Mexico’s public security chief sentenced to more than 38 years and $2 million for taking bribes from cartels

• Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s former public security minister, was convicted by a New York jury in 2023 of taking millions of dollars in bribes to protect the violent Sinaloa cartel he supposedly fought. He is the highest-ranking Mexican government official to be convicted in the United States.
• During his sentencing hearing before a federal judge in Brooklyn on Wednesday, García Luna maintained his innocence and said the case against him was based on false information from criminals and the Mexican government.
• García Luna was sentenced to 38 years and four months in prison and a $2 million fine.

The man once heralded as the architect of Mexico’s war against drug cartels was sentenced Wednesday to more than 38 years in prison in the U.S. for taking massive bribes to help drug traffickers.

Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s former public security minister, was convicted by a New York jury in 2023 of taking millions of dollars in bribes to protect the violent Sinaloa cartel he supposedly fought. He is the highest-ranking Mexican government official to be convicted in the United States.

During his sentencing hearing before a federal judge in Brooklyn on Wednesday, García Luna maintained his innocence, saying the case against him was based on false information from criminals and the Mexican government.

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“I have great respect for the law,” he said in Spanish. “I did not commit these crimes.”

García Luna, 56, led Mexico’s federal police before holding a cabinet-level position as the top security official under then-President Felipe Calderón from 2006 to 2012. At the time, García Luna was hailed by the US as an ally in its fight against drug trafficking.

But U.S. prosecutors said that in exchange for millions of dollars, he provided intelligence on investigations against the cartel, information on rival gangs and the safe passage of vast quantities of drugs.

Mexican Genaro Garcia Luna speaks during a ceremony to declare June 2 as Federal Police Day in Mexico City on June 2, 2011. (AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini, File)

After the conviction, Calderón said via the social platform Calderón said that taking on the cartels was “one of the most difficult decisions of my life. But I would do it again, because it is the right thing to do.”

Earlier, a group of about fifteen demonstrators outside the courthouse celebrated the verdict. Some held a banner reading in Spanish: “Calderon knew,” while others waved signs denouncing his political party.

Prosecutors had asked for a life sentence. García Luna’s lawyers had argued that he should receive no more than 20 years.

U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan said he was not moved by previous awards García Luna received for his work in the war on drugs.

“That was your cover,” Cogan said before imposing the sentence. “You are guilty of these crimes, sir. You cannot parade these words and say, ‘I am Police Officer of the Year.'”

In addition to the sentence of 38 years and four months, the judge imposed a $2 million fine.

During the trial, photos were shown of García Luna shaking hands with former President Barack Obama and speaking with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Senator John McCain.

But prosecutors said García Luna secretly advanced a drug trafficking conspiracy that resulted in the deaths of thousands of U.S. and Mexican citizens. He ensured drug traffickers received advance notice of raids and sabotaged legitimate police operations aimed at arresting cartel leaders, they said.

Drug traffickers were able to transport more than 1 million kilos of cocaine through Mexico to the United States by planes, trains, trucks and submarines while García Luna held his post, prosecutors said.

During the 2018 trial of former Sinaloa queen Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán in the same court, a former cartel member testified that he personally handed over at least $6 million in payouts to García Luna and that cartel members agreed to pay up to $50 million pool to pay the costs. his protection.

“He made the cartel possible. He protected the cartel. He was the cartel,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Saritha Komatireddy told the judge Wednesday.

García Luna enabled a corrupt system that allowed violent cartels to thrive and distribute drugs that killed masses of people, she added.

“It may not have been the defendant who pulled the trigger, but he has blood on his hands,” Komatireddy said.

Prosecutors also said García Luna plotted to overturn last year’s sentence by attempting to bribe or corruptly persuade multiple inmates at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to support false allegations that two government witnesses were convicted prior to the process via smuggled mobile phones.

García Luna’s lawyer, Cesar de Castro, said the defense plans to appeal the sentence. He said his client is someone who “served his country” and has now lost his money, his reputation and the policies he championed in Mexico.

“He has lost almost everything. All that is left is his wonderful family,” De Castro said.

In Mexico, newly installed President Claudia Sheinbaum briefly commented on the case on Tuesday, saying: “The big problem here is how someone who has been rewarded by US agencies, and who ex-President Calderón has said wonderful things about his security secretary, can live today is imprisoned in a prison. the United States because it has been proven that he had links to drug trafficking.”

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García Luna’s arrest and conviction became a political cudgel that Sheinbaum’s ruling party and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, used against Calderón’s weakened National Action Party in this year’s Mexican presidential elections. They tried to portray García Luna as the poster child for corruption and Calderón as the man responsible for the increasing violence caused by the drug war.

López Obrador and now Sheinbaum turned away from direct confrontation with the cartels and focused instead on what they see as the root causes of violence, such as poverty. But the new strategy has failed to significantly reduce the level of violence.

López Obrador reacted very differently in 2020 when US authorities arrested former Mexican Defense Minister Salvador Cienfuegos for alleged collusion with a drug cartel. In that case, López Obrador accused the Drug Enforcement Administration of fabricating evidence against Cienfuegos and protested until the U.S. government dropped the charges. He was sent back to Mexico, where he was immediately acquitted and released.