All drug trafficking routes pass through the Eastern District Court of New York. A last minute adjustment to the calendar will cause Ismael May Zambada and Genaro García Luna appear before the same court in Brooklyn one day apart. The Secretary of Public Security and former anti-drug czar during the Felipe Calderón Government (2006-2012) will be sentenced on October 16. The 76-year-old capo, founder and boss of bosses of the Sinaloa Cartel, will have his first hearing before Judge Cogan on October 17.
This Wednesday, Cogan approved a request from the Prosecutor’s Office to advance Zambada’s hearing, initially scheduled for October 31, due to a conflict in his calendar. It will be the same judge who issues the sentence against García Luna, who faces a sentence of 20 years to life in prison for three drug trafficking crimes, one count of organized crime and another for false statements. The sentencing hearing against the former secretary, the highest-ranking former Mexican official ever tried in the United States, was scheduled for October 9, but in that case it was Cogan who asked for an extra week to determine how many years he will give the former boss. of the Federal Police.
An anonymous jury found García Luna guilty in February of last year, but the sentence has been postponed on several occasions. The former official was accused of collaborating with the Sinaloa Cartel for more than two decades, since he assumed ownership of the Federal Investigation Agency in the Government of Vicente Fox (2000-2006) until several years after he left his career in the public sector. Both the former secretary and El Mayo are imprisoned in the Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, the only federal prison in New York, with capacity for more than 1,200 inmates.
Cogan was also in charge of conducting the trial and convicting Joaquín El Chapo Guzmán to life in prison plus 30 years in 2019. El Chapo was also held at the MDC in Brooklyn, where the defendants remain until their judicial processes are resolved, from when he was extradited in 2017 until he was sentenced. The case opened against El Mayo in New York arises from the same accusation for which Guzmán, his former partner, was tried. The court record has been updated for more than a decade, and in February of this year, a grand jury indicted Zambada for trafficking fentanyl, the drug at the center of Washington’s latest crusade against drugs. That is one of the main reasons why US authorities insisted that he be prosecuted in that court and not in the Western District Court of Texas, in the border city of El Paso, where he remained detained for seven weeks since he was captured. last July 25.
Despite the coincidences, García Luna and Zambada are at diametrically different procedural moments. The former official was arrested in Texas in 2019 and had his trial until early last year, after delays in the United States judicial system caused by the pandemic. The former secretary is in the final phase of his process and his team of lawyers announced that he will appeal the sentence after receiving it. The conviction will also be decisive for a possible negotiation with the United States authorities, in case he decides to collaborate and snitch on other targets of American justice. During the five years that he has spent on the other side of the border, García Luna has insisted that he has not closed any agreement to be a cooperator for the Prosecutor’s Office.
El Mayo, on the other hand, is just beginning the path towards an eventual trial. Zambada pleaded not guilty in his first appearance in Brooklyn on September 13, where he appeared before a magistrate, the equivalent of an investigative judge. The capo, transferred that same week amid strong security measures, is accused of 17 counts for crimes such as drug trafficking, organized crime, illegal carrying of firearms and money laundering.
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