Follow the Money: Countering Illicit Finance in Latin America
International money laundering is a multitrillion-dollar industry that continues to adapt and evolve, making it easier for designated foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) to disguise criminal proceeds and harder for U.S. law enforcement to keep up. As the Trump administration ramps up military operations against recently designated FTOs in Latin America and the Caribbean, identifying, disrupting, and seizing the illicit financial flows that sustain complex criminal networks and threaten the integrity of the U.S. financial system become an essential component in the fight against transnational crime.
Join a Quincy Institute discussion with prominent experts on illicit finance as they discuss the suite of financial tools the U.S. government has at its disposal to weaken FTOs’ lifeblood while reducing the exposure of U.S. military personnel in operations abroad and more effectively countering drug trafficking at home. We will hear from Yara Esquivel, senior financial sector working at the World Bank’s Financial Markets Integrity unit; Julia Yansura, program director for Environmental Crime and Illicit Finance at the FACT Coalition; and Karthik Sankaran, senior research fellow in geoeconomics at the Quincy Institute. Lee Schlenker, research associate for Latin America at QI, will moderate.
The conversation will take place on Thursday, October 22nd from 1:00 – 2:00 ET.
Panelists
Yara Esquivel — Yara Esquivel is a senior financial sector specialist working at the World Bank’s Financial Markets Integrity unit. She is an attorney with twenty years of experience in the investigation of fraud and corruption. She has a master’s degree in International Human Rights Law from Oxford University. She was an anti-corruption prosecutor in her native Costa Rica, where she investigated a former head of State. Ms. Esquivel has been a fraud and corruption investigator for the United Nations in Africa and the World Bank in Latin America. She has been with the World Bank for over ten years, and currently works with the Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR), a partnership between the World Bank and the United Nation’s Office on Drug and Crime, providing technical assistance and policy advice on the recovery of proceeds of corruption.
Julia Yansura — Julia Yansura is the program director for Environmental Crime and Illicit Finance at the FACT Coalition. Her work aims to close anti money laundering and anti corruption loopholes that allow the proceeds of environmental crime to be laundered into the U.S. financial system. Geographically, her work is focused on the Western Hemisphere. Prior to joining FACT, Yansura served as Program Director for Latin America and the Caribbean at another organization working on financial integrity, where she led projects in Colombia, Belize, Ecuador and El Salvador covering environmental crimes such as illegal mining and logging, as well as on other topics such as beneficial ownership, real estate, cryptocurrency, and international trade. From 2012-2019, Yansura worked at the Inter-American Dialogue on remittances, mobile money and financial inclusion.
Karthik Sankaran — Karthik Sankaran is a senior research fellow in geoeconomics in the Global South program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He was originally trained as a Modern European Historian but instead pursued careers in journalism and then finance as a strategist and as a trader/portfolio manager. He was engaged primarily with foreign exchange and fixed income in emerging markets at a variety of institutions on the sell-side and the buy-side. In this capacity, he saw the ripples of the Asian financial crisis of 1997 into Russia and Latin America, and then the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, and the subsequent Eurozone crisis of 2011. He then joined Eurasia Group as Director, Global Strategy, where he worked with country and regional teams to chart feedback loops among political and geopolitical risks, macroeconomics, and market responses.
Lee Schlenker (Moderator) — Lee Schlenker is a research associate with the Global South program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, where he focuses on Latin America. His research interests include US-Cuba relations, Colombian peace and security issues, counternarcotics, sanctions policy, and regional integration and geopolitics. Lee has written for Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The Hill, and The Intercept, and been quoted in The New York Times, Financial Times, Associated Press, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times and others. Before joining QI, he served as policy director at the Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect, producer with award-winning media outlet Belly of the Beast, and Cuba program director and Northeast regional director at Witness for Peace.