Genaro Garcia Luna was arrested on December 9, 2019 in Dallas, Texas. Imprisoned since, he was accused, among other things, of having received millions of dollars in bribes to turn a blind eye to cartel trafficking.
Former Mexican minister Genaro Garcia Luna, a former champion of the fight against drugs in his country, was found guilty on Tuesday by American justice of corruption and cocaine trafficking between Mexico and the United States and faces imprisonment in perpetuity.
He is the most senior Mexican official to have been tried by federal justice in New York, in the war against the drug cartels of Central and South America which take advantage of the complicity of local ministers to flood the North American market.
The 12 jurors of the Brooklyn court found that this former public security minister of Mexican President Felipe Calderon (2006-2012) was guilty of five counts, including that of having received millions of dollars to protect the cartel of Sinaloa and to be involved in trafficking at least 53 tons of cocaine from Mexico to the United States from 2001 to 2012.
“A traitor to his country”
Before becoming minister, Genaro Garcia Luna, a mechanical engineer by trade, was from 2001 to 2005 a police officer and head of the intelligence agency against corruption and organized crime.
His wife and their two children were present at the statement of the verdict in the face of which the former minister remained visibly imperturbable.
After several days of deliberation and a month-long trial, Genaro Garcia Luna, who did not say a word during the trial, was convicted on all five counts and is now a “convicted felon”, congratulated in a press release the powerful federal prosecutor’s office in Brooklyn.
“Garcia Luna, who was once the pinnacle of law enforcement in Mexico, will now live out the rest of his life as a traitor to his country and to the dedicated law enforcement who risk their lives to dismantle the cartels of drugs,” thundered federal prosecutor Breon Peace, quoted in the statement.
The sentence, which can range from ten years in prison to life imprisonment, will be known in several weeks.
Involved in the Florence Cassez case
Unrelated to this trial, his name is also known abroad, especially in France, because he was involved in the Florence Cassez case in the 2000s: he is thus accused of having co-organized and staged the arrest in December 2005 of the young woman and her companion at the time, Israel Vallarta.
The couple had been accused of being part of an organized crime gang, which at the time damaged diplomatic relations between President Calderon’s Mexico and President Nicolas Sarkozy’s France.
