BROOKLYN — When the trial of Genaro García Luna starts Tuesday in Brooklyn, the feeling of deja vu will be inescapable. Four years ago in the same courtroom, before the same judge, likely with several of the same key witnesses, a jury convicted the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the Sinaloa Cartel leader now serving a life sentence in a maximum-security U.S. prison.
But while El Chapo—known for his audacious jailbreaks and vast drug trafficking empire—was already a household name by the time his trial began, García Luna remains largely unknown outside of Mexico, where he served as the nation’s top law enforcement official from 2006 until 2012. In recent weeks, after the chaotic capture of El Chapo’s son in Sinaloa, the Guzmán family has once again dominated the news cycle while García Luna remains overlooked despite being the highest-ranking Mexican government official ever to face a U.S. prosecution.
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The upcoming trial, however, has the potential to make the 54-year-old García Luna notorious in his own right. Not only is he charged with accepting multi-million dollar bribes from El Chapo and the Sinaloa Cartel, García Luna is accused of hoodwinking nearly the entire U.S. government. For more than a decade, he worked closely with the DEA, FBI, and other agencies, overseeing the spending of hundreds of millions worth of American tax dollars sent to combat the very cartels he allegedly enabled to operate with impunity.
García Luna maintains his innocence, and his defense will seek to highlight his deep connections to the U.S. government, asking the jury how a top official who worked hand-in-hand with the gringos to capture some of El Chapo’s closest allies could have possibly been protecting the Sinaloa Cartel at the same time. Prosecutors, meanwhile, will attempt to keep the focus on García Luna’s alleged double-dealing, calling multiple former high-ranking cartel members to testify about delivering bribes in exchange for protection and intelligence leaks.
Beyond determining García Luna’s guilt or innocence, the trial has the potential to deliver multiple bombshells about corruption on both sides of the border. El Chapo’s case revealed allegations of corruption against both former president Enrique Peña Nieto and current leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador, with both denying any wrongdoing. This time around in Mexico, the focus will be on ex-president Felipe Calderón, who entrusted García Luna to serve as the country’s top civilian law enforcement official.
Under Calderón, violence in Mexico spiked to record levels as the government aggressively deployed the military to wage war against the cartels. While many cartel kingpins were killed or captured during the Calderón era, the Sinaloa Cartel remained suspiciously intact.
Some former DEA officials still recall García Luna as a trustworthy partner in the drug war. Mike Vigil, former director of DEA international operations, told VICE News he met multiple times with García Luna in Mexico over the years and never saw or heard anything that aroused suspicion.
“I got along very well with him,” Vigil said. “He was an individual that was very friendly. We never really suspected anything, we never saw any issues, at least I didn’t, that smacked of corruption. As far as I know, he always provided support to the DEA.”
Vigil recalled how García Luna oversaw the creation of a facility on the outskirts of Mexico City dubbed “The Bunker,” full of cutting-edge electronics and surveillance technology and staffed by a team of young, college-educated Mexican government agents. Vigil described García Luna as a taskmaster who would publicly berate employees who failed to meet his standards. Vigil also said García Luna was not nearly as flashy as other senior Mexican law enforcement officials.
“He dressed modestly,” Vigil said. “He wasn’t wearing Giorgio Armani suits. When he dealt with us, he didn’t show wealth. A lot of the comandantes, you see them with massive diamond rings, gold Rolexes, gold bracelets—he never showed any of that.”
García Luna came from a working-class family in Mexico City and worked his way up the ranks of Mexican law enforcement in the 1990s, starting his career in the Mexican equivalent of the CIA before becoming head of an agency comparable to the FBI. According to U.S. federal prosecutors, that’s when García Luna started pocketing multi-million dollar bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel. During El Chapo’s trial, a brother of cartel boss Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada testified that he personally delivered a bribe of $3 million in cash to García Luna in 2005.
He’s accused of being a triple agent working for the DEA, the Mexican government, and the Sinaloa Cartel
After Calderón took office in 2006 and promoted García Luna to the cabinet-level position of Public Security Director, El Mayo’s brother testified that García Luna received another $3-6 million worth of bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel, while another cartel faction shelled out an estimated $50 million. The money allegedly purchased protection, along with information about rival cartels and U.S. law enforcement sources and operations in Mexico.
At the same time, García Luna was a frequent visitor to Washington, D.C., where he hobnobbed with a who’s who of former U.S. officials. Against the objections of prosecutors, García Luna’s defense has sought permission from the trial judge to introduce photos of him meeting with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, along with the directors of the DEA, CIA, FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security, among many others.
Asked how it’s possible that García Luna may have been wildly corrupt while all of these meetings were taking place, Vigil said it would be easy.
“The thing is, there is no vetting process,” Vigil said. “We didn’t vet every single Mexican official or for that matter most officials in foreign countries. If we investigated every foreign official we worked with, we wouldn’t be able to direct any resources against the cartels.”
Another former senior DEA official, Derek Maltz, who led the agency’s Special Operations Division from 2005 to 2014, told VICE News he remembers attending an international conference for anti-narcotics officials and seeing García Luna being treated like a rock star.
“He was walking around like he was a president, like he was a big deal,” Maltz said. “He was involved in developing new strategies and approaches to go after the bad guys.”
Maltz noted that while García Luna was in charge of security, the Mexican government allowed the DEA to aggressively pursue many cartel leaders, leading to captures and extraditions of some of the same suspects who are now expected to be called as trial witnesses, including El Mayo’s brother Jesus Reynaldo Zambada, known as El Rey or The King, arrested in 2008.
“The DEA office in Mexico during that time frame, they were rocking and rolling,” Maltz said. “They were making good cases. They were disrupting business. They were extraditing cartel members. They were getting stuff done.”
At the same time, Maltz said, rumors were spreading about García Luna’s alleged corruption: “There was always this suspicion he was involved with the traffickers.”
But even with the cloud hanging over García Luna’s head, Maltz said, the DEA had no choice but to continue working with him during the Calderón era. Without García Luna’s help at the time, he said, it would have been impossible for the DEA to operate in Mexico.
“It’s always a balance,” Maltz said. “We obviously have to work with them but we have to be careful.”
One former U.S. law enforcement agent who worked in Mexico during the García Luna era described the corruption as an open secret. The ex-agent, who requested anonymity because they are still involved in security work in Mexico, said the DEA and other agencies “knew 100 percent” that García Luna was playing both sides but chose to turn a blind eye.
“The DEA and embassy loved him,” the ex-agent said. “They kissed his butt and gave him all of our intel, which he sold to the BLO [Beltrán-Leyva Organization, a faction of the Sinaloa Cartel].”
Another former senior U.S. law enforcement official in Mexico, who requested anonymity because they still work in the region, said that while Mexican security forces waged war with certain cartels under García Luna, there was never any effort to root out corruption. The DEA, he said, was essentially stuck working with García Luna because he was in charge at the time.
“The only thing the government of Mexico could do was show that it was battling with the cartels,” the ex-official said. “The corrupt police and military controlled the intercept and intelligence gathering capabilities.”
After Calderón left office in 2012, García Luna left Mexico for Miami, where he partnered with prominent international businessmen to form several security consulting companies, which landed lucrative contracts with the Mexican government. Prosecutors have charged him with lying on his immigration paperwork and allege he “used shell companies and straw purchasers to hide assets,” including an expensive waterfront home, a yacht, and other trappings of luxury.
If we investigated every foreign official we worked with, we wouldn’t be able to direct any resources against the cartels
In court filings, García Luna’s defense team has maintained that his business in Florida was legitimate, writing that prosecutors have “zero evidence” that his “purported displays of wealth and luxury between 2013 and 2019 were linked in any way to bribes.”
But the government of Mexico has also alleged wrongdoing, filing a civil lawsuit in Sept. 2021 accusing the former official of stealing $250 million “through a complicated unlawful government-contracting scheme” and laundering the money through offshore banks.
While García Luna has not been charged with money laundering, prosecutors have asked the judge for permission to show the jury evidence of his business dealings and lavish lifestyle as proof that he “never turned his back on the Sinaloa Cartel or his fellow corrupt government officials who worked for the Cartel.”
Peniley Ramírez, an investigative reporter in Mexico who has been following the García Luna story for years and recently co-hosted a podcast series about his case, believes he hasn’t received the same attention as El Chapo in the U.S. in part because Americans tend to shrug off high-level corruption in Mexico as expected. But even so, she added, the allegations against García Luna are unprecedented and stunning in scope.
“It’s remarkable,” Ramírez said. “He’s accused of being a triple agent working for the DEA, the Mexican government, and the Sinaloa Cartel.”
Three other former senior Mexican law enforcement officials, who oversaw a specially vetted unit that worked closely with the DEA, have also been charged in connection with García Luna, including one who has already pleaded guilty and is expected to testify in the upcoming trial. Of the two others, one remains a fugitive and the other is jailed in Mexico.
Just like with El Chapo’s trial, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have said in court filings they intend to call multiple cooperating witnesses who were formerly high-ranking cartel members. The witness names have been kept secret amid security concerns, but beyond El Mayo’s brother, one of the suspects includes Edgar Valdez Villarreal, a Texas-born ex-lieutenant for the Beltrán Leyva Organization currently serving a 49-year U.S. prison sentence. Another candidate is Alfredo Beltrán-Leyva, one of the brothers who led the eponymous cartel faction and is serving a life sentence in the U.S. Both could have their sentences reduced for testifying.
“They’ll line them up,” said one defense attorney, who asked for anonymity because they have cartel clients with pending federal cases. “All of the scumbags in the world.”
Eduardo Balarezo, an attorney who was part of the team that represented El Chapo during his trial, told VICE News that García Luna appears to have a much stronger defense than his former client. While the prosecution will seek to minimize García Luna’s relationship with the DEA, Balarezo said, it’s likely that the defense will seek to play up those connections.
“It’s something we obviously didn’t have,” Balarezo said. “We had the tried and true method of trying to tear down the credibility of the witnesses, the snitches, which always fails, but what the hell else did we have? García Luna definitely has something to play with. Especially if you get one juror that is suspicious of the government to benin with. That could be gold.”
