The man once heralded as the architect of Mexico’s war on drug cartels was sentenced to more than 38 years in a U.S. prison on Wednesday (October 16, 2024) for taking massive bribes to aid drug traffickers.

Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s former secretary of public security, was convicted by a New York jury in 2023 of taking millions of dollars in bribes to protect the violent Sinaloa cartel that he was supposedly combating. He is the highest-level Mexican government official to be convicted in the United States.

At his sentencing hearing before a federal judge in Brooklyn on Wednesday, García Luna continued to maintain his innocence and said the case against him was based on false information from criminals and the Mexican government.

“I have a firm respect for the law,” he said in Spanish. “I have not committed these crimes.”

García Luna, 56, led Mexico’s federal police before he served in a cabinet-level position as the top security official from 2006 to 2012 under then-President Felipe Calderón. At the time, García Luna was hailed as an ally by the U.S. in its fight on drug trafficking.

But U.S. prosecutors said that in return for millions of dollars, he provided intelligence about investigations against the cartel, information about rival gangs and the safe passage of massive quantities of drugs.

After the sentencing, Mr. Calderón said via the social platform X that he respects the court’s decision but he never had “verifiable evidence” of García Luna’s criminal activities. Mr. Calderón said taking on the 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.”

Earlier outside the courthouse, a group of about 15 protesters celebrated the verdict. Some held a banner that said, in Spanish, “Calderon did know,” while others brandished signs denouncing his political party.

Prosecutors had asked for a life sentence. García Luna’s lawyers had argued that he should get no more than 20 years.

U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan said he wasn’t moved by past accolades that García Luna received for his work in the war on drugs.

“That was your cover,” Justice Cogan said before imposing the sentence. “You are guilty of these crimes, sir. You can’t parade these words and say, ‘I’m police officer of the year.’”

Besides the sentence of 38 years and four months, the judge imposed a $2 million fine.

During the trial, photos were shown of García Luna shaking hands with former President Barack Obama and speaking with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Sen. John McCain.

But prosecutors said García Luna secretly advanced a drug trafficking conspiracy that resulted in the deaths of thousands of American and Mexican citizens. He ensured that drug traffickers were notified in advance of raids and sabotaged legitimate police operations aimed at apprehending cartel leaders, they said.

Drug traffickers were able to ship over 1 million kilograms of cocaine through Mexico and into the United States using planes, trains, trucks and submarines while García Luna held his posts, prosecutors said.

During former Sinaloa kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán’s trial in the same court in 2018, a former cartel member testified that he personally delivered at least $6 million in payoffs to García Luna and that cartel members agreed to pool up to $50 million to pay for his protection.

“He enabled the cartel. He protected the cartel. He was the cartel,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Saritha Komatireddy told the judge Wednesday.

García Luna enabled a corrupt system that allowed violent cartels to thrive and distribute drugs that killed multitudes of people, she added.

“It may not have been the defendant pulling the trigger, but he has blood on his hands,” Komatireddy said.

Prosecutors also said García Luna plotted to undo last year’s verdict by seeking to bribe or corruptly convince multiple inmates at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to support false allegations that two government witnesses communicated via contraband cellular phones in advance of the trial.

García Luna’s lawyer, Cesar de Castro, said the defense intends to appeal the sentence. He said his client is someone who “has served his country” and has now lost his money, his reputation as well as policies he championed in Mexico.

“He has lost close to everything. All that remains is his wonderful family,” Mr. Castro said.

In Mexico, newly inaugurated President Claudia Sheinbaum briefly commented on the case Tuesday, saying: “The big issue here is how someone who was awarded by United States agencies, who ex-President Calderón said wonderful things about his security secretary, today is prisoner in the United States because it’s shown that he was tied to drug trafficking.”

García Luna’s arrest and conviction became a political cudgel that the governing party of Sheinbaum and her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, used in this year’s Mexican presidential election against Calderón’s weakened National Action Party. They sought to paint García Luna as the poster child of corruption and Calderón as the man responsible for soaring violence from the drug war.

López Obrador and now Sheinbaum turned away from direct confrontation with the cartels, instead focusing on what they consider root causes of violence, such as poverty. But the new strategy has failed to significantly lower the level of violence.

López Obrador had a very different reaction in 2020 when U.S. authorities arrested former Mexican Defense Secretary Salvador Cienfuegos for allegedly colluding with a drug cartel. In that case, López Obrador accused the Drug Enforcement Administration of fabricating evidence against Cienfuegos and protested until the U.S. government dropped the charges. He was returned to Mexico, where he was promptly cleared and released.