“You have a double life, you dress very elegantly, you may say that you respect the law, and you surely believe it, but your conduct is the same as that of ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán“.
That was the judge’s scolding Brian Cogan gave to the former right-hand man of the former president Felipe Calderonbefore handing down a sentence of 38.33 years in prison for his ties to drug trafficking.
This Wednesday, Cogan – known for being relentless in his sentences – sentenced García Luna to spend practically the rest of his life in prison despite the fact that the former Mexican official maintained that he has no ties to the Sinaloa Cartel, along with presume that in his time at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, he has been an exemplary prisoner.
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After this, the man who also sentenced “El Chapo” to life imprisonment and who will have Guzmán Loera’s compadre, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, in the dock, said that he would give him “a light at the end of the tunnel.” to the former anti-drug czar of Calderón Hinojosa, and sentenced him to 460 months in prison.
The sentence for the former Secretary of Security is 1 year 8 months before a jury will find him guilty of 4 charges related to drug trafficking, and one for lying to the immigration authority in his application for citizenship.
With this, García Luna becomes the first Secretary of State of Mexico convicted in the US for being part of a drug trafficking network. Before him, only politicians such as former governors Mario Villanueva or Tomás Yarrington have been sentenced.
Genaro García Luna’s links were pointed out by Opposition politicians and journalists during his management with a security official but became more relevant in 2018 when, during the trial against “El Chapo” Guzmán, “El Rey” Zambada was questioned by the Prosecutor’s Office about the bribes that his brother, “El Mayo” gave him.
The following year, an investigation against him was reactivated, which led to his arrest on December 9, 2019 in Texas.
During his trial, the US Prosecutor’s Office presented the network of complicities that García Luna wove with senior drug trafficking bosses while he was Secretary of State. Throughout the process against him, García Luna has maintained, in writing, that it is a exemplary person and that the accusations against him “are out of reality.”
García Luna and his defense even tried to bring the accusations against him to former President López Obrador but the strategy during the trial did not work for them. In addition, they tried on several occasions to have a new process opened, which also did not bear fruit.
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Regarding the sentence, Breon Peace, US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York, who commented on the matter that:
“The sentence handed down today against Genaro García Luna is a fundamental step in the defense of justice and the rule of law. His betrayal of the public trust and the people he had sworn to protect resulted in the importation of more than one million kilograms of lethal narcotics into our communities and unleashed untold violence here and in Mexico (…) after years of deceit and destructive drug trafficking, García Luna will spend almost 40 years where he belongs: in a federal prison.”
CSAS