Drug money IS their economy.

In David Zlutnick’s interview, the always candid Charles Bowden calls it as he sees it describing a critical picture of days to come. “…the extreme violence seen in Mexico is a sign of a deeper societal disintegration resulting from governmental corruption, failed economic policies, and the War on Drugs.” We can’t fix Mexico, he says, but we could stop making it worse.

War on the Border: An Interview with Charles Bowden

“We cannot run a country with a secret underclass. We cannot run a country where there’s two types of human beings. We did it once; it caused a civil war, killed 600,000 people, and set back an entire region of our country—the South—for a century. Finally end the War on Drugs. There’s no solution, for Mexico or the United States, by giving tens of billions of dollars a year to a criminal class.” ~Charles Bowden

Bowden alludes to Wachovia in the interview as well as the “drug cash” bank rescue, so this is a good back up piece by Observer from guardian.co.uk.
How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico’s murderous drug gangs:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/​world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-​mexico-drug-gangs

The conclusion to the case was only the tip of an iceberg, demonstrating the role of the “legal” banking sector in swilling hundreds of billions of dollars – the blood money from the murderous drug trade in Mexico and other places in the world – around their global operations, now bailed out by the taxpayer.

At the height of the 2008 banking crisis, Antonio Maria Costa, then head of the United Nations office on drugs and crime, said he had evidence to suggest the proceeds from drugs and crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to banks on the brink of collapse. “Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade,” he said. “There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.”

DCKennedy