News Americas, BOGOTA, Colombia, Fri. Aug. 12, 2011: A woman who police say laundered money for Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, which smuggles large quantities of cocaine from Colombia to Mexico and on to the United States, has been nabbed.
Colombian police say they arrested Dolly Cifuentes Villa in a wealthy neighborhood of Medellin. It is alleged she managed 32 companies in Colombia and 17 abroad, including in Panama, Mexico, Brazil and the US, all funded by money from the drug trade.
Cifuentes also owned property in her hometown of Medellin, the Colombian capital, Bogota, and on the Rosario islands, off the Caribbean coast.
The 47-year-old reportedly took over the money-laundering business from her late brother Francisco, who was the personal pilot of the Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Escobar was killed in 1993.
