MEXICO CITY – The United States and Mexico committed to establish a working group on anti-corruption, focused primarily on a high-level strategic response to public corruption and in line with current Treasury efforts and the Biden Administration’s December 2021 “U.S. Strategy on Countering Corruption.” In May 2022, delegations from the United States and Mexico convened the Strategic Dialogue on Illicit Finance (SDIF) to advance anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) goals established under the U.S.-Mexico Bicentennial Framework. In support of the U.S.-Mexico Bicentennial Framework, officials agreed to continue expanding information-sharing to bolster bilateral efforts to counter illicit finance.
Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes Elizabeth Rosenberg co-chaired the meeting with Mexico’s Financial Intelligence Unit (UIF) Director Pablo Gomez Alvarez. The U.S. delegation to the SDIF included Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) Acting Director Himamauli Das, representatives from the Department of Justice, Internal Revenue Service, and other U.S. government agencies. Mexico has been one of the United States’ closest partners in combatting illicit finance and the dialogue, first established in 2014, has been a key bilateral operational forum for law enforcement and AML supervisory and policy officials. This was the first in-person SDIF since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the dialogue, participants discussed how to move forward on major issue areas such as narcotics smuggling, evolving illicit finance threats, human smuggling and trafficking, corruption, and virtual assets. Assistant Secretary Rosenberg reaffirmed Treasury’s commitment to work with Mexican partners to target the financial networks of transnational criminal organizations and corrupt individuals. Officials also agreed to revitalize joint work to target human traffickers and trade-based money launderers given the threat they pose to both countries.