Congress Suddenly Wants to Know If US Taxpayers Were Helping El Chapo

After flying under the radar for years, the case of Genaro García Luna is finally raising alarms in Congress, with one of the Senate’s top Republicans demanding answers about how Mexico’s highest-ranking cop was able to partner with DEA and FBI, “at the time that he funneled roughly 103,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States” for the Sinaloa Cartel.

Last week, García Luna became the most senior Mexican law enforcement official ever convicted of narco-corruption when a Brooklyn federal jury delivered a unanimous guilty verdict on a five-count indictment that charged him with taking massive bribes to enable cartel drug smuggling, kidnappings, and murders while he was in office from 2001 to 2012. 

García Luna’s position involved close collaboration with U.S. anti-narcotics agencies that operate in Mexico, and it gave him discretion over the spending of hundreds of millions in American tax dollars delivered as security aid. That money was supposed to go toward fighting the cartels, but his trial showed he was leaking sensitive intelligence, protecting drug shipments, and disrupting efforts to capture Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and other cartel leaders.

On Feb. 22, a day after the guilty verdict, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley sent a letter to the heads of the DEA and FBI asking what the agencies knew about García Luna and when, and demanding evidence—including recordings—that could shed new light on the relationship.

“Please explain what each of your agencies knew about García Luna’s corruption and criminal activity, when your agencies learned the information, and how your agencies learned the information,” Grassley wrote to FBI Director Christopher Wray and DEA Administrator Anne Milgram.

A spokesperson for the FBI confirmed receiving the letter and declined to comment. The DEA also confirmed receipt and said the agency would respond to the inquiry but offered no further comment.

While it’s unlikely the letter will be met with immediate transparency, the conviction of García Luna is leading to fresh scrutiny of foreign operations by the DEA and other agencies that fight the war on drugs beyond U.S. borders. Mexico in particular has proven problematic, with state security forces repeatedly linked to massacres, disappearances, and other gruesome human rights abuses. Most recently, the DEA’s special vetted unit of Mexico’s federal police has been exposed as corrupt, dysfunctional, and allegedly mismanaged at the highest levels.

Since 2008, when García Luna was in office, Congress has sent at least $3.3 billion to Mexico through the security cooperation agreement known as the Mérida Initiative. Grassley’s letter expresses concern about “the proper stewardship of U.S. law enforcement assets and information, which are dependent upon resources provided by the taxpayer.”

In short, Grassley wants to know if American tax dollars were being sent to Mexico while the DEA and FBI were tolerating García Luna’s corruption. The letter, which cites reporting by VICE News about a former cartel boss who witnessed García Luna take multi-million dollar bribes, notes that U.S. authorities in Mexico received reports as early as 2008 casting suspicion on García Luna, yet he seemingly remained a trusted partner until he left office four years later. 

One witness who testified against García Luna was Earl Anthony Wayne, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico from 2011 to 2015. Wayne told VICE News after the trial that when he first arrived in Mexico, García Luna was introduced to him by colleagues as “one of the gentlemen who we work with most closely in trying to go after organized crime in the country.”

“During that period of time, he was viewed as a partner that we were working with,” said Wayne, who currently serves as co-chair of the board of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.

Wayne said he eventually learned that some U.S. agencies had suspicions about corruption on the Mexican side and chose to adapt their partnerships accordingly. García Luna’s federal police, he said, had a reputation for protecting the Sinaloa Cartel and a faction called the Beltran Leyva Organization.

“My team of specialists started saying, ‘Well, there are certain parts of the government that we work with more regularly against certain cartel targets and others that we work with more regularly against other cartel targets,’” Wayne said. “I was consistently told that we think that we could work with parts of the federal police, and we have these certain vetted units and we can work with them in a trusting way, going to get certain targets.” 

With García Luna’s federal police, Wayne said, “They don't seem to be as effective against the Sinaloa and the Beltran Leyva groups. So we work with other partners as if we're looking at those targets.”

Wayne had no answer for why García Luna was not charged or arrested sooner by U.S. authorities. Prosecutors said it took years to build the case based on the testimony of cooperating witnesses, but didn’t explain how he was able to move to Miami and receive a green card after leaving office, living comfortably and traveling freely to Mexico until his arrest in 2019.

There have been reports that U.S. authorities possess incriminating recordings of García Luna that prosecutors did not use during his trial because they were not admissible as evidence. Wayne didn’t get into specifics about what exactly the U.S. had on García Luna during his time as ambassador, but said, “I do happen to know there was additional information collected in various intelligence means that I didn't really see, but I heard about some of it.”

Regardless of whether there was a smoking gun that proved García Luna’s link to the Sinaloa Cartel, there’s growing evidence that the DEA and other agencies at least suspected he was dirty and yet chose to continue doing business with him in certain capacities. While the Sinaloa Cartel suffered some losses, it remained powerful while rival groups such as Los Zetas and La Familia Michoacana were crushed and splintered into warring factions.

For watchdogs like Adam Isaacson, director of defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America, it’s no surprise that the U.S. government turned a blind eye toward García Luna while he was in power.

“It seems pretty clear that the DEA and other parts of the United States government knew that Garcia Luna was not somebody that they could fully trust, and that, in fact, he may have been colluding with armed groups or with organized crime,” Isaacson told VICE News. “But they still found him useful because he was going after other organized crime groups at the same time.”

Isaacson pointed to examples beyond Mexico, such as Honduras and Brazil, where the U.S. has provided funding and training to state security forces linked to corruption and human rights abuses, and said it’s no longer shocking—it’s simply business as usual in the war on drugs.

“Their mission is not to make corruption go away,” Isaacson said. “Their mission is to break a drug organization and get as many tons of drugs seized as possible so it doesn't make it to the United States. And if that means making common cause with bad guys to go after other bad guys, they're going to do it without regard to the institutional or accountability damage that that might do in the countries that they're working.”

García Luna’s trial left open the question of whether the corruption extended all the way to Mexico’s presidency. Former President Felipe Calderón and current leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador both denied allegations from witnesses—made without supporting evidence—that they supported or took payments from the Sinaloa Cartel. 

Diplomatic relations with Mexico over U.S. anti-narcotics efforts have been extremely tense in recent years. Cartel violence continues to spiral out of control while fentanyl pours across the border to fuel record overdoses. But there’s no sign that the U.S. plans to withhold security aid, overhaul the DEA, or enact any meaningful change.

Even Grassley, who is now pushing for more DEA oversight in the aftermath of the García Luna conviction, has resisted efforts to implement harm reduction and decriminalization, saying at a congressional hearing last year that he “worried that making drugs more accessible is what this administration calls drug control.”

The 89-year-old Grassley has been using the drug war in Mexico as a political tool for decades—to the point that parts of his sternly-worded letter to the DEA and FBI felt pulled from a familiar script.

"We need to see major progress in the war on drugs,” Grassley said in March of 1998. “Mexican cooperation is crucial to fighting the flow of drugs into the U.S."

Just three years later, García Luna took office.