The last and desperate attempt for the freedom of the prisoner García Luna

A prisoner named Genaro García Luna lives his darkest hours. After decades of unstoppable rise in his elite police career; to rub shoulders with presidents and high figures in international politics; From establishing himself as Felipe Calderón's anti-drug czar, leading his bloody crusade against drug trafficking in Mexico and accumulating an unusual fortune for an official along the way, the last few years have not been so prosperous. On March 20 he faces his last chance to regain freedom, but the attempted millionaire bribe of a witness weighs on him. He knows things aren't looking good.

Everything began to fall apart years ago. First there were those journalists, that handful of busybodies determined to reveal the intrigues of the palace, the machinery of the sewers of the State that he managed with the ease of a puppeteer. News that his power allowed him to dismiss as rumors, after all. But then came the trial, that damned New York court that convicted Joaquín Loera El Chapo Guzmán and those witnesses who tarnished his name by talking about million-dollar bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel.

In 2019, rumors turned to suspicion when US police arrested him in the Texas city of Dallas. And, in February 2023, his own trial, that court that made history by convicting the highest-profile Mexican official ever tried in the United States of all charges: conspiracy for the international distribution of cocaine; conspiracy to distribute and possess cocaine; conspiracy to import cocaine; organized crime and giving false statements. A repertoire that is difficult to excuse and the facts proven: Calderón's former Secretary of Public Security worked for the most powerful cartel in Mexico. The drug czar was, in reality, a drug trafficker.

The backfire

The door closes on García Luna. He already sees himself behind bars for life, in the first steps of his personal via crucis. But his lawyers are playing a risky bluff, the last card they have left up their sleeve: on December 15, they request a new trial. They argue that they have unpublished evidence that undermines the conviction – the Prosecutor's Office of the Eastern District of New York, after investigating it, asks Judge Brian Cogan to reject it due to its lack of consistency compared to previous evidence – and that four of the witnesses They gave contaminated testimony against him.

One of the lawyers' main assets is the controversial testimony of two of the witnesses, both convicted of drug trafficking: the former Nayarit prosecutor Édgar Veytia The devil and Oscar Nava Valencia The wolf —who claimed that he paid more than 10 million dollars in bribes to García Luna—. There is a third person involved who did not testify at the trial: Juan Carlos Nava Valencia The Tiger, brother of Óscar, former bosses of the Millennium Cartel. The defense argues that El Diablo, El Lobo and El Tigre – what else were they going to do, with those nicknames – spoke to each other from prison, thanks to smuggled phones, to coordinate their story and incriminate García Luna.

The request for a new trial is a double-edged sword. The Public Ministry investigates the accusation by García Luna's lawyers. He concludes that it is a lie. Instead, while carrying out investigations, prosecutors come across ammunition they did not have. Evidence that, instead of corroborating the former official's thesis, sinks him (even) further. The shot has backfired.

contraband phones

What the prosecutors discover is that, in a last desperate attempt, a forward flight doomed to fail, the prisoner García Luna tries to buy his freedom. Between June 2022 and August 2023 he shares a cell with another inmate, an anonymous prosecutor's confidant known only as Individual 2.

García Luna wants to contact another prisoner, Individual 1, and bribe him in exchange for testifying on his behalf. Individual 2 meets Individual 1. The former official asks his roommate to convince Individual 1 to give a false statement: stating that he heard The Devil, The Wolf and the Tiger talking on clandestine phones to square his story . In exchange, he offers two million dollars, to be delivered by one of his “associates” outside of prison.

Specifically, García Luna wants Individual 1 to declare that he heard El Tigre tell his brother, El Lobo, that at the trial they must testify that they bribed the former official to gain access to the port of Manzanillo, in the Mexican state of Colima, one of the great gateways to the country. Tons of merchandise dock on its coast every day. And, camouflaged among that tetris of containers painted in bright colors, kilos and kilos of drugs on their way north.

García Luna doesn't know it, but Individual 2 covers his back. On April 12, 2023, with the help of a contraband phone that he possesses, he records a conversation in which the former official tells him what he has to ask of Individual 1. On April 15, without still suspecting that he is being deceived, García Luna even writes a script for Individual 2 to give to Individual 1. She also tells him that she has met with another inmate who has agreed to corroborate the false testimony. The information reaches the ears of El Tigre. And the former boss gives the tip.

On October 6, 2023, two months before García Luna's defense requests the new trial, El Tigre contacts the Prosecutor's Office for the Eastern District of New York. The information is not made public, however, until early March, when prosecutors issue the report of their investigation, 93 pages detailing the bribes, consulted by this newspaper.

Judge Brian Cogan, who led the first trial against García Luna, grants a deadline: on March 20 he will announce whether he will allow Calderón's former secretary to try his luck again in front of a US court. Although now, the balance no longer only balances the old evidence that condemned him and the new evidence used by his defense. The attempt to bribe millions weighs on him. The sentence can range from 20 years to life in prison. The prisoner García Luna swallows saliva.

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