In letters sent to the Court in the first weeks of August, García Luna’s lawyers assured that their defendant has lost more than 14 kilos of weight due to the conditions to which he was submitted in Lee’s prison, Virginia, where they supposedly did not feed him or allowed him to bathe.
“Our client was held in the special unit reserved for those who violate the rules of the prison, although he has never received a single disciplinary infraction, and only a game of underwear was given,” said lawyers César de Castro and Valerie Gottlieb.
“The lack of access to our client has created an unnecessary and extreme difficulty, which has blocked our ability to complete our initial arguments. We need additional time to complete these arguments. The case is extremely complex and involves very broad records. The transcription of the trial is 2 thousand 43 pages,” they added.
If Garcia Luna is granted the time, he would have until December 18 to present the arguments to try to throw the conviction.
García Luna, secretary of Public Security in the six -year term of Felipe Calderón, will spend almost 40 years in jail in the United States, after being found guilty of collaborating with the Sinaloa Cartel.
In October 2024, Judge Brian Cogan issued that in addition to 460 months in prison, García Luna must pay a fine of at least two million dollars.
After he complies with his sentence after bars, when the former official is either a elderly person, he will have five years of freedom supervised by authorities.
When issuing the sentence in a Brooklyn court, Judge Cogan told Garcia Luna: “You already fooled yourself to think that you respect the law. You have that same cloudy mind as ‘El Chapo’.”
The Prosecutor’s Office had requested life imprisonment for the former official of the governments of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, while García Luna’s defense raised a minimum penalty of 20 years. However, the sentence was a middle ground.
“I will give a light at the end of the tunnel,” Cogan told Garcia Luna.
Genaro became the former Mexican official who receives a sentence in the United States for ties with drug trafficking.
García Luna was declared guilty of protecting the Sinaloa Cartel of Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán, sentenced to life imprisonment for US justice in 2019, in exchange for millionaire bribes to send drugs to the United States from 2001 to 2012, according to the Prosecutor’s Office.
In February 2023, a popular jury declared guilty to the architect of the War on Drugs during the six-year term of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012) to participate in a continuous criminal company, conspiracy to distribute, possess and import cocaine and documentary falsehood.
García Luna “exploited his power and authority accepting millions of dollars in bribes of a drug trafficker organization to which he swore,” the Prosecutor’s Office, which considers “difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of the accused’s crimes.”
Among the charges, he was charged to have protected six drug shipments that together added 53 tons, between 2002 and 2008.
Several witnesses at the trial, former prominent members of the Sinaloa Cartel, such as Jesús “Rey” Zambada, Sergio Villarreal “El Grande” U Óscar “Lobo” Valencia, said they had paid millions of dollars to the accused in exchange for protection.
García Luna, who has always declared himself innocent, tried in vain that a new process was carried out by considering that the American justice used “false information provided by the Government of Mexico” and witnesses with “criminal records” that he pursued when he was the anti -drug tsar.
