When Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, went on trial in the Eastern District of New York from 2018 to 2019, it provided hours of entertaining news for U.S. cable shows. Hosts gaped and laughed at stories of Guzmán running through a tunnel naked to escape marines, building a private zoo with lions and tigers, and of his lover crying in the witness box while his beauty queen wife cackled from the public gallery.
As former Mexican Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna began his trial for cocaine trafficking in the same court this month, U.S. coverage has been sparser and more solemn. The majority of journalists lining up in the freezing mornings to enter the courthouse were from Mexican media outlets. But if the accusations are true, then García Luna’s trial will serve as proof that the Mexican state plays just as important a role as cartel leaders like Guzmán in bringing billions of dollars’ worth of drugs to American users—and in creating a bloodbath in Mexico as rivals fight over these profits.
In his opening statement, federal prosecutor Philip Pilmar laid out the case that García Luna used his position as the head of Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI from 2001 to 2006 and then as a cabinet-level security chief until 2012 to protect the drug cartels he claimed to fight. “While entrusted to work for the Mexican people, he also had a second job, a dirtier job, a more profitable job,” Pilmar said. Not only was the top cop getting rich from cocaine dollars, but he used the federal police as a paramilitary force to take out cartel rivals, the prosecution said.
For those journalists who have reported on Mexico’s tragic drug war over the last two decades, allegations of massive police involvement with traffickers are unsurprising. As historians show, cartels grew from their humble beginnings as peasant farmers through corruption networks in the security forces. Back in the 1920s, a famous Mexican police detective called Valente Quintana was discovered protecting drug smugglers, Benjamin Smith writes in The Dope: The Real History of the Mexican Drug Trade. By about the 1970s, drug trafficking territories became known as “plazas” based on police districts where they were allowed to operate.
The career path between gangsters and police officers became like a revolving door. Many of the most infamous traffickers, including Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, started in the police before they went into the mob to make their fortune moving product. In other cases, criminals joining the police to get weapons and a badge. Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, did prison time for heroin before he got a job as an officer in Jalisco.
Indeed, the prosecution’s first witness was a former police officer-turned-cartel enforcer who was arrested and flipped to cooperating with the U.S. government: the hulking Sergio Villarreal Barragán, known as El Grande. He described seeing payments to García Luna of millions of dollars stuffed into duffel bags or cardboard boxes. García Luna had been an intelligence agent before he was appointed to head the Federal Investigation Agency in 2001. Allegations of him working with cartels go back to then, although they could have been forged earlier.
Yet while such deep corruption has been widely acknowledged, hauling such a high-ranking Mexican official before a U.S. jury is unprecedented. The fact that prosecutors are not just going after the flamboyant mobsters but also after their political protection is a step forward.
It has not been an easy case to build. Although U.S. agents have heard accusations against García Luna for at least a decade, prosecutors hesitated. The defense claims that the government will not offer any convincing physical evidence of his work with cartels but will rely on the testimony of so-called cooperating witnesses—scarred gangsters, such as El Grande, who could have cut deals for their testimony. In the selection, the prosecution was vigorous in making sure jurors could accept such testimony and convict someone on it. While it seemed straightforward that El Chapo would be found guilty, this case looks more complicated.
And while U.S. prosecutors should be commended for going after cartel protection, the revelations are embarrassing for U.S. law enforcement. U.S. drug agents worked closely with García Luna, and he schmoozed with the high echelons of Washington; the defense showed photos of him with then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-Attorney General Eric Holder, and even then-U.S. President Barack Obama.
In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador looked upbeat talking about the trial as proof of how corrupt his predecessors were. “This is shameful. It’s an authority of the highest level … and at the same time as he was charged of public security, he protected one of the cartels,” he said during a presentation on the case in his morning news conference on Tuesday.
López Obrador won power in 2018 with a promise to fight corruption at the highest levels or “clean up the government like a staircase”—meaning from the top down. Yet his government has not pursued many judicial corruption cases ,and it is telling that the trial is in New York City not Mexico City. Mexican judges have convicted generals and state governors in the past for working with drug gangs but not an official as powerful as García Luna—or a former president. The challenge of going after top officials on crimes is that it can be very politically divisive and even destabilizing for a country. And former presidents still have a lot of money and connections to try to fight charges.
In 2021, López Obrador held a popular consultancy vote on whether former presidents should be tried if they are found to have committed a crime. Almost 97 percent said they should, although only about 7 percent of people voted. Various former Mexican presidents are accused in the media of working with cartels, including García Luna’s former boss, former President Felipe Calderón, who commentators say must have known what was happening. Calderón has not been charged anywhere and strenuously denies the accusations.
If García Luna is convicted, then it should provide at least some deterrent for officials south of the border not to blatantly work with cartels. That would be a positive development for security. The corruption in Mexico foments the violence as rival gangsters can have rival protectors. Witness Villarreal Barragán told the court that a former federal police chief, Édgar Millán Gómez, who was shot to death, worked for certain traffickers.
Security forces are also accused of carrying out mass violence themselves on behalf of their patrons. Perhaps the most infamous case was in 2014 when police in the town of Iguala detained 43 male students and allegedly handed them over to cartel hitmen. This has all led to a humanitarian tragedy in Mexico, with more than 30,000 murders a year, mass graves, and thousands of people seeking asylum from the bloodshed in the United States.
Yet officials may still continue to pocket drug dollars, perhaps with more sophisticated methods, such as through intermediaries. Americans spend almost $150 billion a year on illegal drugs, according to a study by the Rand Corporation, and as long as traffickers south of the border can make such an immense amount of money from this trade, they will continue to throw money at police and politicians for protection. The United States surely needs to find a way of reducing the mountain of drug dollars that pour back over the Rio Grande—perhaps through much better addiction treatment.
However, prosecuting the political protection of cartels is still good policing. And it won’t be the last case. Former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was extradited to the United States last year on drug trafficking charges. Washington needs to keep the pressure on cartels’ blatant control of politicians.
