Genaro Garcia Luna, who led Mexico’s fight against the violent drug trade for several years, is scheduled to be sentenced on Wednesday following his U.S. criminal conviction for accepting bribes from the cartels he was supposed to combat.
Garcia Luna, 56, will be sentenced by U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan in Brooklyn federal court at a hearing starting at 4:30 p.m. ET (2030 GMT). He faces a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison.
Prosecutors argue that Garcia Luna, who served as Mexico’s public security minister from 2006 to 2012, should receive a life sentence after his February 2023 conviction for participating in a criminal drug enterprise, engaging in various conspiracies, and making false statements. They stated in a September 19 court filing that Garcia Luna accepted millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel, once led by Joaquin Guzman Loera, known as El Chapo, and in return, protected its members from arrest and safeguarded its cocaine shipments.
Garcia Luna’s lawyer, Cesar de Castro, has urged Judge Cogan to impose no more than the mandatory minimum sentence, noting that Garcia Luna has already spent nearly five years in jail since his 2019 arrest. “A sentence of 20 years would represent the approximate length of Mr. Garcia Luna’s entire career as a public servant to the Mexican government,” de Castro wrote.
Guzman is currently serving a life sentence at a maximum-security prison in Colorado after being convicted on drug charges in 2019.
Source: Reuters
