronym they're also part of the secretary of the ICN that create the portico and they're the ones who kind of do investigations they're the ones who go out and really look at what's happening but also make sure that the laws are being followed and then there's this thing in Mexico called the CEO and the CFO is the suprachoroidal Rhea Suh pro career especially sada in investigation the delinquency organized era and that's part of the pay hey array which is the probe corridor iya can run the ladder interesting to note that their state headquarters is located in Cuates and not chihuahua city so the the basically the Mexican FBI you could say has put their headquarters across the border from us not down in in Chihuahua city so these are the your your main actors here and I want to also take a minute because as you know I've expressed my love for regional knowledge and and our communities so I took sort of a deep dive and I'd like to take you with me there for a moment to talk about sort of the structure of law enforcement in the region and the challenges but also the opportunities that that presents us with so if you look at the Mexican law enforcement system or structure after the federal agencies you have the fiscally I can handle estado the Attorney General for the state of Chihuahua and it might or may not surprise you to learn that there is no specific or dedicated anti money laundering or terrorist financing working group or task force at the attorney general's office for the state of Chihuahua now going back to the difference in legal systems that I was explaining earlier a lot of those laws in Mexico are federal because the states in Mexico have much weaker sovereignty than they do in the United States so that's consistent with the political structure but my point is that I think that it could still be beneficial to have something at the state law enforcement level looking into these things in Chihuahua now at the municipal level in see that wadis there is absolutely no task force really specialized in any kind of crime so you know it's important to think about how our local institutions are plugged into these by national international sophisticated innovative money-laundering and criminal enterprise activities that course through our region as we speak and this is something that is not just you know something that is not just present in in the Chihuahua side but also in the New Mexico now past societies I'll share in a minute now I just also wanted to mention a few things about the Mexican anti money laundering illegal structure as I said earlier it follows the recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force now that's not to say that all countries that participate in or work with the financial asking Financial Action Task Force have the same anti-money laundering laws they don't some have exceptions some have aberrations etc and I'll share one of those with you in a minute when Mexico uses a risk-based approach to dealing with the reporting of suspicious activity and this is you know sort of consistent with your your your kyc rules you know your customer rules so they also participate in that same kind of of activity but I also wanted to mention because as I said I always like to share or look at things from a regional point of view money money transmitters are again in Mexico not regulated they're not even required to be licensed so if you think about what that means for the financial stability but also for law enforcement you have all these money transmitters in Mexico and they're not sort of reported that they have to technically report they're covered by anti money laundering rules you know reporting of transactions over a certain dollar amount or things like that but they're not registered ex-ante from the beginning you don't necessarily know you know how much money is going through there you don't know you know who's working with this you don't know the companies behind it and things like that so it's the same thing with currency changers as well only if they deal in a habitual way with customers over $10,000 do they have to be licensed but there's an exception for the border region Fiat they okay so you know if you're working like in the northern Mexico border you have this exception because the private sector the economy in some ways demands that northern Mexico be open to dollar transactions and the exchange of currency between pesos and dollars so in some ways Mexico is between a rock and a hard place on this anti money laundering activity because they need the communities here to participate back and forth between dollars and and in some ways El Paso needs that as well I don't know if any of you have been downtown on a weekend on Santa Fe Street or in CLO Vista but our retail sector very much needs the the economic support from Cuates so we need to have some kind of flexibility here but that flexibility can also be quite apparel for not only our regional security but for vine a tional security now on the US side again it's like a zoo of alphabet soup I guess but the primary regulators really I think coalesce around Department of Treasury and the work that the Financial Crimes enforcement network does as well as the IRS now the I want to say something just quickly here about FinCEN and it is the financial intelligence unit for the United States so it's the weave on the Mexico side and on the US side it's its FinCEN and its responsive it it's it's it's responsible for the issuance administration and civil enforcement of regulations implementing the Bank Secrecy Act and if you want to speak you know until we fall asleep about the Bank Secrecy Act I'd be happy to do that with you as well and it works with other the thing about the United States is even though we have a lot of law enforcement mechanisms and a lot of operations they I think strive really hard to work together so FinCEN works very closely with the IRS and other law enforcement actors here office of Criminal Investigation of the IRS to really find out what's happening with with with the money flows there's also I'm just going to name some of them principal actors that deal with money laundering here just to give you an idea of how many there are there's the office of terrorism and financial intelligence there's the office of terrorist financing and financial crime there's the office of foreign asset control just within the Department of Treasury and then within the Department of Justice there's the asset forfeiture and money-laundering section there's the counterterrorism section there's the National Drug Intelligence Center then law enforcement agencies at the federal level there's the DEA in the Office of Financial Crimes I've created in 2004 then there's the FBI and then within DHS we have Customs and Border Patrol and we have ice and then we have as I mentioned earlier the IRS office of criminal investigation so you know that is like stands in stark contrast to what you have in Mexico even at the federal level where there's so much mmm singularity with respect to who the regulator's are and and their operations at the federal level now I want to say something about the DEA and and there's another map but it's important because we'll also look there's nothing below that map for the time being there's there's others that show what's what's going on there but I wanted to share this with you just to show you what the DEA El Paso division looks like and and think about this map again with respect to all the maps that we've looked at up till now we looked at the one the disputed territory map with the Gaston Purchase and the the Pacific rail lines and i-10 we looked at the Federal Reserve Bank's and how that those districts split up our region and now we have the DEA with a different conception of you know what their area of operation is and so it's I think important to keep that in mind but the other thing that I think is interesting about this DEA map that I like is that it really looks at our region as a whole and a lot of times you know we feel like we're not understood by Kirky will feel like we're not understood by Austin certainly not a lot of times by Washington or Mexico City so what I think is really virtuous about the DEA area of operation here is that it includes the West Texas sector with New Mexico and looks at it as one rather than different units now at the state level there's the New Mexico Attorney General's Office and then the Texas Attorney General as well now both have anti money laundering sections and but you know going back to the yellow light analogy you can't find anything on the New Mexico website other than maybe a paragraph explaining that there is an anti money laundering section I couldn't find any people who work on it I couldn't find it's my understanding also that that the Attorney General has taken the prosecutors from Las Cruces office and move them to Albuquerque so you know what kind of institutional capacity do we have here if those kinds of things are happening and the Texas adjourn Attorney General has an anti money laundering operation that also enforces state and federal anti-money laundering laws but it's not anything that's specifically related to transnational or by national drug trafficking now getting back to these maps I wanted to show you the work that the DEA and others are doing through the hyda program and the hyda program provides assistance to federal state local and tribal law enforcement to dismantle and disrupt drug trafficking organizations through information sharing again that importance of that and coordinated operational activities so look at our southern border and see how you know what what a key gateway it is for high intensity drug trafficking and then look at New Mexico and you know I don't know if you've heard the stories of Espanola and Rio Arriba and the heroin epidemic that's been going on there's for decades this is not you know part of this new wave of opioid crisis this is inveterate and and that corridor there in New Mexico mirrors the corridors we've been looking at these commercial quarters we've been looking at for the the whole length of this morning's presentation going from El Paso and Las Cruces all the way up the Front Range into into Colorado and then even there in the Four Corners area with Farmington and San Juan County now the hyda program interestingly this is a map from the hyda for New Mexico and you see the the kind of overt why I wanted to share this with you again is to show you how drug trafficking and illegal economic activity is parallel with legal trade and commerce and you see how it's sort of mirrors those trade routes and that's that's for New Mexico now there's a whole okay before I get to the Texas part now at the State Police office in New Mexico and the Dona Ana County Sheriff's Office and the municipal police in Las Cruces there's no dedicated task force dealing with money laundering so at the state level you're pretty much left to the federal agencies and the federal and law enforcement working with state agencies but the state agencies don't necessarily have the kind of resources the kind of excellence the kind of expertise that the federal agencies have so again it's from a state law enforcement or a municipal law enforcement or County law enforcement perspective I think that it's very wise of us to start thinking about how to better strengthen those law enforcement organizations now this is a whole different HIDA so we have a we have a high def for New Mexico and then we have a high def for West Texas and you know I'm not part of HIDA but I imagine that even that kind of separation could provoke some kind of uncertainties or could inhibit to some degree information sharing so it's interesting to see how these two hide a our next to each other but are governed with different structures and this is an emerging pipeline from the Pacific through Chihuahua basically our backyard into West Texas and onto the Midwest and the East Coast and Houston so again you know as trade develops transnational crime goes with it now the parallel organizations to the New Mexico State Police County Sheriff of municipalities are these and the Department of Public Safety in Texas does have a border Crimes Division which is in many ways more than you can say for the New Mexico State Police and I have five minutes left you guys are sitting in rapt attention okay so I will go quickly through this but but again the sheriff's office and El Paso Police I think could could benefit a lot from resources and a full fully structured anti-money laundering apparatus so FinCEN map looks like this and I find it fascinating that the southwest border region does not include New Mexico and I'm sure there's a reason for that I'm not at all I think that that those reasons are strong and sound but again I'm just thinking in terms of regionalism in unified structures and the flows in the highways and the rail lines and the and the migratory flows that go through our region that a I was just expecting something that would would be there with New Mexico but as we see here this is the high intensity financial crimes area it's kind of like an analog to to high de and these try to really combine state federal state and local law enforcement to pursue and share information and also disrupt
criminal organizations through through collaboration now what I also wanted to say that there's a lot of other fascinating regional efforts that are taking place in the United States that you don't really see across the border in Mexico and some of these are the border and enforcement security task force all these that I'm about to mention have some kind of jurisdiction for money laundering the border enforcement security task force the organized crime drug enforcement task force the Alliance to combat transnational threats the executive committee for southwest border intelligence and information sharing and the El Paso Intelligence Center so the United States has a very robust very sophisticated very well financed law enforcement apparatus on here and even in Mexico and other places where they operate but as we saw earlier on the Mexican side is much much more fragile and much less robust so what I also wanted to mention quickly that's happening sort of at the regional level are agreements between attorneys general in the southwest border states including Texas and that's the southwest border anti money laundering alliance and this is a kind of information and law enforcement cooperation mechanism that California Arizona New Mexico and Texas participate in then there's also something the conference for Western attorneys general has created this Alianza style to work with Mexico and Mexico law enforcement to really strengthen a mutual awareness of law enforcement activities and law enforcement priorities in the region now something interesting as a law student at the University of New Mexico not only could I not take a course on NAFTA because it was not offered but I could not even find a course on us-mexico criminal law or us-mexico criminal organizations or us-mexico criminal activity you cannot study money laundering and these kinds of issues in Kirky and it's very important to think about that because we're so exposed to this as we've seen and we'll see in a minute here that that our most important law instructional institutions don't have that kind of vision or orientation so I think that to the extent will able to create coursework there or or fine programs will be stronger not only as a region and as communities but also as a nation okay I'm going to go very quickly I'm going to talk about this is some data on cash seizures then we have some data on casinos and then we have some data on car exports and then we also have some data on homicides so if you look at this this is from administration can invalidate 1s cash seizures the second-highest location for cash seizures bulk cash seizures in Mexico all of Mexico see that widest after the and by quite a stretch to not not neck-and-neck there after the idle puerto an astronaut lets you that they make it go now these are some cash seizure data that we were able to get from CBP and also from media from the newspapers it's hard for us to get data on these kinds of things I think for law enforcement reasons but nevertheless it starts to present a picture of what's happening here in our region not only at Isleta a boat died santa teresa but but the but the the other ports of entry and how it's coming in we're leaving now the thing i wanted to mention about the casinos is that there is in new mexico a casino right across the border Sunland Park Casino and this is a huge like threat area for money laundering around the world casinos and it's also that we have a casino and Ruidoso in Otero County which is not far from here as well so you know what is happening with our casinos in the region is important to think about now interestingly just to go back against a Financial Action Task Force and Cuates and Mexican legal system Mexican law prohibits casinos but there are casinos operating legally in Mexico through something called the ampato and the ambato is a legal mechanism where you ask the court to prevent the enforcement of a law while that case is basically resolved it's kind of like an injunction but it happens on a case-by-case basis so see that why it is actually has functioning active casinos but they're not regular they're either they're prohibited in Mexican law and then on top of that the casinos are the kind of betting apparatuses that are allowed in Mexico law are not governed by their AML provisions and they're not licensed and they're not regulated so you know that's something that the Financial Action Task 4 mentions in its report on Mexico is that kind of a threat area now so with New Mexico gaming in licen and and - and Texas does not allow casinos so we have this like state to the south of us that doesn't allow casinos but does have casinos and then we have a state to the north that allows casinos and does have casinos and then we have a state to the east that doesn't allow casinos and you know what's going on with respect to that and so here we got a lot of data from the New Mexico Gaming Commission to find to try and understand you know what's going on not only with their development over time but also the type of operators there are and the machines that are there and then we also try to get some information about how well they're doing financially by looking at their tax revenue over years and and interesting I mean 2018 isn't finished yet but the the taxes that have been paid from 2010 to 2017 show a relatively stable amount with a small D here in 2017 we'll see where that happens you know as we as we finish the year now all of you are very familiar probably with the FinCEN website and the sa RS so what we also did was we tried to get a sense of what kind of SAR s were coming out of the casinos here and unless we press the wrong button or you know downloaded the wrong excel sheet we found no sa RS for casinos in Dona Ana County which I don't know how that could be but it is and then with Bernalillo County we found some sa ours for Otero County also we're really doe so is there was no si ours and Lincoln County neither so another way that people can really launder money back into Mexico was through the exportation Bakewell those took all at this you're probably all familiar with this it's kind of almost almost like a trade based money laundering scheme you buy a car or you know get a car here in the United States and import it into Mexico and recently there's been some regulatory reforms in Mexico to make that a little bit more difficult and as you can see here the car imports into Mexico in the last seven years have decreased significantly so that's I think positive in its own respect but if you know this whole thing is cat-and-mouse and if you press on if you close one Avenue another one opens up so if something's closing off here is there another avenue opening up and and what what could that look like this is just an image of something that I wanted to share with you to demonstrate the kind of ways that dollar transactions are occurring here in the region this is literally cut out of the newspaper from the classified sections for the purchase of a house and Quietus $4 and you know supposedly that kind of transaction is supposed to be recorded is it I don't know if it always is then we just did some data here on suspicious activity reports for El Paso County by type for 2017 and the predominant types there up there at the top are suspicious use of multiple locations individuals working together and suspicions concerning the source of funds and it's quite a long list here and the amount of reports diminished in percentage terms rapidly but nevertheless we wanted to share that with you now there's your total 68,000 reports so far this year to make 100% now the other thing we did for Dona Ana County and that list is shorter but the same three elements are the same elements that we see in Dona Ana County now the Latin only 6,000 reports so you go from 68,000 in El Paso to 6,000 in Las Cruces and that's I think important to to think about we have some data here on suspicious activity Vic's gonna you know drag me out here in a minute so I won't belabor your patience either but we have suspicious activity in El Paso County we also have data on this for the Phoenix Mesa and Glendale metro areas as well as the San Diego Metro Carlsbad metro area as well but I just included the El Paso and Don Jana to focus on this region for the presentation oh there's it twice okay so now we're looking at sort of deposits and homicides and you have deposits there in in dollar terms on the left so it goes from out to 50 to 2007 right before the financial crash to around 150 basically halves when the violence broke out and then it's recovered somewhat by 2011 now so this shows sort of a inverse relationship between homicides and violence and deposits in NCI Quietus so we're nearing the end of the presentation but I really wanted to include this to show you and not that any of us not that any of us in this room need a reminder but of the really destabilizing and detrimental effect that you know transnational money-laundering can have on our communities and it's not victimless crime it's something that is really not only destabilizing from a public safety point of view but as we were mentioning earlier it's very much destabilizing from an economic well-being point of view and a social well-being point of view now I want to share this with you because this is a satellite image of the of North America at night and you'll see to the east the great density of infrastructure cities people that live there and if for any of you who are as nerdy as I am about Western history or maps there's something called the hundredth Meridian and that kind of separates the arid West from the temperate and rainy East and it goes basically through Oklahoma and and Central Texas so to the west of the hundredth Meridian is basically an area of our continent in an area of our country for both Mexico and the United States that is yet to be developed but the trade routes and the trade is is pushing from the Atlantic from the Gulf Coast from the Midwest through New Mexico into the Pacific as it has been for hundreds of years so my point is is that not only sort of are we on the frontlines of current transnational and by national money laundering and public safety and national security issues but temporarily we're also on the front line of a coming decade a coming century of east-west market and infrastructure expansion that is only going to make our region not necessarily more vulnerable but perhaps stronger for the insight and the expertise that we can share at the federal level in both private and public sector here we are again at the center of the continent remembering where we are remembering who we are remembering how important it is for us to work together thank you so much for your patience today I really appreciate your time and efforts again if there's anything that we can help you with please let us know and thank you so much you [Applause]
