United States vs. Genaro García Luna: the collapse of Mexico's drug czar

The suitcases of money were placed on a table.

The narcos called them

because they were long black sports bags.

A hundred $100 bills were compacted with tape to make $10,000

, and then they were stuffed into backpacks.

The bribes were more than a million dollars a month.

Sinaloa cartel lieutenants were picking up Genaro García Luna and his right-hand man, Luis Cárdenas Palomino, in the parking lot of Perisur, a well-known shopping center south of Mexico City.

At that time, García Luna and Cárdenas Palomino were two thirty-somethings who had met while working as spies at the Center for Investigation and National Security (Cisen), the main civilian intelligence agency of the Government of Mexico.

They never made it to the top of the ladder, but in the end their patience paid off.

In 2001, García Luna was appointed director of the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI), a new corporation created during the presidency of Vicente Fox (2000-2006).

But he did not forget his compadre.

Cárdenas Palomino became AFI's general director of Police Investigation that same year.

García Luna was barely 33 years old, but he already sat at the table with the elders, sometimes with the members of the Cabinet.

He was very shy.

He almost never said anything or gave his opinion.

Instead, once or twice a month he parked his car in Perisur.

Cartel members picked him up in another

and took him to a safe house around the corner from the mall.

He and Arturo Beltrán Leyva, one of the most feared drug lords in Mexico, would sit in the dining room or living room and talk for hours.

García Luna, appointed Secretary of Public Security by Felipe Calderón, on November 30, 2006. Nelly Salas (Cuartoscuro)

When they were with him, he was the

, but behind his back the drug traffickers made fun of his speech problems and called him

.

They knew him well.

They knew that he loved motorcycles.

They gave him a limited edition Harley Davidson to see if they could contact him.

who would say

Beltrán Leyva and García Luna would be partners for almost eight years, until the drug trafficker was shot to death.

The suitcases were picked up and put on the table.

The capos opened the zipper.

Officials reviewed the content.

They closed the business and afterwards, they talked like old friends.

Never before has the link between the Mexican authorities and drug trafficking been so evident.

The trial against García Luna uncovered the millionaire bribes that oiled the machinery of the Sinaloa cartel for years and that allowed the annihilation of its rivals and its expansion to become one of the largest criminal forces in the world.

The drug lords killed, kidnapped, tortured, disguised themselves as policemen and sowed terror in the country.

Everything, with the collaboration of officials in the highest spheres of power in Mexico.

All while the government boasted of the results of the war to combat them.

After a month of hearings and the testimony of 27 witnesses, doubts and suspicions became incontrovertible truths in the eyes of the American legal system.

The verdict was unanimous.

García Luna was found guilty on February 21 in a New York court of all five charges against him: three for cocaine trafficking, one for organized crime and one for making false statements to US authorities.

This is the story of the most important trial that has ever taken place against a high-ranking Mexican official, the collapse of the Secretary of Public Security of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), the former Mexican anti-drug czar.

Felipe Calderón and García Luna, on June 13, 2012, months before they left their posts. Iván Stephens (Cuartoscuro)

Confidant of former President Calderón, all-powerful police chief, ambitious and feared politician.

The meteoric rise of García Luna cannot be understood without the war against drug trafficking.

Neither did his fall.

On January 23, 2023, three years after his arrest in Texas, the former secretary finally sat in the dock.

He dressed in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a gray tie.

The decision to go to trial gave him a very poor prognosis: he had less than a 20% chance of being acquitted, according to statistics from the Pew Research Center.

Almost as important as maintaining his innocence in court was that the public did not see him in prison uniform.

He was convinced that he could defend his legacy.

García Luna looked older than in the archive photographs that portray his time in the Mexican government more than a decade ago.

His face was hard again, the frown that has characterized him, and his hair whiter than anyone remembered.

But he, too, seemed brooding and alone.

The myth about the importance of the defendant, fueled by the high expectations at the start of the trial, clashed with the images of the court.

The great architect of the war against drugs was nervously taking notes with a pen, adjusting his glasses and resigning himself to blowing kisses to his wife, Cristina Pereyra, sitting in the distance.

He was an unarmed policeman.

"García Luna was part of the Sinaloa cartel, they put him on their payroll and despite that he presented himself as a hero," said assistant prosecutor Philip Pilmar, after pointing the finger at the defendant.

From day one, the trial would be filled with scenes like these.

"It's like a movie," the dozens of Mexican reporters who gathered in court said in astonishment over and over again.

Up to that point, the script was unpredictable and it was anticipated that the process could take six to eight weeks.

“This is not like a Broadway play, in which you know in advance what is going to happen,” warned Judge Brian Cogan, the same one who sentenced Joaquín El Chapo

to life imprisonment in mid-2019.

"You will see how your government abandons one of its strategic partners and how the Prosecutor's case is based on the testimony of murderers, kidnappers and drug traffickers," replied César de Castro, García Luna's main lawyer, in his first opportunity to address to the jury.

The defense insisted on showing photographs of the former head of the Federal Police with figures such as former President Barack Obama and former presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

There was no administration that collaborated more closely with the White House on security issues than Calderón's.

He had been decorated and praised by his US counterparts, even appealing to them when he wanted US citizenship in 2019, but no one has interceded for him since the allegations came to light.

García Luna with the then US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in Mexico City, on March 26, 2009. Moisés Pablo Nava (Cuartoscuro)

On the surface, the film stuck to the narrative of the past few decades.

"Corrupt officials align with drug traffickers," read a headline in a 1932 Texas newspaper, recovered by British historian Benjamin Smith, who has studied more than a century of drug-trafficking history between the two countries.

Words like "corruption" and "drug trafficking," Smith argues in his book

, have become shortcuts to deciphering the reality and impact of organized crime on the world's most dynamic border

.

But they have been used both to fuel explosive headlines and to justify failed policies that have lost their meaning.

In the words of De Castro, these "murderers, kidnappers and drug traffickers" would be in charge of putting Mexico back in front of the mirror of violence and crime, a country that believed it had seen and experienced it all.

Criminal violence is when you gun down your former partner, when you are tortured to test your loyalty, when you dissolve the body of your rivals in acid to eliminate the trace.

It was no longer a Netflix series.

The protagonists of the war against drugs were ready to tell everything.

"In Mexico, everything is possible, there is a lot of corruption," said Sergio Villarreal

, the first witness to take the stand.

El Grande, a two-meter-high corrupt ex-police officer who ended up as Beltrán Leyva's lieutenant, detailed step by step how bribes were paid to García Luna.

He talked about

of millions of dollars.

He said that the former official was a faithful ally, who gave them uniforms, vehicles and official credentials so that they could carry weapons for the exclusive use of the authorities.

He explained how the narco placed and disposed of police commanders at will to ensure their interests.

He said that the line between crime and the authorities was so narrow that there were even agreements to share the profits, simulate the destruction of seized drugs and spoil capture operations against them.

“Everybody was happy,” he said of the heads of the Sinaloa cartel.

“It was the best investment they had ever made.”

In the first decade of the 2000s, the Sinaloa cartel was, in reality, a federation of drug lords.

There was the faction of El Chapo and Ismael

Zambada, the people of the Beltrán Leyva, the men of Nacho Coronel or Juan José Esparragoza

, among others.

“She was wonderful,” Harold Poveda said at the

trial , when asked to speak about the old criminal alliance that dominated drug trafficking at the time.

That common front was maintained when García Luna became Secretary of Security with Calderón, especially to combat Los Zetas, rivals and the most violent criminal group.

But, little by little, mistrust began to grow between the partners.

The Beltrán Leyva group continued to inject money into authorities at all levels, but they no longer received the usual service.

"People from the government began to fall on us," said El Grande.

Arturo Beltrán Leyva realized that capture operations and seizures almost always occurred after he had spoken with El Mayo or El Chapo, at least that's what he inferred.

"He realized the betrayal," Villarreal said.

The straw that broke the camel's back was the arrest of Alfredo Beltrán Leyva, alias

and Arturo's brother, in an Army operation in January 2008. Thus began an all-out cartel war between Beltrán Leyva and his cousin

Guzmán.

"Which side are you on?" Arturo Beltrán asked García Luna, according to El Grande's story.

"The problem is yours, I am neutral."

"He continued working for everyone: El Mayo and El Chapo, but also for Arturo," said the witness.

“There were members of the Federal Police who left with him and others with Arturo,” he added.

"It was a very violent war, we all started killing each other."

Ministerial agents escort Alfredo Beltrán Leyva after his arrest, on January 21, 2008. Iván Méndez (Cuartoscuro)

Desperate by the secretary's ambivalence, Arturo Beltrán Leyva had García Luna kidnapped on a highway in the State of Morelos, a couple of hours' drive from the capital.

The escorts of the Secretary of Public Security could not resist.

Almost all of them ended up handcuffed and unarmed, lying on the floor, like lumps.

Francisco Cañedo, a ministerial police officer who passed by on his day off, stated that he saw it all.

He slowed down, turned to see what it was about, and suddenly exchanged glances with the criminals and with García Luna, his former boss at the AFI.

"I was left trembling," said Cañedo on the stand, about what happened on October 19, 2008.

"Arturo calls me and tells me that they just picked up García Luna's son of a bitch, that he was going to kill him, that he was going to send his head so that everyone could see that you don't play with him," recalled El Conejo, one one of the men closest to Arturo Beltrán Leyva.

“My God, how are you going to do that?

The government is going to let them come with everything," the Colombian drug lord replied anguished.

"And you are saying that this happened in broad daylight?"

At noon?" De Castro questioned at the time.

―“For Arturo there was nothing impossible”, The Great settled.

The kidnapping episode, always denied by García Luna, played a leading role in the trial.

Anchored in the memory of those who saw or heard something 15 years ago, the testimonies were not exempt from inconsistencies.

It was clear that the process was going to put irreconcilable versions on the line and that it was going to create a context in which what seemed incredible

have happened “beyond a reasonable doubt”.

"In Mexico, everything is possible," El Grande insisted.

The commitment of the Prosecutor's Office to build the case based on the testimonies of drug traffickers was not without controversy on both sides of the border.

The exclusion of key evidence and testimony about the wealth and the most recent scandals of the defendant, either.

Thus began the master class on drug trafficking in Mexico.

Tirso Martínez,

, the second witness in the case, explained that he earned his nickname because he owned four professional soccer clubs and that, when he transported tons of cocaine hidden among oil bottles in a train carriage, he sprayed a little liquid so that “customs workers were afraid of slipping” on suspicion of a false bottom.

The king of eccentricities was El Conejo, who cried in court while remembering his old collection of exotic animals.

A policeman guards the zoo of 'El Conejo' Poveda, in his house south of Mexico City, on October 20, 2008.Ricardo Castelan (Cuartoscuro)

The funny stories were suddenly interrupted by the harshness of other episodes.

Poveda gave details of how he was tortured hours before being presented before a cascade of

press

"Are you El Conejo, son of a bitch?" He recounted.

"They blindfolded me."

“They put a plastic bag on me to suffocate me.”

"They undressed me."

"They gave me electric shocks."

"Until I couldn't anymore."

Israel Ávila, a drug accountant, recalled that he was recruited as a real estate agent for the Sinaloa cartel after renting a house for whom he believed to be AFI agents.

"They asked me if I knew who he was working for," said Ávila, a protected witness.

"You are not wrong.

Neither you nor we work for Genaro García Luna, Genaro García Luna works for us," the drug traffickers confessed.

Avila said he recorded bribes to the former official and others in an Excel spreadsheet.

He assured that he unloaded packages of cocaine from planes with the help of federal police officers and that he laughed out loud when he heard on the radio how the agents pretended to go after the criminals.

It had been the policemen themselves who had allowed them to escape.

“We got in and out with their help.”

Óscar Nava Valencia, alias

, leader of the now-defunct Milenio cartel, claimed that he paid more than $10 million in bribes to García Luna.

"Are you saying that people who were just below President Calderón were bribed?" questioned Florian Miedel, defense attorney.

"Yes, it got to that point," settled the witness.

In the midst of the drug war, El Lobo requested a secret meeting with the defendant in a car wash in Guadalajara.

The then secretary asked him for three million dollars to be with him for 15 minutes.

That was the fee.

That was the amount, always according to the testimonies, that they asked Jesús

Zambada, El Mayo's brother, when the cartel wanted to woo the newly appointed Cabinet member at the end of 2006. “The money was put in a large portfolio, like the ones lawyers use,” El Rey explained.

"And in a suitcase of those used by athletes, which are quite spacious," he added.

For a second meeting, about three weeks later, García Luna offered a discount: only two million dollars.

"I was very surprised," acknowledged the drug trafficker when he met him at Campos Eliseos, a luxurious restaurant a few meters from the US Embassy.

The site had no cameras and was a favorite space for money exchanges between officials and criminals.

This was said by Miguel Madrigal, a DEA special agent who spent eight years on a mission in Mexico.

Jesus 'El Rey' Zambada is presented after his arrest in Mexico City, on October 22, 2008.Alexandre Meneghini (AP)

El Rey, the last witness for the Prosecutor's Office, was arrested in Mexico City in October 2008, and the capture was allegedly coordinated by El Grande, the first to speak.

Sergio Villarreal put on the uniform of an official State agent again and said that other gunmen disguised themselves as elements of an agency unrelated to García Luna, so that the operation could be completed.

"I was part of the operation," said El Grande.

Rival drug lords paid journalists money to spread the word so El Rey couldn't bribe the cops in exchange for letting him go.

The money was going and he was looking in all directions.

García Luna, for example, paid 25 million pesos, just over a million dollars, to silence rumors of the kidnapping that same year, according to Héctor Villarreal, a corrupt former official of the State of Coahuila who has been a United States aid worker for almost a decade. Joined.

“It gives you the feeling of a narco-state in Mexico,” journalist Ioan Grillo, who has written for more than 20 years about violence and organized crime, said in an interview with this newspaper.

Perhaps the person who best summed up the penetration of drug trafficking in institutions was Édgar Veytia,

, former prosecutor of the State of Nayarit and sentenced to 20 years for collaborating with the cartels.

“We did everything they asked us to do,” he said.

The most remembered phrase of the former official appealed to the instruction that, according to him, was given during the Calderón government and the García Luna administration: "The line was [to protect] El Chapo."

Former President Calderón denied that such orders existed and maintained throughout the process that he never knew of any crime committed by García Luna.

"I never negotiated or agreed with criminals," he replied.

Eight out of ten Mexicans believe that he should be investigated for links to drug trafficking, according to a survey by Enkoll for EL PAÍS and W Radio.

The former president affirmed that his strategy against crime was the correct one: "The courageous fight of thousands of police officers, soldiers, sailors, prosecutors, judges, and good public servants."

Although it was said that the Prosecutor's Office had a list of more than 70 witnesses ready to testify against García Luna, the US authorities decided to conclude the interrogations after summoning 26 witnesses, which shortened the expected duration of the trial by at least two weeks.

Despite the confusion in Mexico, former prosecutor Daniel Richman told EL PAÍS that the public ministry was trying to show strength.

“If you really want to convince a jury, you have to present a short, powerful case,” said the Columbia University law professor.

The defense lawyer, César de Castro, followed by García Luna's wife, Cristina Pereyra, and their daughter Luna, on February 15. YUKI IWAMURA (AFP)

Speculations raged for days that García Luna was called to testify by his lawyers.

Finally, it was not the former Secretary of Public Security who responded to everything that was said against him.

His wife, Cristina Pereyra, did it, the only person who called the defense.

Her testimony, in the middle of Valentine's Day, focused on generating empathy in the jury, 12 citizens who until a few weeks ago knew nothing about the defendant.

Pereyra assured that the couple worked for years to make their way, that they relied on small businesses and mortgages to get ahead and that they suffered harassment from the media and the risks of the position that her husband had.

"We thought about leaving Mexico because we wanted our children to have a normal life," she settled on the family's decision to move to Miami after leaving public life.

She was eloquent, but her version would not have stood up in a Mexican court.

Another reminder that she was playing by the rules of America's legal system.

The trial went on in the final stretch, the most intense part of the entire process.

After the testimonies of 27 witnesses, the Prosecutor's Office and the defense collided for the last time to present their conclusions in the closing arguments.

It was also the last chance both sides had to convince the jury before deliberations began.

The lawyers presented their best face to 12 strangers.

They were friendly, explained everything with apples and pears, and tried to be as charming as they could.

They did everything to incline them in their favor.

First it was the turn of the Prosecutor's Office, headed by Assistant Prosecutor Saritha Komatireddy.

"Ladies and gentlemen, you have to believe it, the corruption reached the highest levels," she said.

"There is only one possibility: Genaro García Luna took the bribes."

“This case was put together over a decade, it took time to put the pieces together, but the pieces fit, everything fits,” he added.

"It is impossible for the cartel to have expanded as it did without the support of the Mexican government."

Komatireddy explained the case step by step and why the Prosecutor's Office decided to build it from the testimonies of convicts and drug traffickers.

The prosecutor chose to be didactic: she put up a board titled United States against García Luna, put up the photos of the drug traffickers involved, projected a Power Point presentation and went through the slides one by one.

"It takes a criminal to meet another," said the prosecutor, recalling the testimony of Sergio Villarreal El Grande.

“It was like having a professor from the Sinaloa Cartel, he could wear a jacket with patches on the elbows.”

"He told them how he paid money to authorities at all levels."

“The King told them the same thing.

Do you remember his testimony last Monday?

That week,

Zambada declared how he paid at least five million dollars in bribes to García Luna.

"We also had Édgar Veytia here."

“They told them all about how corruption works in Mexico.”

“These guys are like the FedEx for cocaine;

they use trains, ships, submarines,” he said of other witnesses.

Then it was the turn of the defense of García Luna, led by César de Castro.

"Where is the evidence?" He questioned.

“The big problem that the Prosecutor's Office has is that it cannot prove these accusations.

They have to try them, we don't”.

"Don't fall, don't fall, don't fall for what they are telling you."

“Are there videos?

No".

"El Grande said that Beltrán Leyva recorded his meetings, where are the recordings?"

"Payments?

They weren't taught any of that."

“Did they find the evidence?

No, it's the story of this case."

Komatireddy was more rational.

De Castro appealed more to the emotions of the jury.

After the defense arguments, the Prosecutor's Office had the right to respond.

“Let's be very clear, we would love to call school teachers to testify in this trial,” said prosecutor Erin Reid before pausing.

"But schoolteachers don't head criminal organizations."

"This is how corruption works at the highest levels, it is done in secret and paid for in cash."

Regarding the statement of Cristina Pereyra, wife of the former secretary, he said that it was "a master class" in how politicians hide their heritage.

"It didn't matter at all, it was just a

."

"Use your common sense."

The jurors listened carefully to the closures.

From that moment on, everything depended on them.

The decision about the future of García Luna was in his hands.

The 12 jurors withdrew.

Deliberations began behind closed doors.

The members were cut off from the outside world.

There was no deadline for them to reach a verdict, which had to be unanimous for all five charges against García Luna.

By February 16, time froze at the Brooklyn Court.

There would be no more testimonies or words from the lawyers.

Deliberations started.

Twelve strangers locked themselves in to talk for hours about what they had seen and heard in recent weeks.

In the room, everything was uncertain.

The deliberations were private and the verdict could come at any time, as long as it took for them to reach a unanimous decision on each of the five crimes against García Luna.

After more than 15 hours of deliberations on three different days, the verdict came on February 21 at around half past two in the afternoon.

Genaro García Luna was upset.

He had never looked so nervous at the trial.

At the gates of the moment that would define everything, there was no longer room for appearances.

Genaro García, the former official's eldest son, closed his eyes and shook his head from side to side.

His sister, Luna, was also a nervous wreck.

Cristina Pereyra, the only person present throughout the process to support the accused, just stared into space.

Everyone felt nervous, excited, impatient.

Suddenly, the jury handed Judge Cogan a sheet and there was total silence.

Conspiracy for the international distribution of cocaine.

“Guilty,” Cogan read.

Conspiracy to distribute and possess cocaine.

"Guilty".

Conspiracy to import cocaine.

"Guilty".

Belonging to a continuing criminal enterprise.

"Guilty".

Giving false statements to authorities on your naturalization application.

"Guilty".

García Luna clung to reasonable doubt and was met with a crushing verdict: guilty on all counts.

Before being removed from the room, García Luna turned to see his family.

He nodded, closed his eyes, and tried to tell them that he was going to be okay.

The options had run out.

He faces between 20 years and the rest of his life behind bars.

Sentencing is expected to be handed down on June 27.

Digesting everything will take years.

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