García Luna, Secretary of Public Security under Felipe Calderón, will spend almost 40 years in prison in the United States, after being found guilty of collaborating with the Sinaloa Cartel.
In October 2024, Judge Brian Cogan ruled that in addition to 460 months in prison, García Luna must pay a fine of at least two million dollars.
After serving his sentence behind bars, when the former official is already an elderly person, he will have five years of freedom supervised by authorities.
Handing down the sentence in a Brooklyn court, Judge Cogan told García Luna: “You have already fooled yourself into thinking that you respect the law. You have the same clouded mind as ‘El Chapo.'”
The Prosecutor’s Office had requested a life sentence for the former official of the Governments of Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, while García Luna’s defense proposed a minimum sentence of 20 years. However, the sentence was a middle ground.
“I will give you a light at the end of the tunnel,” Cogan told García Luna.
Genaro became the highest-level former Mexican official to receive a sentence in the United States for ties to drug trafficking.
García Luna was found guilty of protecting the Sinaloa Cartel from Joaquín “Chapo” Guzmán, sentenced to life imprisonment by the US justice system in 2019, in exchange for millionaire bribes to send drugs to the United States from 2001 to 2012, according to the prosecution.
In February 2023, a popular jury found the man who was the architect of the war on drugs during Felipe Calderón’s six-year term (2006-2012) guilty of participating in a continued criminal enterprise, conspiracy to distribute, possess and import cocaine, and document falsification.
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.”
Among the charges, he was accused of having protected six drug shipments that together totaled 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” and Óscar “Lobo” Valencia, claimed to have paid millions of dollars to the accused in exchange for protection.
García Luna, who has always declared himself innocent, tried in vain to have a new trial carried out, considering that the American justice system used “false information provided by the government of Mexico” and witnesses with “criminal records” that he persecuted when he was the anti-drug czar.
