The News
A US court sentenced Mexico’s former public security chief to 38 years in prison for accepting bribes from the very drug cartels his office was meant to target.
Genaro García Luna was originally arrested in 2019 and ultimately found guilty last year of, among other things, providing intelligence to the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel in exchange for huge sums of money.
“He helped the cartel, he protected the cartel, he was the cartel,” said the chief prosecutor. “You have death on your hands.”
His is one of a number of high-profile cases over drug trafficking in Mexico taking place in US courts: García Luna was convicted by the same judge as the notorious drug kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, with Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada — arrested this summer — due in the same dock this week.
SIGNALS
García Luna trial may have more of an impact than other drug trafficking cases
García Luna’s case is expected to cause even more of a stir in Mexico than similar high-profile drug trafficking cases, The New York Times wrote. When drug lord “El Chapo” was convicted, revelations of bribery and wrongdoing didn’t come as a surprise to most Mexicans, who are “intimately familiar” with the violence and corruption caused by crime bosses. On the other hand, García Luna was a government official, long seen as a mythical figure in the fight against drug cartels: His case likely sheds light on “a corrupt system almost everyone believes exists, but few have seen up close,” the Times wrote.
The case illustrates failures of the war on drugs
García Luna’s case draws attention to not only the corruption plaguing Mexican security agencies, but also the failures of the US-supported fight against drug trafficking, The Guardian argued last year. When García Luna was in office between 2006 and 2012, then-President of Mexico Felipe Calderón launched a “war on drugs” campaign, relying heavily on US support: Washington sent $1.5 billion between 2008 and 2016 to aid his government’s efforts. García Luna was “one of Washington’s favorites,” a former foreign policy adviser to Calderón told the outlet — so his trial could bring to light “this complex web of cooperation but also complicity between officials in Mexico and the United States in the war against drug trafficking and organized crime.”
US overdose deaths are falling, but reasons are unclear
As the US prosecutes people connected with drug trafficking, overdose deaths in the country are surprisingly decreasing, falling by 10% between April 2023 and 2024 — though the reasons for the drop remain unclear. The majority of overdose fatalities are caused by the synthetic opioid fentanyl, which is imported in its illegal form primarily from Mexico. Experts hypothesize that widening access to addiction treatment and over-the-counter medicines to reverse opioid overdoses, particularly Narcan nasal spray, could help explain part of the decline in deaths. “The ability for folks to manage such a toxic drug supply might be changing,” an epidemiologist told The New York Times, “People have been exposed to fentanyl often for years now. They’ve adapted.”