U.S. Treasury Targets Key Link Between Mexican and Colombian Drug Cartels

Mexico City | May 27, 2009

The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) today identified Colombian drug trafficker Pedro Antonio Bermudez Suaza (alias “El Arquitecto”), who operated a trafficking network in Mexico for twenty years, as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker (SDNT). Mexican authorities captured Bermudez Suaza in Mexico City on October 2, 2008.

“When Mexican authorities captured Bermudez Suaza, they took down a major conduit of cocaine between the Colombian and Mexican drug cartels,” said OFAC Director Adam J. Szubin.

OFAC also identified as SDNTs 13 other individuals and 14 entities located in Colombia, Mexico, and Panama that act on behalf of Bermudez Suaza. Mexican nationals Felipe Bermudez Duran (Bermudez Suaza’s son), Julio Cesar Sanchez Martell, and Omar Alfredo Jacome del Valle are among the individuals designated today. Mexican authorities arrested these three men in 2007 for their links to a plane carrying 3.7 metric tons of cocaine, which crashed in Mexico on September 24, 2007.

Today’s designation action freezes any assets the designees may have that are subject to U.S. jurisdiction and prohibits all financial and commercial transactions by any U.S. person with the designated companies and individuals.

To read the full text of the OFAC press release, please go to:
http://www.treas.gov/press/releases/tg147.htm