Mexico riveted over fate of former security chief

Ex-official accused of taking millions in cartel bribes

MEXICO CITY — He has talked about the case for months, likening it to a television crime drama and saying its revelations dramatize the deep corruption of his predecessors.

But Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador says he isn’t going to forecast the outcome of the U.S. trial against this country’s former top security official.

“What do I expect from the jury? We are going to wait,” López Obrador told reporters on Thursday. “I don’t want to make any prediction. But I am not going to let this be. We are not going to shut up.”

On Friday, the Mexican president called on Washington to investigate the role of U.S. law enforcement authorities and other U.S. officials who worked closely with Mexico’s exsecurity chief.

Following a four-week trial, jurors in U.S. District Court in New York continued deliberations Friday on the fate of Genaro García Luna.

While serving as Mexico’s chief law enforcement officer, García Luna is accused of having taken millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa cartel headed formerly by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, now imprisoned for life in the United States after being tried three years ago in the same Brooklyn courthouse.

García Luna was the security secretary in the administration of exPresident Felipe Calderon, who served from 2006 to 2012 and unleashed a bloody war against drug traffickers. The anti-drug campaign, which often featured García Luna as its public face, left tens of thousands dead, but failed to rein in cartels or reduce cross-border drug trafficking.

The prosecution in New York has drawn intense interest in Mexico, where its sometimes sensational disclosures about links between drug cartels and officials have featured prominently in the news and and on social media. Mexican outlets have dispatched correspondents to New York to report on the proceedings.

In court, ex-cartel operatives with such nicknames as “The King,” “The Rabbit,” “The Devil’ and “The Big One” have taken the stand to finger García Luna as a greedy crook who collected a fortune in cash as police and other officials on his watch allowed massive cocaine shipments to flow through Mexico to the U.S.

The defense has characterized the witnesses incriminating García Luna as a collection of “murderers, kidnappers and criminals” who fabricated allegations in a bid to get more lenient sentences from U.S. prosecutors.

For many Mexicans, the case has confirmed their worst suspicions about complicity between government officials and criminal gangs that run amok, profiting from the enormous illicit trade to the U.S., along with other rackets. And, in a country where criminal trials are largely secret affairs based on written declarations, the sometimes explosive testimony from a U.S. courtroom has proved riveting.

“From the parade of witnesses of the prosecution we can … argue that García Luna is, in reality, a symbol of what the court should be perceiving: Mexico is a rogue state that is rotten,” wrote columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio this week in El Financiero newspaper. “One doesn’t have to know the verdict … to suppose that, in the eyes of many worldwide, we are a nation … controlled by criminals.”