U.S. ties 3 Mexican financial institutions to fentanyl trafficking
MEXICO CITY – The U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday accused three Mexican financial institutions of moving money for opioid traffickers and handling payments for cartels seeking imported chemicals to make fentanyl.
The department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, identified CIBanco S.A., Intercam Banco S.A. and Vector Casa de Bolsa as being “of primary money laundering concern” in connection with opioid trafficking.
“Financial facilitators like CIBanco, Intercam, and Vector are enabling the poisoning of countless Americans by moving money on behalf of cartels, making them vital cogs in the fentanyl supply chain,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.
But Mexico’s Treasury Ministry said that it had asked its U.S. counterpart for details of the alleged wrongdoing and that “no evidence has been received.”
The three are well-known financial institutions. CIBanco has more than $7 billion in assets, while Intercam has $4 billion, according to a U.S. Treasury news release. Vector manages nearly $11 billion in assets, the statement said, and operates throughout Latin America. The U.S. orders would bar American financial institutions from receiving funds from the companies or sending money to them.
The announcement came as President Donald Trump has pressured Mexico’s government to crack down harder on the country’s drug cartels, considered the biggest producers of U.S.-bound fentanyl. He has threatened punishing tariffs and designated six Mexican cartels as foreign terrorist groups. He has also slapped tariffs on China, the source of many of the chemical ingredients to make fentanyl, arguing it is not doing enough to halt the flow.
The latest measure “sends an important message to Mexico, that this is serious,” said Mariana Campos, the director of México Evalúa, a think tank focused on public policy.
Still, Mexican officials said none of the U.S. evidence they had seen added up to criminal activity.
The only information shared by U.S. authorities that Mexican officials could verify was data on some electronic transfers made by the Mexican financial institutions to legally constituted Chinese companies, the Mexican Treasury Ministry statement said. Those money flows didn’t seem unusual, the ministry said.
“Thousands of these transactions are made by national financial institutions,” the Mexican ministry said. It added that its financial-crimes unit “found transactions with those Chinese businesses by more than 300 Mexican businesses through 10 national financial institutions.”
When it investigated the transfers, the ministry said, it only discovered “administrative problems that have been sanctioned” with fines and other actions.
Vector said in a statement that it “categorically rejects any imputation that damages its institutional integrity.” The other two Mexican institutions did not respond to calls and emails seeking reaction.
Fentanyl sparked the deadliest drug epidemic in U.S. history, leaving hundreds of thousands of Americans dead. Overdose deaths plunged nearly 27% last year, compared with 2023, according to estimates published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and U.S. seizures of illegal fentanyl have been dropping. Yet even so, more than 80,000 Americans were killed by drugs in 2024, with fentanyl a major culprit.
The U.S. Treasury statement said that CIBanco had a “long-standing pattern of associations, transactions, and provision of financial services that facilitate illicit opioid trafficking” by the Beltrán Leyva, Jalisco New Generation and Gulf cartels. The U.S. statement said that, from 2021 to 2024, the bank had handled more than $2.1 million in payments from Mexico-based companies to Chinese companies that sent precursor chemicals to Mexico for illicit use.
The U.S. statement accused Intercam executives of meeting in late 2022 with suspected Jalisco cartel members to talk about money laundering, including transferring funds from China. From 2021 to 2024, Intercam moved more than $1.5 million from Mexico-based companies to a Chinese firm associated with a person who shipped precursor chemicals to Mexico, it said.
As for Vector, the U.S. statement said, it was used by a Sinaloa Cartel operative to launder $2 million between 2013 and 2021. The statement also said that Vector made more than $1 million in payments on behalf of Mexico-based companies to Chinese firms known to have sent precursor chemicals to Mexico.
The inclusion of Vector on the Treasury list raised eyebrows in Mexico because of its connection to Alfonso Romo, who had been a top adviser to ex-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Romo led a group of investors that bought the brokerage firm in 1987, and he is currently the director of Grupo Plenus, the conglomerate that owns Vector.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has sought to increase antidrug cooperation with the Trump administration, including transferring 29 high-level cartel operatives to the United States in February.