The former secretary of public security in Mexico, the man who was heralded as being the architect of the country’s war against drug cartels, this week received a prison sentence of more than 38 years.
That sentence was handed down Wednesday, determining that Genaro Garcia Luna will spend nearly 40 years in a U.S. jail for receiving huge bribes in exchange for helping drug traffickers.
Last year, a jury in New York convicted Garcia Luna of receiving bribes worth millions of dollars in exchange for providing protection to the Sinaloa cartel. In his public role for Mexico, he was supposed to be combating the actions of the very violent drug crime group.
Garcia Luna is now the highest-ranking official of the Mexican government to ever be convicted of a crime in America.
During the sentencing hearing that was held on Wednesday in Brooklyn, Garcia Luna maintained that he was innocent. He said that the case that was brought against him was based solely on false information that was supplied by the government in Mexico as well as other criminals.
As he said in Spanish at the hearing:
“I have a firm respect for the law. I have not committed these crimes.”
The 56-year-old Garcia Luna was in charge of the police force in Mexico before he served from 2006 through 2012 in a cabinet-level position as the country’s top security official. He served under Felipe Calderon, who was president for that time period.
The United States once considered Garcia Luna to be a strong ally as it fought against drug trafficking across the southern border.
That all changed, though, when the U.S. government uncovered evidence that Garcia Luna was receiving bribes from the cartel. In exchange, he provided intelligence to them about investigations that were looking into the cartel’s actions, as well as information about some of their rival gangs.
U.S. prosecutors said that he even helped the cartel safely transport massive amounts of drugs.
Following the sentencing hearing, Calderon posted on the social media platform X that while he respects the decision handed down by the U.S. court, he never had “verifiable evidence” of the criminal activities that Garcia Luna purportedly participated in.
The former Mexican president wrote that taking on drug cartels “was one of the most difficult decisions of my life. But I would do it again, because it is the right thing to do.”
Prosecutors were seeking a sentence of life in jail for Garcia Luna, while his lawyers argued that he should spend less than 20 years in prison.
Brian Cogan, the U.S. District judge overseeing the case, said he wasn’t moved by past accolades Garcia Luna received for his work on the war on drugs. As the judge said before handing down the final sentence:
“That was your cover. You are guilty of these crimes, sir. You can’t parade these words and say, ‘I’m police officer of the year.’”
In addition to being sentenced to spend 38 years and four months behind bars, Cogan also imposed a $2 million fine on Garcia Luna.
