Genaro García Luna “betrayed” Mexico and the US by receiving millions from drug traffickers, the New York prosecutor alleges in court

Former Secretary of Security of Mexico, Genaro García Luna “betrayed” his country and the United States by receiving millions of dollars from drug trafficking, the prosecutor said Monday during his trial in New York.

The architect of the war against drug trafficking that launched Felipe Calderon in his six-year term (206-2012), he would have “taken millions of dollars in bribes over and over again” from the Sinaloa cartel, according to el fiscal Philip Pilmar During the session chaired by the Judge Brian Congan.

García Luna listened with a relaxed countenance, he put his hand to his heart several times and from time to time he blew kisses to his wife and daughters present in court.

This former Mexican official, the most senior to appear before a US court, “betrayed his country and ours,” Pilmar said. “No one is above the law”he warned.

García Luna helped the Sinaloa cartel of Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán to introduce 53 tons of cocaine to the United States, becoming one more “member” of the conspiracy, according to the prosecution. The prisoner was director of the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI) between 2001 and 2005 and Secretary of Public Safety from 2006-2012.

the face of war

For the defense the whole case is based on “shaky foundations” and it has been built with the testimonies of Calderón’s “victims of the drug war” who want to “kill two birds with one stone: reduce their sentence and take revenge on the person that Mexican drug traffickers hate the most.” It is not for nothing that they consider it the “face of war.”

García Luna is charged with five counts, including participating in an ongoing criminal enterprise, conspiring to traffic cocaine and lying to authorities when he applied for US citizenship in 2018, the country where he had lived since leaving the Mexican government in 2012.

Payment Witness

According to the defense, there is “no money, no photos, no videos, no recordings, no texts, no evidence” to support these accusations.

But the first witness for the prosecution, Sergio Villarreal Barragan, alias “El Grande”, a former federal police officer, assured that he himself witnessed the bribery payments to García Luna by the drug lord Arturo Beltrán Leyva; died in 2009 and one of the brothers of the cartel of the same name, who before breaking his alliance with El Chapo in 2008, was at the service of the Sinaloa cartel.

“When I entered (in the Beltrán Leyva cartel in 2001), he was already paid (bribes) and they were paid until the last day of Beltrán”, said in Spanish “El Grande” who before turning to drug trafficking had been a federal police officer.

In exchange, García Luna “gave us information about operations, made it easier for us to place and remove commanders in any place in Mexico and we shared information to be able to hit our opponents,” he said in Spanish in the Brooklyn court.

The name of García Luna came up in the Chapo trial. The drug trafficker Jesús “Rey” Zambada said that he had given the then official suitcases with between six and eight million dollars in bribes between 2005 and 2007.

shaky foundations

Arrested in Dallas in December 2019, García Luna settled in the United States when he left the Mexican government in 2012 and whose citizenship he applied for in 2018.

“Quantity is not quality”the defense told the jury and when “you don’t have quality you overwhelm with quantity”, he lashed out.

The defense recalled the congratulations and awards from the US government for its “efforts” to combat the Mexican drug cartels and its “close relationship” with US security forces.

The accused met with then President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, among other personalities.

The name of García Luna is also linked to that of the French Florence Cassez and her ex-partner Ismael Vallarta, accused of leading a gang of kidnappers, in a murky case that shook diplomatic relations with France. Cassez was released after spending more than six years in prison, but Vallarta has been detained for almost 20 years, without trial.

The current government of Mexico, which has requested his extradition to the United States, also accuses García Luna of diverting more than 200 million dollars from the treasury to family businesses.