Yesterday the trial against Genaro García Luna began in the Brooklyn Court. The first witness presented by the prosecution was Sergio Villarreal, El Grande, who was a ruthless hitman boss of the Beltran Leyva cartel. If the other testimonies that the US prosecutor’s office will present are like those of Villarreal, I don’t see how they can prove the alleged relationship of the former secretary of public security with the Sinaloa cartel, the crime for which he is accused.
Villarreal did not present a single proof of his statements, as the defense said, but his version is not even credible. Villarreal said that he left the Sinaloa cartel in 2001 to be part of the Beltrán Leyva family, but since then, García Luna has been part of the cartel: he collected money, reported on operations, placed and removed agents anywhere in the country. He was part, Villarreal said, of the cartel itself.
The problem is that, by that date, before 2001, García Luna was a CISEN operator, influential but without the possibility of doing what Villarreal says. In 2001, when the hitman says that he himself left the Sinaloa cartel to join the Beltrán Leyva, García Luna had just been appointed director of the Federal Investigation Agency of the PGR headed by General Rafael Macedo de la Concha. . The security secretary was none other than the current attorney general of the republic, Alejandro Gertz Manero, who was also the head of the Federal Police. García Luna and Gertz did not have the slightest sympathy for each other.
But, in addition, since the middle of that six-year term, the internal ruptures of the Sinaloa cartel with the Beltrán Leyva began, shortly after Chapo Guzmán escaped from the Puente Grande prison, in January 2001. Shortly after Calderón took office in December In 2007, those differences turned into a war, especially after one of the Beltrán Leyva brothers, El Mochomo, was arrested and Rodolfo Carrillo, the brother of Amado, The Lord of the Skies, was assassinated in Culiacán. Since then the Beltrán, the Juárez cartel and the Zetas have entered into an open war with the Sinaloans.
The question is pertinent: why would the Beltrán family pay García Luna, which is what Villareal says, to protect their enemies? How could the Beltrán hit man be a witness to this? How could García Luna do everything What was he supposed to do when he didn’t have enough power to do it, especially between 2001 and 2006?
These are testimonies that may work well in a certain press, then and now, but in judicial terms they are simply improbable.
Another character who will testify these days is the former Nayarit prosecutor, Edgar Veytia, detained since 2017, accused of introducing drugs into the United States linked to the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel, one of the most corrupt and unscrupulous characters that has ever existed in the system. of Justice. That prosecutor’s office was used to beat, extort, was paid with land, property, resources and in the center of these versions and complaints was always the prosecutor Veytia.
A few years ago, 2012, we went to investigate in Nayarit the arrest of a young businessman, Eduardo Valencia, who had a tough legal dispute with a group of Canadian investors supported by the state government and, above all, by the prosecutor, then attorney general. , Veytia, for some real estate in Nuevo Vallarta. The businessman had literally been arrested by force and asked us to investigate his case. That we did.
The Todo Personal reporter who went to Tepic and Nuevo Vallarta met with harsh threats from the prosecution, which were later extended to a server and to Bibiana Belsasso, accompanied by a campaign promoted by Veytia in local media against the Todo Personal program and its drivers and ended with a worsening of the imprisonment conditions of the businessman.
Veytia himself threatened us through a letter, simply for having investigated one of the many cases of apparent judicial corruption in the state.
The prosecutor personally told the businessman’s family that since they had aired his issue in the media, it would cost them much more to get him out of prison. It cost Eduardo Valencia all of his assets, years in jail, two assassination attempts in jail and until Veytia fell, he did not regain his freedom and he has won almost all the trials that had been opened against him. Furthermore, his case is now in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Veytia has become a protected witness for all uses, serving a 20-year sentence that will end up being much less for his alleged collaboration with the US authorities.
That was a particular story. Beyond that, the important thing was the control of the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel over the state. The prosecutor in the United States was accused of being an accomplice of that cartel. Having a character like Veytia used as a prosecution witness actually weakens any case. They have already used it to arrest General Salvador Cienfuegos and the former Secretary of Defense was returned to Mexico in less than a month and exonerated.
Veytia, like Sergio Villarreal, is a man with dozens of deaths behind him, but also with an undeniable load of corruption. With an addition, if Veytia was part of the Jalisco Cartel, and for that reason he was arrested and sentenced, how could he know, how could he be a witness, that García Luna was part of the Sinaloa cartel?
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