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For compliance officers charged with monitoring financial crime news, the timing of U.S. Treasury Department sanctions designations last month against Ismael Guerrero and Jose Perales may have seemed odd. The pair had been arrested in Mexico the previous year for laundering money on behalf of Los Zetas. The arrests alone should have prompted banks to check their accounts for Guerrero and Perales, long before the designations by the department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). The Obama administration blacklisted the cartel as a whole in April 2009 and included the group as a transnational criminal organization in a separate sanctions...