Former Mexican Secretary of Public Security Genaro Garcia Luna was found guilty this Tuesday of drug trafficking in the Federal Court of the Eastern District of New York, for which he could be he is sentenced to life imprisonment. After deliberation, the twelve members of the jury have unanimously found him guilty of five counts.
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García Luna, 54, has been found guilty of participating in the management of a criminal enterprise whose activity continues to this day; conspiracy to distribute 5 kilograms or more of cocaine; conspiracy to distribute and possess 5 kilograms or more of cocaine with the intent to distribute it in the United States, and conspiracy to import the same amount or more.
The fifth offense was that of giving false testimony to the US authorities when he applied for citizenship.
Judge Brian Cogan announced that he will hand down the sentence on June 27 at 11 am.
García Luna worked in the intelligence corps for a decade, headed the Federal Investigation Agency (AFI), whose main objective was to fight organized crime, during the Government of Vicente Fox (2000-2006), and was Secretary of Public Security during the six-year term of Felipe Calderón (2006-2012).
Since 2012 he has lived in Florida, from where, according to what the Prosecutor’s Office showed during the trial, he regularly travels to Mexico. The former official was arrested in December 2019 in Dallas (Texas, USA) and was in prison until the start of the trial on January 17, when jury selection began.
Justice has arrived for whoever was Felipe Calderón’s squire.
The Mexican government celebrated this Tuesday that the former secretary was found guilty by a US jury of the five charges for which he was tried, four of them related to drug trafficking.
“Justice has arrived for whoever was squire of Felipe Calderón (president between 2006 and 2012). The crimes against our people will never be forgotten,” said the spokesman for the Presidency of the Republic, Jesús Ramírez Cuevas, in his account Twitter.
This morning, the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has followed the case exhaustively since his daily press conferences, assured that he “will not leave” the case after the jury’s verdict.
Nor did he rule out that Mexico request his extradition from the United States, saying that there are “criminal complaints” against him.
In addition, López Obrador regretted that the trial did not take into account the civil lawsuit that his Government filed in 2020 in Florida to claim 700 million dollars that, he alleged, García Luna obtained illegally from public resources. And he recalled the importance of the trial, since he puts the magnifying glass on Calderón, one of his great political rivals.
The other cause in the United States
García Luna also faces a civil lawsuit in Miami for laundering “stolen” funds with which Mexico intends to recover some 700 million dollars. That figure is the one mentioned by the Government of Mexico, but the lawsuit only says that the amount to be recovered is greater than 250 million dollars, according to an established scale.
The lawsuit filed by the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) of the Mexican Government in 2021 before the Miami-Dade County courts includes García Luna’s wife, Linda Cristina Pereyra, as a “main participant” in a “complex” network that he used at least 40 companies and trusts for his purposes.
This legal action is officially “inactive” since last December due to an appeal not yet resolved and is independent of the criminal case opened in the federal courts of New York against García Luna (2006-2012) for four drug trafficking charges and one immigration charge.
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