A former Marine who for years helped smuggle drugs from Mexico to the United States was sentenced Friday to 12 years in federal prison.
Roberto Salazar, 26, a San Diego resident, was convicted of importing fentanyl and conspiring to distribute heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine and fentanyl, federal authorities said.
The defendant pleaded guilty last October. He worked at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego.
He obtained cars that were driven to Mexico, where the drugs were loaded into the engine compartments. The couriers would then take them back across the border into the United States, prosecutors said.
The scheme went live around 2015. Some of the couriers recruited by Salazar were former Marines or classmates at Southwestern College in Chula Vista.
When he was arrested, “Salazar had become so involved in drug trafficking that he was commissioning a Mexican composer to write a drug ballad known as ‘narcocorrido about him,’” the US attorney’s office said in a statement.
A verse that Salazar suggested to the composer, read: “I wanted to study and become a soldier, but I liked the fast life better.”
