Money laundering is one of the most difficult criminal economies to detect and prosecute, and the debate over the effectiveness of anti-money laundering policies has intensified in recent years, especially in Argentina.
InSight Crime discussed the structural challenges behind money laundering in the country with Juan Félix Marteau, president of the Financial Intelligence Research Foundation (Fundación de Investigaciones en Inteligencia Financiera – FININT), director of the Center for the Study of Security, Terrorism and Financial Crime at the University of Buenos Aires, and twice Argentina’s national coordinator for combating financial crime.
InSight Crime (IC): The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that 2% to 5% of global GDP is laundered annually, but only 0.2% of those funds are confiscated. What are the main obstacles limiting the effectiveness of anti-money laundering efforts, particularly in Latin America?
Juan Félix Marteau (JFM): To start with, countries in the region struggle to meet international standards due to limited material, technological, and human resources; political instability; and economic crises. But there are also intrinsic problems with how the global standardization process works.
Anti-money laundering systems are largely ineffective because they target only the formal economy, and in particular, the regulated financial system. Countries today implement due diligence requirements for clients and file suspicious transaction reports. These feed into financial intelligence systems. The problem is that our national frameworks fail to grasp the scale and nature of the informal economies in which criminal groups operate — and how deeply those economies are embedded in the formal sector.
IC: Do you believe Latin America presents unique challenges compared to other regions?
JFM: Absolutely. Global standards are based on economic models from developed economies — which also lead the system, like the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). For instance, the United States has an informal economy that accounts for 5% to 8% of GDP. Countries like the United Kingdom, France, and Germany might have slightly higher levels depending on the moment. But we’re not talking about informality levels of 30% to 40% or more, as is the case in Argentina and across the region.
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IC: What about measuring the scale of this criminal economy in Argentina? Are there limitations there as well?
JFM: FATF’s mutual evaluation of Argentina, concluded late last year, estimated that some $30 billion is laundered annually, yet authorities seize only around $27 million per year in illicit assets. That’s less than 0.1%. How did FATF arrive at that figure? I couldn’t say — the methodology wasn’t disclosed. While I believe that assessment overstates Argentina’s deficiencies, there’s no denying the structural shortcomings in our approach to fighting financial crime.
The urgent challenge is to redefine which national interests are most threatened by transnational crime — not only drug trafficking, but also terrorist financing in the Tri-Border Area and illegal fishing along our continental shelf. These are criminal economies generating vast sums of illicit revenue that we must learn to counter.
IC: What’s your assessment of how Argentina’s criminal justice system responds to these crimes?
JFM: The official record shows 91 convictions for money laundering in five years. That’s a very low figure — especially since not all of them were high-profile cases.
FATF encourages countries to build complex national systems with goals around prevention, mitigation, and enforcement. But in practice, the system’s performance is measured by the outcomes produced by the traditional criminal justice system. And that system is poorly equipped to manage complex financial investigations aimed at dismantling major criminal economies. It’s unreasonable to expect prosecutors and judges — who were not given that responsibility or the necessary tools — to fulfill such a demanding mission. Political leadership must take ownership of this issue.
IC: Is Argentina’s money laundering primarily transnational in nature, or are networks mostly local?
JFM: By definition, money laundering is transnational. The moment pesos are converted into US dollars, the crime crosses borders. Depositing the proceeds of Bolivian cocaine sales into a local bank makes it a transnational operation. And that local bank necessarily relies on corresponding international relationships.
Financial crime cannot be confined to national territories. The only reason foreign banks that facilitated systemic corruption in Argentina acknowledged it was because they were forced to through legal action. Sooner or later laundering crosses borders, and that’s what makes it so difficult to disrupt in time.
IC: You’ve previously warned that drug trafficking is one of Argentina’s most pressing threats. How has this dynamic evolved in recent years? Is it increasingly tied to financial crime?
JFM: Drug trafficking has clearly intensified. Ten years ago, it wasn’t even seen as a serious concern — Argentina was mostly viewed as a drug transit country. That has changed. We’re now seeing historic highs. Santa Fe province, especially the city of Rosario, marked a turning point. The violence — the number of killings — gave the issue a visibility it had never had before.
So what’s the real challenge? If drug trafficking led to a spike in violence, and then the number of killings dropped — as they did in 2024, when Santa Fe’s homicide rate fell to 4.83 per 100,000, the lowest in a decade — what explains that shift? One answer is that criminal leaders were prosecuted and imprisoned.
SEE ALSO: How Rosario Became Argentina’s Drug Violence Capital
But here’s the real question: Did the illicit business that fueled that violence — the drug trade in Rosario and the corridor linking it to Greater Buenos Aires — vanish? Or are we witnessing an evolution in how organized crime operates? After the arrests and turf wars, are new structures taking shape? That’s a fundamental challenge: to determine whether the economic and financial backbone of these groups has been dismantled — or simply reorganized.
IC: How does Argentina compare to other countries in the region in its efforts to fight money laundering?
JFM: Argentina is at an inflection point. We still have the capacity to strike at money laundering structures. I believe we have more room to maneuver than other countries in the region, where organized crime is already far more entrenched and has captured political decision-making spaces.
In Argentina, we know organized crime has infiltrated local institutions — segments of the police, some judges, a few lawmakers — and we know corruption often goes unpunished. But our political class hasn’t been fully co-opted. That’s why it’s essential for national and provincial authorities to adopt strategies that disrupt the criminal economies tied to organized crime and terrorism.
We still have a window of opportunity to prevent dirty money from contaminating our political campaigns. Ultimately, criminal economies don’t just undermine the financial system — as global policymakers often claim — they threaten the safety of our communities. And that’s a political issue at its core.
*This interview has been edited for clarity and length.*