Playing Both Sides
    In 2006, then-Mexican President Felipe Calderón declared war on the country’s drug gangs. He mobilized security forces against the groups, and in 2008, the U.S. government began supporting Calderón’s efforts to the tune of more than $3 billion. Washington hoped to stem the northward flow of narcotics and worked closely with Mexican officials tasked with retraining and better equipping Mexico’s police. Chief among them was Calderón’s secretary of public security, Genaro García Luna.
    In 2012, the year García Luna retired from his position, he received an award from the CIA for his “friendship, collaboration, and support.” But the FBI arrested García Luna in 2019 on charges of collaboration with drug traffickers, and on Tuesday, a jury in New York convicted García Luna of five criminal offenses, including a conspiracy that involved taking millions of dollars in bribes from Mexico’s biggest cartel to help it move cocaine into the United States.
    For Mexicans, García Luna’s case seemed like the “trial of the century,” news site Expansión’s editor Mariel Ibarra said on the podcast Política y Otros Datos early this month. Even with a clear verdict, the case continues to raise major questions about the U.S.-Mexico war on drugs, including how much—and when—officials from both countries knew about suspicions of García Luna’s corruption.
    Cuban Mexican investigative journalist Peniley Ramírez has covered García Luna for a decade and co-hosts the podcast USA v. García Luna. According to her reporting, Mexican army officials who suspected García Luna’s involvement with traffickers warned both Calderón and his interior secretary about their concerns around the time Calderón took office. Until then, García Luna had led Mexico’s federal investigations agency.
    A former Mexican attorney general for the state of Nayarit who served as a witness in the New York case—and had himself been convicted of drug trafficking—mentioned Calderón in testimony on Feb. 7. He said that in 2011, Nayarit’s governor told him that Calderón and García Luna had ordered Nayarit’s leadership to protect the group of drug traffickers led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Calderón called the testimony an “absolute lie” and, after Tuesday’s verdict, released a lengthy statement via Twitter that denied involvement in any crimes.
    Former Mexican federal police officer Javier Herrera Valles told Ramírez that he met with employees of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico in 2008 to share suspicions of García Luna’s involvement with traffickers and was told that U.S. officials were already investigating García Luna. A week after that meeting, Herrera Valles was arrested and imprisoned for four years on charges of drug trafficking that were later dropped.
    ProPublica reported that in 2013, the head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had urged DEA investigators to pursue an indictment against García Luna based on evidence of his alliance with traffickers, but U.S. federal prosecutors repeatedly rejected the evidence as insufficient.
    Earl Anthony Wayne, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico during the last year of García Luna’s tenure, testified at the trial that he never received “specific, credible evidence that bribes had been received” by García Luna. Other former U.S. diplomats and DEA officials have issued similar denials. If convicted, ProPublica’s Tim Golden wrote in January, García Luna’s “betrayal would point to one of the more extraordinary intelligence failures of the decadeslong U.S. battle against the drug trade in Mexico.”
    Security analysts have pointed out that the U.S. approach of funneling military aid to top Mexican officials in the hopes of stopping drug trafficking has also been a strategic failure. A new report from the U.S. Institute of Peace offers detailed examples of how Mexican elites “captured” the benefit of U.S. security assistance while drug trafficking continued to take a toll on both Mexican and U.S. civilian lives.
In October 2021, Washington and Mexico City jointly announced they were rethinking their approach to drug trafficking—seeking to reject militarism and focus instead on addressing drug use as a health issue. They also said they aimed to increase cooperation on investigating and prosecuting organized crime.
    Last week, however, DEA chief Anne Milgram testified to the U.S. Congress that Mexico is not sharing information with the United States about seizures of fentanyl and fentanyl precursor chemicals or allowing joint operations against clandestine labs in Mexico. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has also continued to expand the crime-fighting authority of Mexico’s army.
    López Obrador’s government “has not pursued many judicial corruption cases, and it is telling that the [García Luna] trial is in New York City, not Mexico City,” Ioan Grillo wrote last month in Foreign Policy. The López Obrador administration pressured the U.S. government into dropping drug charges against an influential retired military general in 2020. And, in what critics say is another erosion of checks on his power, López Obrador has pushed for cuts to the budget and operating ability of Mexico’s electoral authority. The cuts passed the country’s legislature this week.
    In other words, if the García Luna case revealed what was wrong with Mexico’s war on drugs, course corrections pledged by Mexico’s president are still slow to materialize. He also appears to be stifling U.S. attempts at a paradigm shift.
    Even so, the García Luna case should serve as a spark for reform, journalist and editor Jesús García, who covered the trial, tweeted. “This is an opportunity for Mexico to change.”