On the subject of money laundering: When will the United States do its part?

Calderón's belated initiative to counter money laundering through limitations on cash limits is laudable, but again, the key may lie on the U.S. side, where most of the money is being made in the first place. 

As Martin Woods, formerly of Wachovia, put it: "“If you don’t see the correlation between the money laundering by banks and the 22,000 people killed in Mexico, you’re missing the point."
Woods is referrring to anks like Wachovia, for which he headed a anti-money-laundering unit 2006-2009, but quit in disgust when it became clear that his bosses didn't like what he found: That drug gangs were using the bank to funnel billions to Mexico. 

Why not indict the bastards? That's the tricky part: According to an excellent investigation by Bloomberg a few weeks back,

"No big U.S. bank... has ever been indicted for violating the Bank Secrecy Act or any other federal law. Instead, the Justice Department settles criminal charges by using deferred-prosecution agreements, in which a bank pays a fine and promises not to break the law again.‘No Capacity to Regulate’Large banks are protected from indictments by a variant of the too-big-to-fail theory.Indicting a big bank could trigger a mad dash by investors to dump shares and cause panic in financial markets, says Jack Blum, a U.S. Senate investigator for 14 years and a consultant to international banks and brokerage firms on money laundering."

The United States, then, in addition to being responsible for much of the drug consumption that fuels Mexico's "drug war," and of putting in place very few obstacles to selling the assault rifles and guns used to kill Mexican police, civilians, and drug rivals, for fear out of financial panic blocks a full indictment of the criminal wrongdoings of big banks such as Wachovia, meekly asking them pay merely a small fine and to promise not to do it again...

It has often been noted that the key to win Mexico's "drug war" is found in the United States and its policies, and the absurd banking laws of the latter country only throws more fuel on that argument.