Mexican ex-security minister sentenced to 38 years in US prison

Genaro García Luna, the highest-ranking Mexican official ever convicted in the United States, appeared in a sharp suit and dark tie and remained impassive as his sentence was handed down in a New York courtroom.

He was sentenced to more than 38 years in prison and a $2 million fine. It was not the life sentence he could have received, but one that Judge Brian Cogan said reflected the seriousness of his crimes.

A small group of protesters outside the court on Wednesday greeted the news with cheers.

It marks the final chapter in the story of modern Mexico’s most spectacular fall from grace.

If anyone was the czar of Mexico’s drug war – the main architect and public face of the government’s security strategy under then-President Felipe Calderón – it was García Luna.

The sentence will also increase pressure on Mr Calderón, who has always claimed to have no knowledge of his security chief’s illegal activities.

García Luna has maintained his innocence. But to see him sentenced to nearly four decades behind bars for drug-related crimes is more than even his fiercest critics could have imagined during his time in office.

“His role in taking the war on drugs in Mexico to a whole new level starting in 2006 cannot be overstated,” said Falko Ernst, an independent drug war and security expert in Mexico.

“He championed a violence-based solution against organized crime in Mexico as never before and revamped the state apparatus accordingly.”

To discover that during his outwardly ‘proactive’ stance on drug crime he was actually in bed with one of the most violent and feared cartels in the region is emblematic of the kind of corruption and duplicity that makes Mexicans so skeptical of their politicians.

For Mr. Ernst, the García Luna case also exposes a fundamental contradiction underlying the so-called “war on drugs.”

“It shows how this recipe of a so-called ‘good’ state cracking down on the bad guys and wiping them off the map does not match the reality on the ground in Mexico,” he argues.

As Minister of Public Security of Mexico, Genaro García Luna was able to deploy state resources and security forces against the Sinaloa Cartel’s main rivals, an extremely ruthless and violent criminal organization called Los Zetas. In exchange for that favoritism, he received millions of dollars in bribes, for which he was convicted in a US federal court last year.

Suspicion always remained about García Luna and there were open rumors about his involvement in organized crime, albeit without any legal evidence being published during his time in office.

At the heart of his defense was the argument that García Luna, as a top official embroiled in a complex internal security battle, was merely diverting government resources and troops where they were most needed to neutralize the country’s biggest threat. at that moment.

The wisdom of prioritizing certain groups over others is an ongoing debate in Mexico and is essentially as old as the drug war itself.

“Every public safety chief before him did the same thing,” argues Benjamin T Smith, a professor at Warwick University and author of The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade.

“You actually have to choose one over the other because you need informants. Cartels are closed operations,” he says, “and the only way to get in there is to have informants inside. So you support one team over the other.’

Mr Ernst reiterates the same point: “Every government faces the same dilemma. You have too much criminal power to deal with it all at once, so somehow you concentrate your resources and forces in one direction.”

García Luna, of course, turned out to have been well rewarded by the infamous King Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán with millions in drug money for his services.

But even García Luna’s self-enrichment reflects a “thin dividing line,” according to Ernst.

“The issue is whether the corrupt and conniving behavior of government officials serves an idea of ​​law and order as part of a pragmatic approach to pacification, or whether it is merely about lining their pockets.”

The court in New York ruled that García Luna was guilty of the latter.

But some argue that even taking drug money could be considered part of the rules of the game, and that this was known to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) at the time.

“Cartels demand that you take money and wouldn’t trust you if you didn’t,” says Mr Smith. “It’s the old idea that you have to be complicit in corruption.”

Moreover, García Luna’s lawyers argued, the case against him depended largely on the testimony of convicted criminals and drug traffickers already serving prison sentences in the United States, whose reliability was questionable at best.

The idea that the DEA, among others, was aware of Garcia Luna’s complicity with the Sinaloa cartel raises the question why the Americans chose to prosecute him now, when he is no longer a major player and has been in the US for a number of years lives. year.

“It’s worth asking whether these big cases have a real preventive effect,” says Deborah Bonello, investigative journalist and author of Narcas, which is about women in organized crime.

“García Luna left office in 2012 and the damage he has done has already been done. His conviction will not change that. So it feels a bit like ‘too little, too late’.”

Some suggest that the “why now” question may be the result of New York City prosecutors actively trying to expose some of the most high-profile and embarrassing cases in recent Mexican administrations as a warning to other corrupt state officials.

Regardless, the legacy of García Luna’s tenure is still felt in Mexico.

During the arrest earlier this year of one of the Sinaloa Cartel’s co-founders, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the Americans essentially acted alone and did not share any intelligence information with their Mexican counterparts in advance, Ms. Bonello notes. .

“They completely bypassed the Mexicans because of the corruption in law enforcement and intelligence leakage to organized crime. The Americans completely bypassed the Mexicans – and that is partly due to the protection of people like him,” she says.

Following El Mayo’s arrest, which stems from an apparent betrayal by the son of his former partner, El Chapo, the Sinaloa Cartel is embroiled in a violent battle between warring factions.

Dozens of people have been killed in recent weeks and the security situation in the state is rapidly deteriorating, leaving Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum, facing one of her first major challenges since taking office.

Some analysts see a direct line between García Luna’s actions and the current war within the Sinaloa Cartel.

His strategy of cronyism was “fuel to the fire of conflict and criminal power in Mexico,” Ernst says.

“It led to the extreme fragmentation of the criminal landscape into what we see today, which is much more aggressive towards civil society and the legal economy.”

A policy of favoring one party and hitting the other hard has also led to “smaller and smaller groups trying to take control of local politics,” he says.

Given such a legacy of violence and corruption, few in Mexico will mourn the downfall of a man once considered too powerful to fall.