Confiscated cocaine in Hamburg, Germany, 18 November 2015. discovered in a container from Central America. Christian Charisius/DPA/PA Images. All rights reserved.
The US State Department has named seven Central American countries as havens for laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking and organized crime. This is the first time since 2013 that the State Department has included Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama together in the list of primary money laundering countries in its annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR).
An important development in the 2017 INSCR - which refers to trends and statistics from the previous year - is that El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua have re-entered the list of "major money laundering countries," which the State Department defines as those "whose financial institutions engage in currency transactions involving significant amounts of proceeds from international narcotics trafficking."
