The darkest ambition of Genaro García Luna: the head of the war against drug trafficking tried for serving drug traffickers

He was handcuffed and handcuffed.

he wore

, a zip-up sweater and blue sneakers.

He was escorted by a couple of guards, walked in line with six other inmates, sat alone in a corner of the courthouse, spoke briefly with a lawyer, and spoke just a few words to the judge with the help of a translator, if anything to identify himself and then return. to remain silent.

That was the first known scene after the arrest of Genaro García Luna, on December 10, 2019 in Dallas (Texas).

The former chief of the Mexican Police, the man of all confidence of former President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), the official of large arrests and television productions, was accused of three charges for drug trafficking and another for false statements.

Justice did not reach him in his homeland, but on the other side of the border,

Guzmán to life imprisonment.

After three years of waiting, García Luna will go to trial on January 17.

The highest-profile Mexican official ever tried in the United States will sit in the dock, and with him, suspicions of a painful collusion between the drug cartels and the government.

The legitimacy of a war that has left hundreds of thousands dead in less than two decades.

The credibility of an Administration that took a low-profile agent and elevated him to become an ambitious, powerful and feared politician.

Confidant of the former president, frustrated presidential candidate, great strategist of the war against

.

Much has been written about García Luna, almost everything, about his relationship with Calderón and organized crime.

Drawing that triangle is outlining what is at stake in the trial: the former secretary is halfway between the president who declared war on crime and a handful of drug lords who say they are ready to confess everything.

Bribes, corruption, the dark pacts of a kind of

.

Nearly a dozen prosecutors will try to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.

Four defense attorneys have accepted the challenge to go to trial.

It is not a minor fact when it comes to the American judicial system: they would not do it if they did not believe that they could prove in court that their client is innocent.

Judge Brian Cogan, the same one who sentenced El Chapo, will have the last word.

Genaro García Luna with President Felipe Calderón, in a ceremony in June 2012. Moisés Pablo Nava (Cuartoscuro)

“My position will always be in favor of justice and the law,” Calderón said upon learning of the arrest.

His version, unchanged in all these years, is that his government is clean and that if crimes were committed in his cabinet, everything happened behind his back.

That he never knew or realized.

What he has made clear is that he is going to defend his legacy.

"If the evidence was so solid, why hasn't he even started the trial?" He questioned last June.

In the end, it will be an ordeal for those mentioned.

Almost twenty testimonies, mountains of documents, weeks of media scandals are expected.

“It would be a very strong political blow for the Calderón administration and all of us who were there,” acknowledges Guillermo Valdés, former director of the Mexican secret service (Cisen) during that Administration,

It was precisely at Cisen where García Luna began his career as a public official.

He graduated as a mechanical engineer at the age of 26, but he really grew up through nearly a decade of work at that agency, the most important civilian intelligence arm of the Mexican government.

In 1999 he made the leap to the Federal Preventive Police, the direct predecessor of the Federal Police, the institution that years later would become his greatest legacy as head of Security.

In 2001 he had his first big position: he joined the Government of Vicente Fox (2000-2006) as director of the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI).

"He had a very low profile," recalls Rubén Aguilar, spokesman for the Fox government. "He was quiet and I don't remember a single meeting of the Security Cabinet in which he intervened or gave his opinion," he adds.

Behind a timid facade, this thirty-something bureaucrat was a man with enormous ambitions.

But he was an Administration in which he did not have much of a game.

Security was not an issue that mattered much to the president, the homicide rate was the lowest in years and the responsibilities were limited to specific incidents, says Aguilar.

He was another Mexico.

But García Luna would manage to try to stand out.

On December 9, 2005, he invited a television

to broadcast live the arrest of Israel Vallarta and his girlfriend Florence Cassez together with an alleged gang of kidnappers.

As the journalists made their way behind the agents, they broke into a house and interviewed the French citizen point-blank.

Everything was a montage ordered by García Luna.

The arrest had actually been a day earlier.

The fiasco was known and the scandal exploded, with a diplomatic crisis included with the France of Nicolas Sarkozy and an embarrassment amended (partially) by the Supreme Court.

The judicial soap opera jumped to Netflix last year, based on a novel by Jorge Volpi.

Florence Cassez and Israel Vallarta are presented to the press during the assembly of their arrest, on December 9, 2005.STR (AP)

"Ambition won him," says Valdés, his partner in the Security Cabinet with Calderón.

"It was clear that he wanted to appear in the media, but it was a blunder."

Already in the following term, his appointment as Secretary of Public Security surprised locals and strangers.

He didn't have the experience or the resume.

Aguilar confesses that he saw him only once after the change of government, but he was already another.

"I had taken a leap, I felt safe, with a project of what he wanted to do and that he knew he had the confidence of the president," he says.

The second-line bureaucrat became the secretary called upon to build the largest civilian force in the history of Mexico: the Federal Police.

“He liked power and being a secretary,” says Valdés.

García Luna was no longer the quiet type.

He was still very dedicated to work, but he constantly clashed with his Cabinet mates.

They remember him as a professional person, but with an immense thirst for prominence and recognition, not very prone to teamwork.

Those close to him justified that it was a role that he had to assume.

In a country where the Army was already the largest intelligence body and the Attorney General's Office (now the Prosecutor's Office) was used to doing its own investigations, the emergence of a civilian Police made it uncomfortable to a certain extent.

The body would multiply its power of force by five under his management, going from less than 8,000 agents to almost 40,000 elements at the end of the six-year term.

But the construction of the Federal Police only tells part of the story.

García Luna's meteoric rise in public service cannot be understood without a key decision by Calderón.

The president came to power amid accusations of electoral fraud, with little charisma and little legitimacy.

He tried to sell himself as "the president of jobs," but the slogan didn't catch on.

And then he was convinced to launch an all-out war against drug trafficking.

16 years after hitting the hornet's nest, the country continues to be plunged into the deepest crisis of violence and insecurity it has experienced in decades.

"It was stupid: the problem with a war is that you always know when it starts, but never when it ends," Aguilar settles.

"But García Luna was empowered in an extraordinary way."

García Luna and Calderón, in a ceremony to designate June 2 as Federal Police Day, in 2011.Alexandre Meneghini (AP)

Mexico would become the stage for the political and propaganda spectacle of drug violence.

He would get used to bodies hanging from bridges, traitors beheaded, the general panic of shootings, blockades and bombings.

Calderón's tenure would be characterized by the large arrests of famous drug lords who years before had been completely unknown.

They fell, among others, Sandra Ávila

;

Alfredo Beltrán Leyva

and his brother Arturo,

;

Sergio Villarreal

;

Jesús

Zambada, and Édgar Valdez Villarreal,

.

They were presented in massive press conferences and among an avalanche of

like war trophies.

In a way, they were.

One of the most remembered arrests was that of La Barbie, in August 2010. The capo wore designer clothes, had an expensive watch on his wrist and looked defiantly at the cameras.

He did not bow his head after the arrest.

He was observed, even smiling.

In November 2012, the drug trafficker sent a letter to the journalist Anabel Hernández, in which she assured that he had been present at meetings of drug traffickers personally organized by the still President Calderón.

About García Luna, La Barbie wrote: "I know that he has received money from me, from drug trafficking and organized crime."

A spokesman for the now-defunct Federal Police said at the time that it was an attempt to discredit the authorities' efforts to bring him to justice.

Édgar Valdez Villarreal, alias 'La Barbie', presented in Mexico City after his arrest in 2010.Daniel Aguilar (Getty Images)

The shadow of collusion with drug trafficking and corruption has haunted him since he was in office.

Former police officer Javier Herrera Valles, head of Regional Security of the Federal Police, just one step below García Luna, collected evidence on irregular hiring, nepotism and other crimes of his boss.

"Everyone knew, it was an open secret," Herrera Valles said of the

secretary's alleged ties to

In February 2008, he tried to send a letter to Calderón and went to the media to denounce him.

There was no response from the president.

He ended up fired, without pay, and eventually arrested in November of that year.

He spent four years in jail.

In 2008, Anabel Hernández stated in the book

that Calderón consented to the corruption of García Luna and made him one of the most influential men in his administration.

In 2011, the journalist specializing in drug trafficking denounced that she had received death threats and that the then Secretary of Security had hired federal police officers to assassinate her with the promise of offering them a promotion.

"García Luna and his team continue with the order given to kill me," she said on a live television program.

Some of the most powerful accusations against García Luna were uncovered in the trial against El Chapo in November 2018.

Zambada, who fell from grace during the Calderón administration, assured that he paid millionaire bribes to the then head of the Mexican Police so that he not interfere in the operations of the Sinaloa Cartel.

The first was delivered in a briefcase at a restaurant in 2005 and amounted to three million dollars.

Another ranged between three and five million dollars and occurred in 2007 when he was already Secretary of Public Security.

Zambada referred to him as the “Licenciado”.

That's what the heads of the main cartels called him, he says.

Five months after the sentence against El Chapo, García Luna was arrested.

US prosecutors claim that he has collaborated with the Sinaloa Cartel for more than 20 years, since he was in charge of the AFI, in exchange for "tens of millions of dollars."

He is formally accused of three crimes of cocaine trafficking, one more for organized crime and another for false statements.

But in previous hearings, authorities have also said they have evidence that he led a "corrupt bribery scheme" to silence negative news, that he threatened and harassed journalists investigating his crimes, and that he attempted to have one killed. of the prosecution's witnesses from jail.

Jesús 'El Rey' Zambada, during the trial of 'El Chapo' Guzmán.

JANE ROSENBERG (REUTERS)

The past reached the politician, who denied all the accusations.

Names like Anabel Hernández or

Zambada resurfaced.

All of them, as potential witnesses in the trial, according to the former official's own defense, who accused political persecution and "revenge."

Just at the end of November another old ghost of García Luna revived.

Édgar Valdez Villarreal,

, disappeared from the US prison registry, which fueled all kinds of rumors about the possibility that he would return the favor to the former secretary and testify against him.

But the parade of capo names does not end there.

El Grande, another old acquaintance, assured that the "Licenciado" was key in one of El Chapo's escapes and that he met several times with the "Management" of Sinaloa, according to

.

He is another of the possible witnesses in the deck.

Nothing is safe and everything is classified.

The official list will be announced one day before each one takes the podium.

Valdés has maintained on multiple occasions that neither he nor anyone in the Calderón administration knew of his alleged relationship with drug trafficking and that García Luna's influence in that government is often extrapolated.

“He was not the head of the Security Cabinet, not even close.

Really, the boss was the president”, he affirms.

He also assures that the accusations seem at times “exaggerated” and that the evidence is “flimsy”.

“I don't put my hands in the fire for Genaro or for anyone else,” he warns.

"But, for example, what Zambada says seems like a fable to me, three million dollars doesn't fit in a briefcase," he says with a laugh.

“If you are involved in these things, you do not accept that the exchange is in a restaurant.

Come on, it's a thing for beginners."

Members of Los Zetas are escorted by federal police in Mexico City, in March 2009.Alexandre Meneghini (AP)

Former members of security forces and members of that government have a similar opinion: they do not consider it unlikely that he is "corrupt", they do not consider it strange that he is labeled "arrogant", but they believe that it is unlikely that he was involved with

.

Valdés completely rules out that he gave El Chapo preferential treatment.

"Everyone was fought, although the priority was to dismantle Los Zetas, it was the most harmful cartel," he says.

The former director of Cisen coordinated the blows against Sinaloa with Ramón Pequeño, one of García's closest collaborators and former anti-drug chief of the Federal Police, a fugitive after being accused by the US of receiving bribes from the cartel.

Luis Cárdenas Palomino, right-hand man of the former secretary, was arrested for torture against the gang of alleged kidnappers of the

.

The Calderón Administration was possibly the one that has collaborated the most with Washington in security tasks.

García Luna had a fluid relationship with the DEA and the Department of Homeland Security.

In addition to accusing a

of his former enemies, he defends that he passed all the trust checks that his American peers placed on him.

"During his campaign for the presidency of the United States, Senator John McCain met with García Luna to reaffirm the support of the US Government in the fight against the cartels," read the defense briefs.

“Officials like Janet Napolitano [former governor of Arizona and head of Homeland Security during the Barack Obama administration], Robert Muller [director of the FBI between 2001 and 2013], Eric Holder [former attorney general of the United States] and Hillary Clinton traveled to the City of Mexico to meet with García Luna", their legal representatives pointed out.

His attorney César de Castro, an experienced litigator, declined a request for an interview, saying he will not speak before the trial.

“If the Americans had had signs of corruption, they would have let the president or other members of the Cabinet know and they never did,” says Valdés.

In Mexico there are multiple cases against him.

In January of last year, the Attorney General's Office formally charged him with crimes committed during the failed operation known as

which allowed the entry of illegal weapons from the United States to track the activity of criminal groups.

The failure was settled with 2,500 weapons lost in the hands of the Sinaloa Cartel and other groups.

El Chapo is another of the defendants, along with other bosses and former officials whose names are not known.

García Luna in front of Judge Brian Cogan, during a hearing in Brooklyn, in January 2020. JANE ROSENBERG (Reuters)

The Financial Intelligence Unit, the arm of the Ministry of Finance against money laundering, filed a civil lawsuit in Florida in which it is accused of giving bribes for 10 million dollars to obtain government contracts in the following Administration, that of Enrique Peña Grandson (2012-2018).

He had, says the agency, a network of companies to launder money and manage ill-gotten gains.

The process is stalled.

The case in New York, however, monopolizes all the reflectors.

It is the highest profile against a former Mexican official in the United States, only comparable to the process against former Secretary of Defense Salvador Cienfuegos in 2020, which did not reach the courts.

Less than two weeks before the start of the trial, the paths of García Luna and the Sinaloa Cartel have crossed again.

Ovidio Guzmán, son of El Chapo, was arrested in an operation that set fire to Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa, a few days after Joe Biden's arrival in Mexico, in the first visit by a US president in almost 10 years.

While the assumptions of a possible extradition of another member of the Guzmán family run, these days 400 candidates for the jury filled out questionnaires to see if they will be part of the trial against the former secretary.

"Have authorities been able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the offense involved five kilos or more of cocaine?"

That is the question that the 12 anonymous members of the jury will have to answer at the conclusion of the trial and that will, in turn, clear up a sea of ​​doubts outside the court.

If found guilty, García Luna will face a sentence of between 10 years and life in prison.

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