Arrest of Top Crime Fighter Stuns Mexico, Where Corruption Is All Too Routine
The news shocked even a country grown used to graft: The man who for years led Mexico’s war against drug traffickers was accused of taking millions in bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel.
Genaro García Luna speaking in 2010, when he was a cabinet-level security official in Mexico. He is accused of accepting bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel.
Genaro García Luna speaking in 2010, when he was a cabinet-level security official in Mexico. He is accused of accepting bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel.Credit…Alxandre Meneghini/Associated Press
By Kirk Semple and Paulina Villegas
Dec. 11, 2019
MEXICO CITY — Even in a nation almost inured to corruption, the news was astonishing.
The man considered to be the brains behind the Mexican government’s militarized war on drug traffickers stood accused by American prosecutors of having been in the pocket of one of the major criminal groups he was ostensibly pursuing, severely undermining the very fight he was helping to lead.
Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s former public security secretary, was charged with taking millions of dollars in bribes while in office to protect the Sinaloa Cartel, allowing the organization to smuggle tons of cocaine and other drugs into the United States. At the time, the group was led by Joaquín Guzmán Loera, better known as El Chapo, who is now serving a life sentence in the United States.
The indictment, unsealed in New York on Tuesday, and the subsequent arrest of Mr. García Luna in Dallas hours later, stunned Mexico. It was as if Eliot Ness had actually been an accomplice of Al Capone.
“It’s huge,” said Jaime López-Aranda, a security analyst in Mexico City who briefly worked under Mr. García Luna in the late-2000s. “I’m still a little bit in shock. And I keep thinking back to the guy and our conversations and his team and his people. It’s the sharp disappointment. I mean — my God, man. It’s like — ” He paused. “It’s like the end of an era.”
Mr. García Luna was the chief engineer of the country’s controversial counternarcotics strategy that relied heavily on the armed forces to confront criminal groups and kill or capture their leaders. Mexico is still grappling with the legacy of his approach.
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While it had some success in capturing dozens of prominent crime bosses, deploying the military also spurred a sharp increase in violence and left a trail of death, as monolithic criminal enterprises were fragmented into an array of groups that have proven to be even more violent and uncontrollable.
For some Mexicans, the news of Mr. García Luna’s arrest was almost unimaginable. For others, it was proof of enduring suspicions that he had been in bed with criminals all along. Still others interpreted it as a sweeping — and scalding — referendum on the two administrations in which he served.
Then there were those who found confirmation that the whole apparatus of Mexico’s government was once and forever corrupt.
Mr. García Luna was one of the architects — and the embodiment — of Mexico’s security strategy for a decade. From 2001 to 2005, during the administration of President Vicente Fox, Mr. García Luna led the Federal Investigative Agency, Mexico’s equivalent of the F.B.I. He then became the public safety secretary in the cabinet of President Felipe Calderón from 2006 to 2012, overseeing his boss’s “war” on drug trafficking organizations and the deployment of the Mexican military to wage it.
Politically powerful, Mr. García Luna curried intense loyalty among his supporters but also inspired deep animosity among his critics, particularly when violence soared amid Mr. Calderón’s offensive against the traffickers. The strategy disrupted the criminal ecosystem but did not contain the violence between criminal groups, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the disappearance of many others.
The New York Times