The owner of La Popular, a chain of money-transfer businesses in Oregon and Washington, was sentenced Wednesday to more than three years in federal prison for laundering millions of dollars in drug proceeds to Mexico.
Brenda Lili Barrera Orantes, 40, of Beaverton, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder monetary instruments.
She owned and operated La Popular stores in Hillsboro, Beaverton, Woodburn, Odell, Canby and Vancouver. She also served as the business’ compliance officer, responsible for following the rules and regulations governing its financial transactions, prosecutors said.
U.S. District Judge Karin J. Immergut sentenced Barrera Orantes to three years and five months in prison.
From August through November 2024, La Popular stores sent more than $4.2 million in wire transfers to places in Mexico associated with drug trafficking, according to Assistant U.S. Attorneys Christopher L. Cardani and Julia Jarrett.
Investigators from Homeland Security Investigations, working with the Internal Revenue Service and the Westside Interagency Narcotics team, initiated the investigation in 2021 based on tips from a confidential informant. Police investigating fentanyl trafficking discovered that many of the drug dealers were using La Popular to transmit their drug proceeds.
“By early 2021, defendant and her La Popular businesses had become a magnet for drug traffickers in the Portland metro area,” according to Cardani and Jarrett.
Barrera Orantes charged a 10% fee for each transaction, leaving her with at least $1.8 million, according to the prosecutors. La Popular broke down the cash into multiple wire transfers across its stores using false names and addresses for the senders to avoid record-keeping requirements, they said.
In April, federal agents searched Barrera Orantes’ Beaverton home with a warrant and found $120,000 in cash in the bottom of a closet, bundled in $10,000 stacks, Jarrett said.
They also searched three La Popular stores, in Beaverton, Hillsboro and Vancouver, and seized more than $300,000 in cash, a 2021 Cadillac Escalade, jewelry and high-end clothing.
Barrera Orantes agreed to forfeit her Beaverton home and all the seized cash and other property tied to her crime.
Her defense lawyer, John C. Terry, had argued for a prison term of no more than a year and a day, noting his client is a first-time offender who accepted responsibility and has already served more than nine months in jail since her arrest. He said she conducted the wire transfers for confidential informants who were acting at the direction of federal investigators.
She now is hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and also faces deportation, severing her from her three minor children who are all U.S. citizens after she had built a life in the United States for more than 21 years, Terry said.
Barrera Orantes, originally from Guatemala, was ordered nearly a decade ago to voluntarily leave the country after overstaying her visa but did not leave, according to the government.
