Narco brokers in Mexico, a booming business thriving alongside Chinese money-laundering networks

Bojun He, known as “El Chino,” was arrested on November 4 in the Miguel Hidalgo borough of Mexico City with $2 million and 43 million pesos, in both local and foreign currency. The detainee was identified as the alleged leader of a money-laundering network for organized crime, including the Mexico City-based Unión Tepito cartel, and linked to arms and human trafficking with operations in central Mexico City, Tijuana (Baja California) and Cancún (Quintana Roo). His capture has highlighted the role played by brokers — or financial intermediaries — in Chinese laundering networks that act as the cartels’ economic arm.The arrest of El Chino recalls others such as that of Tomoiyi Yu in 2007 at his home in Lomas de Chapultepec, Mexico City, where the Attorney General’s Office seized more than $200 million. The wife of Zhen Li Ye Gon, a Mexican pharmaceutical businessman of Chinese origin accused by Mexico and the United States of illegally trading chemical precursors for methamphetamine production, was sentenced to 15 years in prison for organized crime, money laundering and possession of military-grade weapons and ammunition. More recent cases include Zhi Dong Zhang, alias “Brother Wang,” the Chinese fentanyl kingpin, and Marco Ebben, who was considered Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada’s Dutch broker and was killed in Atizapán in 2025. What did all these financial intermediaries have in common? They connected organized crime across continents and made it possible for dirty money to be legalized.According to Víctor Sánchez, an academic at the Autonomous University of Coahuila (UAdeC), people of Chinese origin or networks from the Asian country — some linked to triad organized crime groups, others operating independently — have been inserting themselves into the dynamics of Mexican criminal organizations. The security expert says that, perhaps alongside Albanian mafias, they may be the second-largest source country assisting drug traffickers with money laundering, primarily because of the significant advantages this offers them.First, with China — unlike almost any other country (except the U.S. in the case of Mexico) — there is significant and intense international trade. “That means the opportunities to disguise illegal operations as legal ones are quite significant. Every shipment of Chinese goods arriving at Mexico’s various ports can consistently become an opportunity for money laundering, and since so many arrive so frequently, keeping track of them all is impossible; it’s the old adage of finding a needle in a haystack,” Sánchez explains over the phone.The second major advantage Chinese laundering networks offer is the market’s lowest rates. The UAdeC academic says that while other providers of these services charge around 10% to 15% on average, the Chinese charge between 3% and 5%. “Thus it becomes more profitable for Mexican organizations to turn precisely to the Chinese,” he notes.According to Pablo Pérez, an international expert on money laundering and asset recovery, one of the main methods these Chinese networks use to launder funds is triangulation among China, Mexico, and the United States, because China has an annual legal limit of $50,000 for citizens withdrawing foreign currency. There are businesspeople and citizens who seek to move capital in renminbi (RMB) — the official name of the national currency, which means “the people’s currency” — to invest it abroad. An example of this is real estate in the United States.He also explains, as CEO of RiskFlow — a company specialized in preventing money laundering — that Mexican cartels sell narcotics in the U.S. and obtain cash dollars, but need to return those funds to Mexico converted into pesos. To connect both needs, they resort to the Chinese informal banking system known as Fei Qian, equivalent to the historical Hawala, an informal funds-transfer system.“The Chinese investor hands over RMB in China to an informal agent and the network provides the equivalent in cash dollars in the U.S., money coming directly from the cartel’s profits. To reconcile funds between China and Mexico, importing companies are used, for example, in appliances or telecommunications in Mexico. The Mexican importer receives products valued at a higher figure, say $10 million, but only pays a lower amount, $8 million, settling the difference through the network. Crypto assets such as Bitcoin are also used to transfer value without leaving a trace,” Pérez adds.In the United States, the asset-recovery expert continues, illicit cash is moved into the banking system by recruiting Chinese university students who deposit fractional sums at ATMs in exchange for living-cost payments. It also involves injecting funds into the accounting of Chinese-community businesses such as restaurants, bazaars, currency-exchange houses, and remittance agencies, where commissions of between 5% and 10% are charged. Another method is fake invoicing for purported consulting services or suppliers to legally justify purchases of luxury real estate, such as apartments in Miami.A recent example is the $500 million fine imposed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network on Bank of America, due to internal control failures that allowed transactions linked to Chinese networks. “It is estimated that more than $5 billion passed through Bank of America without adequate controls. This issue is a priority for the governments of Mexico and the United States, and is part of the risk assessments of the Financial Action Task Force,” Pérez adds.Until a few years ago, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel or the Sinaloa Cartel were the organizations that worked with these brokers. They facilitate purchases for obtaining chemical precursors to manufacture fentanyl or money laundering with the Albanian mafia to buy luxury properties in Europe. However, Sánchez says this type of service is not only for the major players in organized crime, so it is not surprising that El Chino allegedly tried to do the same for a smaller criminal group like the Unión Tepito.“Many turn to national channels because that’s what they’re familiar with or because of the contacts they have in their social circles, but in a city that’s a bit more cosmopolitan and internationally connected, like Mexico City, it’s not unusual for them to come into contact with foreign businesspeople,” the expert explains.Sánchez agrees that the presence and importance of narco brokers is not an isolated phenomenon, but rather a trend that makes “perfect sense.” Organized crime, the scholar asserts, is a “booming business” that generates a great deal of money, and part of that money needs to be injected into the legal economy. “Furthermore, when it comes to money laundering, the basic principle applies that it is harder to detect the process in places where there is more money: a million dollars in a mountain town in Durango stands out a lot, but in Mexico City, San Pedro Garza García, Zapopan, Cancún, Hong Kong, Shanghai, London, or New York, it is practically nothing, and the chances of detection are slim,” he concludes.Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition