The poster boy for the War on Drugs is in the dock.It is no big secret that Mexican police officers moonlight for drug traffickers. As far back as 2010, a state commander nicknamed “El Tyson” admitted in a confession video on national television that he was not only a high-ranking cartel member, but that he made young narco recruits cut up bodies to lose their fear of blood. El Tyson was arrested by the federal police when it was controlled by Genaro García Luna, a square-jawed intelligence agent who was a key architect of the country’s war on cartels.
In a
twist of fate, however, García Luna is now himself on trial in New York,
accused of pocketing millions of dollars from those same kingpins after helping
them traffic tons of cocaine to America. The trial, which began on 17 January
in a federal court in Brooklyn and is expected to last eight weeks, breaks new
ground in the drug war. Since Richard Nixon first declared a war on drugs in
1971, the US has taken down a vast array of Mexican traffickers — most famously
Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, who was convicted in the same Brooklyn courthouse in
2019. But never before has such a high-ranking Mexican official faced a US jury
on drug charges.
Journalists
and activists have for years pointed out that it is no use targeting the
mobsters if you don’t go after their political protection. This case therefore
marks a serious turning point for US law enforcement. But it also rings alarm
bells. The level of corruption alleged by the witnesses goes beyond anything
I’ve seen in my two decades covering Mexico’s drug war. At the very least, the
trial is deeply embarrassing for Washington’s drug agents and politicians who
schmoozed with García Luna. (There are photos of him with Hillary Clinton,
Barack Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder.) More seriously, the
far-reaching allegations also suggest that, unless the United States can reduce
the amount that Americans spend on illegal drugs — estimated at close to $150
billion a year in one study — this narco corruption may just carry on with
catastrophic consequences.
What’s more,
it is by no means guaranteed that the jury will convict García Luna. In his
opening argument, defence lawyer César de Castro claimed the prosecution does
not have hard evidence that his client led a double life as law enforcer and
crime boss. “No money. No photos. No videos. No texts. No emails. No records,” De Castro said. “No
credible, believable, plausible evidence Mr García Luna helped the cartels.”
Prosecutors
are, however, using the testimony of so-called cooperating witnesses, including
scarred and grizzly cartel operatives who could have made deals with
prosecutors to take the stand. Some have confessed to killing multiple victims
and were major traffickers. Before the trial started, the judge even had to
rule that the defence could not ask them about potential acts of cannibalism —
a practice that various gangsters have been found to engage in — because it
might be “distracting”.
As the
jury was selected, prosecutors rigorously made sure the candidates agreed they
could believe such witnesses and convict someone on their evidence, even if it
were not backed up by physical proof. If the jury were to find García Luna not
guilty, it would be, as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said on
Tuesday, “a fiasco — the agencies and government of the United States would
look very bad”. There is a lot at stake.
When I
met García Luna back in 2005, when he was a rising star as the head of a
federal investigative agency dubbed as Mexico’s FBI, he struck me as
underwhelming, largely because he mumbled and stuttered. But he was convincing
in his argument that Mexican law enforcement had to change to meet the new
challenges. This was a time when gangland murders in Mexico were on the rise
and Mexican traffickers had usurped Colombians as the biggest gangsters on the
continent, smuggling the lion’s share of cocaine, heroin and crystal meth over
the Rio Grande.
The
following year, García Luna rose to a cabinet-level role under President
Calderón, who ordered soldiers and police on a national offensive against the
cartels. García Luna revolutionised the federal police, increasing it from a
force of 6,000 to 37,000 officers. He also tried to salvage its image,
financing a TV soap opera called El Equipo, in which good-looking cops went on
daring operations. Moreover, Calderón crafted the Merida Initiative with
Washington to increase cooperation in the fight. Under it, the United States
provided Mexican law enforcement with billions of dollars in equipment and
training, including Black Hawk helicopters and wiretap gear. García Luna also
forged strong relationships with agents from across the US security apparatus.
At
first, this new war on cartels appeared to bear fruit. In 2007, Mexican marines
made the world’s biggest ever cocaine bust, a seizure of 23 tons off the
Pacific coast. Kingpins who had long evaded justice were shot dead. Detained
cartel suspects were made to record confession videos, like that of Tyson, in
which they detailed serial murders.
But then
violence erupted, with relentless firefights, execution-style hits and
massacres. I covered much of this bloodshed — a grim period spent discovering
bullet-ridden corpses on the street and watching too many mothers screaming in
grief. By the time President Calderón left office in 2012, Mexico was suffering
from a humanitarian crisis of mass graves and disappearances that remain
unsolved. For his part, García Luna left Mexico for Florida to set up a
security consulting company and rent a luxury beach house.
Seeing
García Luna in the first days of the trial, he cut a transformed figure,
silver-haired and beaten down by prison, where he has been since his 2019
arrest. Yet he also looked calm and alert to all the technicalities of the
trial, occasionally smirking and blowing kisses to his wife. The first
government witness was Sergio Villarreal Barragán, a hulking enforcer known as
El Grande, a former police officer who was recruited by the Sinaloa Cartel. The
fact that Villarreal was in the police before the mob is not a freak
occurrence, but revealing of Mexico’s history: the country’s cartels grew from
their humble beginnings as peasant farmers with the help of corrupt networks in
the security forces. The career path between gangsters and police officers was like
a revolving door.
Villarreal
described seeing his boss, the kingpin Arturo “The Beard” Beltrán Leyva, meet
García Luna in a safe house in the south of Mexico City and hand over bribe
payments in duffel bags and cardboard boxes — worth more than a million dollars
a month — on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel. In return, García Luna allowed the
cartel’s cocaine to travel through Mexico, busted its rivals and passed on
police intelligence. “Everything ran perfectly. It was the best investment they
made,” he said. One time, the cartel used this intelligence to steal two tons
of cocaine from rivals, Villarreal testified, and split the profits with García
Luna himself.
Such
testimony was expected in this trial. But what Villarreal then described was
remarkable. The cartel, he explained, would make false cocaine bricks and swap
them with police for real cocaine that had been seized. Another time, the
mobsters dressed up as police, arrested a rival and then handed him over to the
real officers. On one occasion, the cartel kidnapped García Luna and brought
him before The Beard because he wasn’t answering the telephone.
Villarreal
also explained how the cartel’s close relationship with corrupt police actually
succeeded in reducing Mexico’s murder rate for a period in 2007, just when
Calderon’s offensive seemed to be going well. But then, he said, the deals
inside the cartels fell apart and the violence soared. One of the biggest
battles was between Beltrán Leyva and his childhood friend “El Chapo”, which
ended with Beltrá Leyva being gunned down by Mexican marines.
In 2019,
I covered a stretch of El Chapo’s trial, which was more enthusiastically
embraced by the New York media. Everyone wanted to be in the courtroom and see
such an infamous mobster and his beauty-queen wife in the gallery. US cable
networks ran regular segments on the trial’s revelations, whether it was El
Chapo running through a tunnel naked to escape marines or his former lover
taking the stand and crying while his wife chuckled. García Luna’s trial, by
contrast, has garnered far less attention. But in some ways, the revelations
are more important in showing how corrupted Mexico’s institutions are and why
the country is so violent.
The
trial might act as a deterrent to make Mexican officials think twice before
blatantly taking cartel bribes. Mexican President López Obrador certainly looks
upbeat when he talks about it in his morning press conferences, saying it shows
how corrupt the previous administration was. Yet the trial also symbolises
something uncomfortable about modern-day Mexico. It is notable, for instance,
that the trial is in New York not Mexico City. Mexican judges have convicted
generals and state governors for working with drug gangs, but not an official
as powerful as García Luna — or a former president. And as long as the
country’s security forces find more sophisticated ways of taking bribes, such
as using intermediaries, this looks unlikely to change. Perhaps even more
depressing is the fact that since García Luna has gone, the cartels have
shifted to more perilous synthetic drugs such as fentanyl, which are driving a
far worse rate of overdoses in the United States.
Everything
has changed since, and not necessarily for the better. In his testimony, El
Grande also talked about the glitter of narco wealth; how his boss The Beard
had a fleet of cars, including a Lamborghini, a Ferrari, and a Rolls Royce, and
pets including a white tiger and black panther. Amid such opulence, achieving
justice for the deaths on both sides of the border will be an extraordinary, if
impossible, challenge. While the stories of El Grande, The Beard, and El Chapo
may dominate the headlines, they are far removed from the bloody conflict that
has consumed Mexico — and the decaying corpses still being dug up in mass
graves.
***Ioan
Grillo is a journalist based in Mexico and the author, most recently, of Blood
Gun Money.
ioangrillo