Fixing a broken border

with going after the cartels. I mean going after them where they live and dismantling their operations, discarding the failed tactic of waiting until smugglers try to cross before attempting to stop them. We must stop pretending Border defense is a playground game of Red Rover.

It’s about the money! Any effective border defense must begin with a serious effort to stop the torrent of cartel cash pouring across the border—a number that probably exceeds $40 billion a year.

Sophisticated transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) are not formed out of a lust for power or to employ the bosses’ relatives, but in order to maximize profits. Cartel agents do not threaten, terrorize, and kill because they love the work or out of religious zeal. They do it because they are very well paid. Stop the cash, stop the terror. 

The weapons to fight money laundering are at the top of that list of what is not being used to protect the border today. It’s past time for the Department of the Treasury to get serious about stopping cartel money laundering. Stopping the outrage of unregulated cash cards, the funnel accounts, the unreported wire transfers and the money brokers. In Arizona, we showed how to cut down illegal wire transfers when the feds did nothing.  It is time they followed Arizona’s lead.

The techniques needed to secure the border are straightforward; the mystery is why so many in Congress (and in political debates across the country) don’t demand they be used.  Cutting down the cartels’ cash will cripple them—cripple them more effectively than thousands more Border Patrol agents. Failing to stop the vast sums flowing back to the cartels, in effect, provides the cartels the resources needed to continue evading apprehension on the border and slaughtering thousands in Mexico. Inaction on money laundering makes Operation Fast and Furious look like penny-ante incompetence by comparison.

If Mexico, our most critical diplomatic and trading partner, is destabilized or worse by violent criminal organizations, Congress will end up spending years trying to figure out why. Wouldn’t it be better to stop the fall before it happens?

Critical time is wasting. Few think that the courageous Mexican initiative against the cartels will be continued at the current level after the Calderón Administration ends in less than a year. We need a maximum U.S. effort against the cartels now, before it is too late.

Terry Goddardcompleted his second and final term as Arizona’s attorney general in January 2011 and has re-entered the private practice of law. A native of Tucson, Arizona and a graduate of Harvard College, he was first elected Arizona Attorney General in 2002. Over eight years in office, he focused on protecting consumers and fighting the organized criminal activities of the drug cartels. He made significant progress in attacking cartel money laundering, seizing approximately $20 million and culminating in an historic $94 million settlement with Western Union in February 2010.