Mexican ex-lawman's trial may ripple past courtroom
NEW YORK >> As the prosecution of Genaro Garcia Luna, Mexico’s former top security official, starts winding down, a jury will be called on to answer the central question in the case: whether Garcia Luna, who once served as the public face of his country’s war on drugs, led a double life and took millions in bribes from the very cartels he was supposedly pursuing.
But the trial’s outcome will also send ripples far beyond the New York federal courthouse where the jurors have heard stories about boatloads of cocaine, a cartel civil war and vast cash payments made to Garcia Luna in places like a drug-filled warehouse and a car wash owned by a gangster.
An acquittal in the case could spark a firestorm in Mexico, casting doubt on the ability of U.S. authorities to collect convincing evidence about toplevel Mexican corruption, which has traditionally received less scrutiny than the crimes of cartel kingpins.
A conviction could have an equally serious but quieter effect, leaving unresolved a question mostly unanswered during the trial: What did U.S. officials know about Garcia Luna’s ties to Mexico’s biggest crime group, the Sinaloa drug cartel, when he served as director of Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI and then as the country’s public security secretary, a powerful Cabinetlevel post?
Whatever the outcome, one thing is certain: It is unlikely to affect the dismal spiral of cartel bloodshed in Mexico or stem the flow of drugs into the United States.
Dangerous narcotics like fentanyl continue to spill across the border, killing more Americans in recent years than gun violence and traffic accidents combined.
And despite more than $3 billion in foreign aid from the United States over the past 15 years, Mexican law enforcement has been unable to stop the growth of the cartels, which have seized control of large swaths of the country and unleashed violence that has left hundreds of thousands of people dead, wounded or disappeared.
The indictment against Garcia Luna, the highestranking Mexican official to be tried in the United States for drug trafficking and corruption charges, was supposed to have marked a new day for accountability: the first in a series of U.S. corruption cases brought against Mexican officials, U.S. federal prosecutors say.
The charges were filed in late 2019 in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, months after a witness at the trial of Joaquin Guzman Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo, testified in spectacular fashion about handing Garcia Luna suitcases stuffed with cash.
But since then, the appetite for such prosecutions has vanished, largely because of the collapse of another Mexican corruption case in Brooklyn. In that one, Salvador Cienfuegos, Mexico’s former defense minister, was arrested in late 2020 in Los Angeles, and accused of bribery and drug trafficking. But weeks later, after intense pressure from Mexico, he was released, as prosecutors dropped the charges.
An acquittal in the Garcia Luna case could add to the already deep sense of defeat among U.S. prosecutors, while at the same time giving Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador fresh energy to criticize the American legal and political systems.
A conviction could help blunt such arguments, although it would not likely settle a different issue: the lingering question of what U.S. officials knew about Garcia Luna and when they knew it. The jury at the trial has heard little about the suspicions in U.S. political and law enforcement circles about Garcia Luna and the decisions made, despite them, to continue working with him.
Several U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officers came forward to describe those suspicions but spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Others interviewed were former Mexican or U.S. officials who are now private government consultants working on sensitive matters.
Rumors about Garcia Luna’s connections to the Sinaloa cartel started swirling as early as 2001, the year he took control of the Federal Investigation Agency — and the same year Guzman escaped from a Mexican prison.