New York., The criminal trial of Genaro García Luna, the highest Mexican official prosecuted in the United States, began yesterday with the selection of the jury and the last legal strategy maneuvers of the parties, in preparation for his presence in the Federal Court of Eastern District of this city the following week.
Upon completion of the selection of the 12 jurors and their alternates next Tuesday, the prosecutors and defense team are expected to make their initial presentations to the jury, before the judge, and with the defendant present, all of which could possibly occur. on January 17 or 18.
The parties have amassed more than a million pages of documents, thousands more of other classified materials – including visual ones – as well as hours of taped communications recordings, more components that will be offered in hundreds of exhibitions that will now be presented as evidence. during the trial.
But the greatest suspense and drama of this trial will be offered by the witnesses that both sides will present to give their testimonies and undergo cross-examination by the defense and prosecutors, although their identities will only be formally disclosed shortly before they are summoned to sit in court. bench in court. They are known to have included, prosecutors reported, several “high-ranking former members of the Sinaloa cartel,” among others.
The disclosure of evidence by the prosecution has been accelerated as the start of this trial approaches, as has the maneuvering of both parties regarding the handling of the evidence.
This Monday, the defense lawyers – headed by César de Castro and Florian Miedel – sent a request to federal judge Brian Cogan, who is presiding over this trial, in which they ask to order prosecutors not to introduce evidence about the activities carried out by García Luna after leave public service in 2012 and become a private citizen living in the United States.
They asserted that his financial assets “were obtained through income from private businesses,” and that prosecutors have not established a link in all the evidence between the alleged bribes he is accused of and his accumulation of wealth from his post-2012 activities. , adding that without a link between the two, their income and other wealth acquired after that year “is irrelevant evidence” in this lawsuit.
The defense claims that prosecutors have valid evidence to show that García Luna’s assets in Florida are somehow linked to the alleged bribery of drug cartels, of which he is accused.
Therefore, allowing prosecutors to show the jury through witness statements or photos of his assets – including his luxury residences and offices in this country – without evidence to associate those acquisitions with the illegal activities for which he is prosecuted, will offer an unfounded image to the jury.
In fact, they point out that García Luna’s assets and income were very limited when he arrived in Miami at the end of 2012, where “he had no wealth to speak of and could not have a luxurious lifestyle.” They point out that his business associates are the ones who offered him a large house with a dock and a boat for his use, but that they did not own it, and that it was only through his consulting and security services business that he started to accumulate wealth. His main client was the Mexican government.
Multi-million dollar bribes dating back to 2001
The charges against García Luna by the United States Department of Justice indicate that he participated in a drug trafficking conspiracy that began in 2001, by accepting multimillion-dollar bribes from the Sinaloa cartel when he was head of the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI), later as Secretary of Public Safety and that his illegal activity continued until his arrest in Dallas, Texas, in 2019.
With this request, the defense seeks to dismiss charges related to activities once García Luna stopped working in the federal administration.
The Mexican government, through the Financial Intelligence Unit of the Ministry of Finance, has a legal case in Florida against García Luna, with which it seeks to recover at least 250 million dollars that were stolen by the former Secretary of Public Safety and laundering the funds, partly in Florida, Barbados and other places. According to the defense lawyers, for the Mexican government that case is not related to the one in New York.
On the other hand, Judge Cogan’s response to the prosecutors’ request filed at the end of December that the defense be prevented from presenting statements by the defendant when he was first arrested by DEA agents in Dallas in December 2019 is still awaited. , that all praise for the defendant by US officials and politicians during his tenure as a public official be excluded, and that no reference be made to the case dismissed against another high-ranking Mexican official, General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda.
In this trial, García Luna faces five charges, four of them related to the alleged conspiracy in which he provided assistance to the Sinaloa cartel in exchange for multimillion-dollar bribes, and the fifth for making false statements before US authorities. The trial – if there are no surprises, which includes a negotiation with the defendant – could last two months, according to estimates by prosecutors.
