Oscar Lopez in Mexico City
Mon, January 16, 2023
Photograph: Marco Ugarte/AP
One of Mexico’s most powerful former officials will stand trial in the US this week, charged with accepting million-dollar bribes from a violent cartel in a case with profound political implications that could expose the inner workings of the “war on drugs” on both sides of the border.
Genaro García Luna, a former head of Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI who went on to lead the country’s security ministry, was arrested in Texas in 2019, charged with conspiring to traffic cocaine and lying to the US government.
Related: Twenty-four hours of terror as cartel violence engulfs Mexican city
He was subsequently charged with taking multimillion-dollar bribes from the powerful Sinaloa cartel, once run by the drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, in exchange for allowing it to operate with impunity, all while he was supposedly spearheading Mexico’s anti-drug efforts.
The accusations against García Luna surfaced during El Chapo’s trial, when one of the Sinaloa cartel’s members testified that he had given the former security minister briefcases filled with cash. If convicted, the former official faces up to life in prison.
“For nearly two decades, García Luna betrayed those he was sworn to protect”, said Seth DuCharme, acting US attorney for the eastern district of New York, announcing the second set of charges in 2020, “by accepting bribes from members of the Sinaloa cartel to facilitate their crimes and empower their criminal enterprise.”
The trial, which is set to begin in a Brooklyn court on Tuesday, has the potential to expose the insidious corruption that has plagued Mexican security agencies, while also underscoring the failures of the US-supported fight against drug trafficking groups, and provide Mexico’s current president with still more ammunition for his constant attacks against previous administrations.
Calderón sends in the army
Mexico’s “war on drugs” began in late 2006 when the president at the time, Felipe Calderón, ordered thousands of troops onto the streets in response to an explosion of horrific violence in his native state of Michoacán.
Calderón hoped to smash the drug cartels with his heavily militarized onslaught but the approach was counter-productive and exacted a catastrophic human toll. As Mexico’s military went on the offensive, the body count sky-rocketed to new heights and tens of thousands were forced from their homes, disappeared or killed.
Kingpin strategy
Simultaneously Calderón also began pursuing the so-called “kingpin strategy” by which authorities sought to decapitate the cartels by targeting their leaders.
That policy resulted in some high-profile scalps – notably Arturo Beltrán Leyva who was gunned down by Mexican marines in 2009 – but also did little to bring peace. In fact, many believe such tactics served only to pulverize the world of organized crime, creating even more violence as new, less predictable factions squabbled for their piece of the pie.
Under Calderón’s successor, Enrique Peña Nieto, the government’s rhetoric on crime softened as Mexico sought to shed its reputation as the headquarters of some the world’s most murderous mafia groups.
But Calderón’s policies largely survived, with authorities targeting prominent cartel leaders such as Sinaloa’s Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
When “El Chapo” was arrested in early 2016, Mexico’s president bragged: “Mission accomplished”. But the violence went on. By the time Peña Nieto left office in 2018, Mexico had suffered another record year of murders, with nearly 36,000 people slain.
"Hugs not bullets"
The leftwing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power in December, promising a dramatic change in tactics. López Obrador, or Amlo as most call him, vowed to attack the social roots of crime, offering vocational training to more than 2.3 million disadvantaged young people at risk of being ensnared by the cartels.
“It will be virtually impossible to achieve peace without justice and [social] welfare,” Amlo said, promising to slash the murder rate from an average of 89 killings per day with his “hugs not bullets” doctrine.
Amlo also pledged to chair daily 6am security meetings and create a 60,000 strong "National Guard". But those measures have yet to pay off, with the new security force used mostly to hunt Central American migrants.
Mexico now suffers an average of about 96 murders per day, with nearly 29,000 people killed since Amlo took office.
“During Felipe Calderón’s presidency, [García Luna] was one of the two or three most important actors in the fight against drug trafficking, probably the most important,” said Rafael Fernández de Castro, director of the Center for US-Mexican Studies at the University of California, San Diego, and a former foreign policy adviser to Calderón. “So yes, it is very significant.”
Once the head of Mexico’s Federal Investigation Agency, García Luna was selected by Calderón in 2006 to serve as secretary of public security, which also put him in charge of Mexico’s now defunct federal police.
Related: Architect of Mexico’s war on drugs held in Texas for taking cartel bribes
Throughout Calderón’s presidency, García Luna was tasked with developing and implementing the president’s militarized assault on the nation’s powerful drug cartels. In doing so, he worked closely with American security officials and traveled regularly to the US.
“He was one of Washington’s favorites,” said Fernández de Castro.
But according to the current US attorney for the eastern district of New York, Breon Peace, García Luna was secretly receiving millions of dollars from the Sinaloa cartel. In a letter last week to Judge Brian M Cogan, Peace said that, in exchange for the bribes, the cartel was granted “safe passage for its drug shipments, sensitive law enforcement information about investigations into the cartel, and information about rival drug cartels”.
The cartel was also at times tipped off about potential arrests, and even if they were arrested, cartel members were allowed to walk free. While being protected by García Luna, the Sinaloa cartel was able to import “multi-ton drug loads” to New York, according to Peace.
After leaving office in 2012, García Luna moved to Miami, where his lavish lifestyle, including a multimillion-dollar home and yacht, was supported by businessmen with whom he had worked while in office, helping them extend government surveillance and technology contracts.
Using what the US attorney called “an opaque constellation of shell companies, straw buyers, foreign bank accounts, cash businesses, and proxies”, García Luna is alleged to have “spent his time peddling the influence he had gained while participating in the conspiracy to create wealth for himself in the United States”.
García Luna has pleaded not guilty to the charges. César de Castro, a lawyer for the former security secretary, did not respond to an interview request.
People who knew and worked with García Luna, particularly in his early days as head of the Federal Investigation Agency, described him as serious and strict – a figure at odds with the mansion-dwelling Miami playboy portrayed by US prosecutors.
“He was a very disciplined guy, very institutional,” said Gustavo Mohar, who served as the general secretary of Mexico’s top intelligence agency CISEN under President Calderón. “He was the classic policeman who in front of his superiors was very ‘Yes sir, no sir.’”
The problem, said Mohar, came once García Luna was appointed to the head of the security ministry, a position with extraordinary power.
He became the guy in charge of taking down organized crime. I think that warped his sense of reality
Gustavo Mohar
“He became the policeman, the guy in charge of taking down organized crime, and particularly drug trafficking,” Mohar said. “I think that warped his sense of reality.”
Given the close ties the former security secretary once enjoyed with Washington, the trial could also be awkward for US officials, security analysts said.
“It’s part of this complex web of cooperation but also complicity between officials in Mexico and the United States in the war against drug trafficking and organized crime,” said Fernández de Castro, the former Calderón adviser.
Related: Betrayal, torture and a $100m bribe: what the El Chapo trial has revealed
Peace, the US attorney, said the government “expects that numerous witnesses, including several former high-ranking members of the Sinaloa cartel, will testify”. As happened at the trial of El Chapo, this testimony, along with García Luna’s own, has the potential to implicate current and former officials on both sides of the border.
But one official likely looking forward to the trial is the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who built his brand campaigning on the corruption that plagued his predecessors.
“This is a marvelous gift for Andrés Manuel López Obrador, because it speaks to the corruption of the past,” said Fernández de Castro. “It’s a football the US justice system is giving him so he can score an incredible goal.”
Unlike the 2020 arrest of Gen Salvador Cienfuegos, which caused such outrage among Mexican officials that the US returned him to Mexico, López Obrador has spent months raging about García Luna – even reprimanding Mexican media for not covering the trial enough.
“It’s going to be interesting,” the president said last week. “It’s very important for me to follow it, and I hope the media are going to be reporting on it constantly.”
US drug trial opens for Mexico ex-security head
In this Jan 3, 2020 file courtroom sketch, defense attorney Cesar de Castro, left, Mexico's former top security official, Genaro Garcia Luna, center, and a court interpreter, appear for an arraignment hearing in Brooklyn federal court in New York, Jan. 3, 2020. The former top security official is scheduled to go on trial Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2023, on charges he accepted millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for helping the powerful Sinaloa Cartel move drugs and its members avoid capture.
(AP Photo/Elizabeth Williams, File)
In this 2008 photo provided by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York, Jesus Zambada is shown. In 2019, jurors in his New York trial heard Zambada testify that he personally made at least $6 million in hidden payments to top Mexican security official Genaro Garcia Luna on behalf of his older brother, cartel boss Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.
(U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York via AP, File)
MARK STEVENSON
Mon, January 16, 2023
MARK STEVENSON
Mon, January 16, 2023
MEXICO CITY (AP) — The man who was once Mexico's top security official and in charge of fighting the drug cartels goes on trial Tuesday on charges he accepted millions of dollars in bribes in exchange for helping the powerful Sinaloa Cartel move drugs and its members avoid capture.
Genaro García Luna was best known as the mumbling, tough-looking former security secretary under ex-President Felipe Calderón who spearheaded the bloody war on cartels between 2006 and 2012.
United States prosecutors allege he was so brazen he accepted tens of millions of dollars, often stuffed in briefcases. The evidence against him includes pay stubs, though whether they were from official jobs, private sector consultancy, cartel payments or other bribes is unclear.
They say he continued to live off his ill-gotten proceeds even after he moved to the United States, where he was arrested in 2019, though the defense says he was a legitimate businessman. Jury selection was scheduled to begin Tuesday.
In the end, the case could reveal the inner workings of how Mexican cartels have been able to operate so openly for so long: by bribing Mexican police and military right up to the top ranks.
“For decades, Mexico’s political elite, of all parties, has sought by any means to have security ministers, generals, police commanders, interior secretaries and high-ranking officials tried and imprisoned in Mexico … all that to avoid them giving information on the ties between the drug cartels and politicians,” said Mexican security analyst David Saucedo. “Garcia Luna’s trial in the United States breaks with that pattern.”
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has welcomed the trial expected to cast light on corruption in the administration of Calderón, who the president accuses of having robbed him of the presidency in 2006.
But López Obrador himself fought tooth and nail to avoid a U.S. trial of former defense secretary Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos on similar charges in 2020, at one point threatening to kick DEA agents out of Mexico unless the general was returned, which he was.
The trial begins just days after U.S. President Joe Biden met with López Obrador in Mexico City. The two governments pledged continued cooperation against the drug cartels, especially against the scourge of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which contributed to more than 107,000 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. in 2021. López Obrador scrapped the civilian federal police force that García Luna once led and put the military in charge of much of the country's security.
“It’s not the same to put a civilian PAN official on trial, as it is to put a defense secretary on trial, when your whole national security policy rests on the armed forces,” said Ana Vanessa Cárdenas, an international security analyst at the Anahuac University, referring to Calderón's conservative National Action Party.
García Luna has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking charges and a continuing criminal enterprise. He could face decades in prison if convicted.
What he will face in a Brooklyn courtroom is a parade of government witnesses, including high-level cartel members, of a kind not seen in Brooklyn since Sinaloa boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was convicted there in 2019 and sentenced to life in prison. Some accusations against García Luna surfaced at the Guzmán trial.
“While holding public office, (García Luna) used his official positions to assist the Sinaloa Cartel, a notorious Mexican drug cartel, in exchange for multimillion-dollar bribes. At trial, the government expects that numerous witnesses, including several former high-ranking members of the Sinaloa Cartel, will testify about bribes paid to the defendant in exchange for protection,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace wrote in a court filing last week.
“In exchange for these bribes, the defendant provided the Sinaloa Cartel with, among other things, safe passage for its drug shipments, sensitive law enforcement information about investigations into the cartel, and information about rival drug cartels,” Peace wrote. “These payments allowed the cartel at times to receive warnings in advance of law enforcement efforts to apprehend cartel members and to allow cartel members to be released if arrested.”
Before convicting Guzmán in 2019, jurors in his New York trial heard former cartel member Jesús Zambada testify that he personally made at least $6 million in hidden payments to García Luna, on behalf of his older brother, cartel boss Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.
The cartel is now believed to be run by Zambada and at least three of Guzmán's sons, one of whom was arrested earlier this month on an extradition request from the United States.
García Luna isn't the first top Mexican official arrested for involvement with drug traffickers. Gen. Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo was made Mexico’s drug czar by President Ernesto Zedillo in 1996. He was arrested the following year after it was discovered he was living in a luxury apartment owned by the leader of the Juarez cartel, Amado Carrillo Fuentes.
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