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NEW YORK — A former top public security official in Mexico on Wednesday was sentenced to more than 38 years in U.S. federal prison for accepting millions of dollars in bribes to allow Sinaloa cartel narcotics traffickers to operate with impunity under his watch.

Genaro García Luna, 56, was convicted Feb. 21, 2023, of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, conspiracy to possess and distribute cocaine, and other related counts after a five week trial in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. In addition to being sentenced to prison, he was fined $2 million.

U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan compared García Luna to the notorious leader of the cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, saying that despite his polished exterior and seemingly pristine image, García Luna led a “double life.”

“You have the same kind of thuggishness as El Chapo,” Cogan said. “It just manifests itself differently.”

The judge acknowledged that some factors worked in García Luna’s favor, like his good behavior in jail and that he was not directly involved in the violent atrocities committed by Sinaloa members.

Prosecutors had said García Luna deserved a life sentence  because his job called for him to stifle the drug trade, but he enabled it instead and was responsible for a wave of deaths that he swore to try to prevent. While he was in power, tens of thousands of Americans died from cocaine overdoses, according to statistics cited by prosecutors.

The cartel’s rampant reign of kidnapping, murder and torture was only possible because of García Luna, Assistant U.S. Attorney Saritha Komatireddy said in court: “It may not be the defendant pulling the trigger, but he has blood on his hands.” 

U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement after the proceeding that García Luna’s crimes led to a flood of dangerous drugs circulating in U.S. communities.

“His betrayal of the public trust and the people he was sworn to protect resulted in more than one million kilograms of lethal narcotics imported into our communities and unleashed untold violence here and in Mexico,” Peace said.

César de Castro, an attorney for García Luna, argued for the minimum sentence of 20 years.  He pointed to his client’s work promoting education among fellow inmates in the federal jail where he’s been held for nearly five years, throughout the worst of the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/coronavirus/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">coronavirus</a> pandemic.

“He had made the [Metropolitan Detention Center] look good in its darkest years,” the lawyer said.

García Luna submitted a handwritten letter to the court before the sentencing, arguing that he was an honest public servant who was wrongly targeted and the victim of lying witnesses, many of whom who were cartel members themselves. When given the chance to speak in court, García Luna maintained his innocence through an interpreter and said he was convicted on “the false information provided by the Mexican government and their criminal witnesses.”

García Luna’s case has riveted Mexico, which has suffered about a half-million homicides since President Felipe Calderón declared a “war on drugs” in 2006, unleashing bloody fighting between security forces and crime groups.

García Luna served as minister of public security in 2006 to 2012 under Calderón and was responsible for creating a new federal police force. He was a key U.S. partner on a multibillion-dollar plan known as the Merida Initiative, aimed at dismantling the cartels.

García Luna took on the key cabinet role after running the Federal Investigation Agency, Mexico’s version of the FBI, from 2001 to 2005. U.S. prosecutors say he started receiving cartel bribes during that period and continued while he served as a cabinet minister.

He and his lawyers have insisted on his innocence, and emphasized how highly he was regarded in Washington. During his trial in 2023, he was shown in photos shaking hands with former president Barack Obama and meeting with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton.

Evidence in the trial largely consisted of testimony by convicted drug traffickers.

Calderón, whose presidential term ended in 2012, has insisted that he fought the cartels “with the full force of the state” and was unaware of narco-corruption in his team.

In a letter to the judge seeking a lower sentence, García Luna alleged that Mexico’s current government opposed him because of his antidrug efforts and had sent “false information” that led to his conviction.

President Claudia Sheinbaum rejected the allegation Wednesday.

“Prosecutors in the United States, and a jury in the United States, have provided evidence of his ties to drug-trafficking, and the benefits he received for being involved with drug trafficking, at the very moment in which a war on drugs had been declared,” she said.

Ana Maria Salazar, a Mexican American analyst who held senior antidrug jobs in the Clinton administration, said the García Luna case raised critical questions about the ability of the U.S. government to work with its neighbor.

“How can you cooperate with a country that has the highest level of law enforcement linked with organized crime?” she said.

The case also raised questions about why the U.S. government apparently didn’t realize that a key drug-fighting partner was allied with a top cartel, she said.

“The U.S. government spent I don’t know how many millions of dollars on the Merida Initiative,” she said. “Whatever investment the taxpayers made has disappeared.”

<i>Sheridan reported from Mexico City. Gabriela Martínez in Mexico City contributed to this report.</i>

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, MS

Montclair State University, BA in History

Shayna Jacobs is a federal courts and law enforcement reporter on the national security team at The Washington Post, where she covers the Southern and Eastern districts of New York. 

Shayna Jacobs

Part of a Post team named as finalists for Pulitzer Prize for reporting on terrorism post-9/11

Overseas Press Club Robert Spiers Benjamin Award for Latin America coverage, 1998

Nieman Fellowship, Harvard University, 2012-13

Knight-Bagehot Fellowship, Columbia University, 1992-93

College of the Holy Cross, BA in English

Mary Beth Sheridan is a correspondent covering Mexico and Central America for The Washington Post. Her previous foreign postings include Rome; Bogota, Colombia; and a five-year stint in Mexico in the 1990s. She has also covered immigration, homeland security and diplomacy for The Post, and served as deputy foreign editor from 2016 to 2018.   

Mary Beth Sheridan

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Former Mexican official sentenced for taking millions in bribes from cartel

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