cryptogon.com

From the white Caribbean beaches of Cancun to violent towns on the U.S. border and the beauty parlors of Mexico City’s wealthy suburbs, drug cash is everywhere in Mexico. It has even propped up the country’s banking system, helping it ride out the financial crisis and aiding the country’s economy.

Smuggled into Mexico mostly from the United States in $100 bills, narco money finds its way onto the books of restaurants, construction firms and bars as drug lords try to legitimize their cash and prevent police from tracing it.

“Mexico is saturated with this money,” said George Friedman, who heads geopolitical analysis firm Stratfor.

In western Mexico, drug money started pouring into Zapopan and nearby Guadalajara in the 1980s as the Sinaloa cartel bought hospitals and real estate, said Martin Barron, a researcher at the institute that trains Mexico’s organized crime prosecutors.

Now residents in the region known in Mexico for its piety say drug smugglers barely make an effort to disguise themselves.

A strip of fancy boutiques in Zapopan was financed with drug money, says Jaime Ramirez, a local newspaper columnist who has been reporting on the drug world for two decades. As well as the Grupo Collins factory in Zapopan, a nearby car wash is also on the U.S. Treasury’s black list.

A local cemetery draws relatives of traffickers who were among the 17,000 people killed in the drug war in Mexico since 2006. “A lot of narcos are buried there. You should see it on Fathers’ Day,” Ramirez said, as a black pick-up truck with tinted windows pulled in.

Zapopan residents just shrug their shoulders when a wealthy neighbor displays traits seen as typical of a drug trafficker — wearing cowboy gear, playing loud “norteno” music from the country’s north or holding lavish parties attended by guests who arrive in pick-up trucks or SUVs.