Human Events Daily host Jack Posobiec delved into the crisis at the United States' southern border, showing a yet-to-be-aired clip from Border Battle by Turning Point USA. Posobiec went into detail about the ties between the CCP and the Mexican cartels.
"What we're seeing now, and there's a great piece that exemplifies this out of ProPublica today, titled 'How Chinese Gangsters Transformed Money Laundering for Drug Cartels.' Let me tell you a little something about Mr. Chinaloa, Juan Li, AKA Xizhi Li, otherwise known as Juan Li, was running something called the Chinaloa money laundering syndicate. He has been arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison here in the United States. But what people don't understand, is the depths to which this operation went," said Posobiec.
A new report compiled by ProPublica reveals that the Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has appeared to turn a blind eye to money laundering committed by members of the Chinese diaspora in the United States and Central America.
Some have suggested that the ignorance is deliberate, part of a plan to allow the drug trade and human smuggling to destabilize North America.
In 2019 a man named Xizhi Li was arrested and found guilty of leading a conspiracy involving upwards of $30 million. Originally from China, Li was raised in Mexico near the US border, and soon migrated north.
Li later cultivated relationships with Mexican cartels and Chinese gangsters, and began assisting in the smuggling of drugs across borders.
According to ProPublica, Li’s success came from a system he developed to more efficiently launder money between the US, Mexico, and China.
Whereas cartels previously had to hire middlemen who would charge up to 18 cents on the dollar to move dirty money into the financial system, Li managed to do it for just a 1 to 2 percent cut.
In most cases, upon receiving US dollars from a courier, Li would get his organization in Mexico to deliver pesos to the cartel. Wealthy Chinese, who suffered from the CCP’s $50,000 annual capital flight limit, would then buy US dollars from Li, and spend it in the US, before transferring the equivalent in Chinese currency to Li’s bank account in China.
Li would then sell the Chinese currency to Mexican companies in need of money to do business with China, who would, in return, pay him in US dollars, completing the cycle.
Li’s case shone a light on China’s involvement in money laundering across the Pacific, and the ability of those involved to gain access to the US government. One of Li’s business associates, Tao Liu, even managed to meet with former president Donald Trump.
Former senior US military leader Adm. Craig Faller said in 2021, for example, that Chinese launderers had emerged as the “number one underwriter” of drug trafficking in the Western Hemisphere, and that the Chinese government is “at least tacitly supporting” the laundering activity.
Faller told ProPublica that “there’s no doubt that they have the ability to stop things if they want to,” citing the fact that China has “the world’s largest and most sophisticated state security apparatus.”
Former FBI official Frank Montoya went so far as to suggest that there was a “Chinese ideological and strategic motivation behind the drug and money activity,” arguing that via taking advantage of the North American drug trade, they can “fan the flames of hate and division.”
“There is no question there is interconnectivity between Chinese organized crime and the Chinese state,” he added. “The party operates in organized crime-type fashion. There are parallels to Russia, where organized crime has been co-opted by the Russian government and Putin’s security services.”
As ProPublica reports, one of the main indicators that China knows what’s going on is that the majority of communication between alleged Chinese gangsters and their clients takes place on WeChat, a messaging app that is “closely monitored by the Chinese state.”
“The Chinese government is clearly aware of it,” retired DEA agent Thomas Cindric argued. “The launderers are not concealing themselves on WeChat.”
The CCP has denied any such allegations. However investigations continue into people such as Li who have utilized ties with high-ranking Chinese officials and state-controlled banks to commit crimes.
"To them," Posobiec concluded, "this is the third Opium War, and they're flooding us with fentanyl."
