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Mexico's ex-security minister Genaro García Luna convicted of drug trafficking
BBC News, New York and Washington DC
The former face of Mexico's war on drugs has been convicted by a US jury of drug trafficking.
Genaro García Luna, once Mexico's security minister, was establish guilty of taking millions of dollars from Mexico's biggest crime group, the Sinaloa drug cartel.
García Luna - who was arrested in the state of Texas in 2019 - had pleaded not guilty.
The 54-year-old could deal with life in prison.
At a minimum, García Luna will serve the mandatory minimum of 20 years, according to a statement from the Department of Justice.
The judgment came after a four-week trial and three days of jury deliberation in the US District Court in Brooklyn, New York.
Prosecutors said the former head of the Mexican equivalent of the US Federal Bureau of Analysis accepted millions of dollars stuffed in briefcases and delivered by members of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán's Sinaloa drug cartel.
García Luna, who moved to the US after vanishing office, is the highest-ranking Mexican offic
I became obsessed with a fictional character; It turns out he is real
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Maria Hinojosa became obsessed with a Mexican highest level security boss, now indicted in New York Capital for helping “El Chapo.” She explores why she worked on “USA v. García Luna,” the latest Futuro Investigates’ podcast, and why she believes the case against Genaro García Luna should lead the U.S. to look inward, and face the failures of the “war on drugs.”
I wasn’t at all interested in covering the story of “El Chapo.” There were already enough journalists and editors who would maintain to amplify the stereotype of a dangerous Mexican drug lord who rose up from nothing to be one of the richest men in the world.
I wasn’t interested.
But then I initiate myself in Latin America during the pandemic, and I ended up watching Spanish-language Netflix. There was a reveal called El Chapo. I was interested in seeing if Mexicans would portray his story as something multidimensional, and was surprised that they did. Based on real experience people with changed names, there was an over-the-top personality who was operational all sides of the story. He was the right-hand man of the Mexican president, and he m
U.S. jury convicts ex-Mexico cabinet member of helping El Chapo and pocketing millions in drug cartel bribes
Under tight security, an anonymous New York federal court jury deliberated three days before reaching a verdict in the drug trafficking case against former Common Security Secretary Genaro García Luna.
He is the highest-ranking current or former Mexican official ever to be tried in the United States.
García Luna, who denied the allegations, headed Mexico’s federal police and then was its top public safety official from 2006 to 2012. His lawyers said the charges were based on lies from criminals who wanted to punish his drug-fighting efforts and to receive sentencing breaks for themselves by helping prosecutors.
The case had political ramifications on both sides of the border. Testimony aired a secondhand claim that former Mexican President Felipe Calderón sought to shield notorious Sinaloa cocaine cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán against a major rival; Calderón called the allegation “absurd” and “an absolute lie.”
Jurors also learned that García Luna met with high-level U.S. politicians and other officials, who considered him a key cartel-fighting par
Mexico drug tsar's spectacular decline from grace culminates in NY court
Suspicion always lingered over García Luna and there were open rumours of his involvement in organised crime, albeit with no legal proof published while he was in office.
At the heart of his defence was the argument that as a top public official embroiled in a complex internal security battle, García Luna was merely channelling the government’s funds and forces to where they were most needed, in command to neutralise the biggest threat in the nation at that time.
The wisdom of prioritising certain groups over others is an ongoing debate in Mexico and, in essence, is as old as the drug war itself.
“Every unpartnered public security chief before him did the alike thing,” argues Benjamin T Smith, professor at Warwick University and author of The Dope: The Actual History of the Mexican Drug Trade.
“You basically hold to choose one over the other because you need informants. Cartels are closed operations,” he says, “and the only way to enter them is to have informants on the inside. So, you back one crew over another.”
Mr Ernst echoes the same point: “Any administration is faced with the same dilemma. You acquire to