Genaro García Luna, the former Secretary of Security of Mexico during the Felipe Calderón government, will know this Wednesday October 16 if the New York justice system sentences him to life imprisonment as requested by the prosecution or to 20 years in prison as his defense suggests.
The highest-ranking Mexican official to sit on the bench of US justice will appear this Wednesday before Judge Brian Cogan in the Eastern Federal Court in Brooklyn to learn his fate, which has been postponed several times.
The prosecution requested on September 20 life sentence for the one who was anti-drug czar during the six-year term of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012), while the defense requested 20 years in prison, after being found guilty in February 2023, by a popular jury of five crimes.
Among them, international cocaine trafficking, by protecting the Sinaloa Cartel from Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmánwho is serving a life sentence in the United States.
García Luna “exploited his power and authority by accepting millions of dollars in bribes from a drug trafficking organization that he swore to pursue,” argued the prosecution, who considers it “difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of the defendant’s crimes.”
Since he was arrested in December 2019, García Luna has been detained in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, with an infamous reputation, where figures such as the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández – sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking – passed. , or currently the billionaire rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs, accused of rape and sexual assault.
Some of his companions in misfortune have written to the judge to ask for leniency or magnanimity with him after helping them prepare their high school certificate.
“He has the record of being the teacher who has passed the most (sic) this exam,” says a prisoner who considers that he is a “leader in organizing” everything that “serves us prisoners.”
“He is a person who is always willing to help others, he always takes the time to advise us and motivate us for when we get out of this situation (and) be able to integrate into society,” says another.
The letters written by prisoners and family members on behalf of this 56-year-old mechanical engineer may not have much influence on Judge Cogan, who sentenced “Chapo” Guzmán to life in prison in 2019 and in whose trial the name of García Luna, That in 2013 Forbes magazine included him on the list of the “10 most corrupt Mexicans.”
Now, Cogan has also been involved in the dossier of Ismael “Mayo” Zambada – co-founder of the Sinaola Cartel along with “Chapo” in the 1980s -, and who was arrested on July 25 in New Mexico after landing in a small plane in the company of one of the “chapitos”, Joaquín Guzmán López, his son.
“Honor intact”
The former Mexican official has tried in vain to have the trial repeated, considering that he has evidence that would prove his innocence.
In a handwritten letter published on September 18, he suggested that the government of the former Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador was behind his conviction.
The letter lamented that the US justice system had used “false information provided by the Mexican government” and witnesses with “criminal records” that he persecuted when he was the anti-drug czar.
According to García Luna, the prosecution “did not present a single piece of evidence or evidence to prove the crimes” against him.
“My honor is intact, I have not committed any crime,” he said.
After his arrest, according to him, the New York prosecutor’s office proposed an agreement for him to plead guilty to drug trafficking in exchange for “weakening” the institutional life of Mexico in exchange for a light sentence (6 months) and “economic benefits,” according to him. that he refused said in the letter.
García Luna warned that he will appeal the sentence and exhaust all legal resources “until he achieves” his freedom.
