PHOENIX — Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard told lawmakers Tuesday in Washington that Mexico and the United States need to collaborate more to confront cartels that smuggle drugs and immigrants into the U.S. and guns and money into Mexico.
Goddard, one of several law enforcement officials who testified before a Senate subcommittee on drugs and crime, said drug violence in Mexico won’t be contained there unless its government succeeds in its war against cartels.
“It is in the interest of the United States to assist Mexico in that effort and to step up our own law enforcement activities to dismantle the criminal organizations operating across the border,” Goddard said in his prepared remarks.
No single police or prosecutorial agency has enough people or expertise to confront smuggling groups, Goddard said, suggesting that all levels of American law enforcement must help their Mexican counterparts.
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The best approach is to stop the flow of smuggling money to Mexico and target the leaders of trafficking groups, said Goddard, whose state is the busiest illegal gateway into the United States.
The attorney general said traffickers turn to some seemingly legitimate businesses for assistance, such as weapons dealers who sell guns to rings that sneak guns into Mexico and some money wire transfer businesses that help move suspected smuggling proceeds.
For more than four years, Goddard’s office had used special court orders that allowed his prosecutors to seize $17 million in wire transfers flowing to Arizona that authorities said were payments to smugglers.
Prosecutors said their previous efforts were so successful that smugglers began to route their payments from other American states to Mexico, even as traffickers continued to sneak people in through Arizona. Authorities responded by trying to seize money transfers going into the northern Mexican state of Sonora.
Western Union, the biggest wire transfer company in Arizona, challenged the seizures of money going into Sonora, arguing Arizona prosecutors had no power to interfere with transfers into another country.
In 2007, a Maricopa County judge ruled that state prosecutors hadn’t shown they had jurisdiction to seize money from locations outside Arizona. But the Arizona Court of Appeals reversed that ruling last summer.
In his testimony before the Senate subcommittee, Goddard singled out Western Union. “Western Union is by far the largest provider of illicit money-movement services, so it is the source of valuable information about illicit money movements and has been the focus of interdiction efforts aimed at criminal proceeds in transit,” Goddard said.
Messages left for a spokesman for Western Union, which is based in Englewood, Colo., weren’t immediately returned Tuesday afternoon.
David Landsman, executive director of the National Money Transmitters Association, said money transmitters are licensed and regulated by states and that Goddard needs to acknowledge the legitimate role that they play in the economy.
Landsman said he didn’t know whom the attorney general was referring to when he testified about corrupt money transmitters. “The only problem I have with his testimony is his use of inflammatory language,” Landsman said in a phone interview from his group’s office in Great Neck, N.Y.
Western Union isn’t a member of the National Money Transmitters Association.
Goddard acknowledged that such special court orders temporarily detain some legitimate money transfers, but said courts have approved such seizures when given evidence of the probability of crimes and when the impact on innocent people is minimized.
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