Mexico’s former public security secretary will be sentenced Wednesday in a U.S. court after being found guilty of receiving bribes to help drug traffickers.
The Brooklyn federal prosecutor’s office has asked the judge to order Genaro García Luna to spend the rest of his life in prison, while his lawyers say he should spend no more than 20 years behind bars.
García Luna, 56, was convicted early last year of receiving millions of dollars in bribes to protect the violent Sinaloa cartel he was supposed to fight. The former official denies the accusations.
The prosecution wrote that García Luna’s actions promoted a drug trafficking conspiracy that led to the deaths of thousands of American and Mexican citizens.
“It is difficult to overstate the magnitude of the defendant’s crimes, the deaths and addiction he facilitated, and his betrayal of the people of Mexico and the United States,” prosecutors wrote. “Their crimes demand justice.”
García Luna headed Mexico’s federal police before taking a position in the presidential cabinet as the country’s top security official, from 2006 to 2012, during the administration of former Mexican President Felipe Calderón.
García Luna was not only considered the architect of Calderón’s bloody war against the cartels, but the United States also praised him as an ally in its fight against drug trafficking. At the trial, photos were shown of García Luna greeting former President Barack Obama and speaking with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Senator John McCain.
But prosecutors claim that, in exchange for millions of dollars, García Luna provided intelligence on investigations against the cartel and information on rival cartels, and facilitated the transit of enormous quantities of drugs.
Prosecutors allege that García Luna ensured that drug traffickers were notified in advance of raids and sabotaged legitimate police operations aimed at apprehending cartel leaders.
Drug traffickers were able to ship more than 1 million kilograms (more than 2 million pounds) of cocaine from Mexico to the United States using planes, trains, trucks and submarines during the time García Luna held his position, prosecutors said.
During the 2018 trial of former Sinaloa cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán in the same court, a former cartel member testified that he had personally provided at least $6 million in bribes to García Luna, and that cartel members agreed to form a fund of up to $50 million to pay for their protection.
Prosecutors also allege that García Luna conspired to overturn the verdict of last year’s trial by seeking to bribe or corruptly convince several inmates at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to support false claims that two government witnesses communicated with each other earlier. of the trial using smuggled cell phones.
In his appeal for clemency, García Luna’s lawyers wrote to a judge that the former security secretary and his family have suffered public attacks during the almost five years he has been in prison.
“He has lost everything he has worked for — his reputation, all his assets, the institutions he defended, and even the independence of Mexico’s judiciary — and he has been unable to control any of it,” they wrote.
“In the last five years alone, she lost two siblings, learned of another’s disability due to COVID-19 complications and the imposition of an arrest warrant against her, and learned that her younger sister was incarcerated due to their relationship with him,” they added.
In Mexico, President Claudia Sheinbaum briefly commented on the case on Tuesday, saying: “The big underlying issue is how someone, even one who was awarded at the behest of the United States, about whom former President Calderón spoke highly of his security secretary, today “He is imprisoned in the United States because it is proven that he was linked to drug trafficking.”
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