Photo: Isaac Esquivel / EFE
For: The opinion Posted 24 Jan 2023, 15:59 pm EST
The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, considered that it is “shameful” for the country the trial that began on Monday in the United States against Genaro García Lunaformer Secretary of Public Security of Mexico accused of drug trafficking.
“It is important because, first, very shameful, it is about an authority of the highest level who was in charge of public security during the government of (Felipe) Calderón (2006-2012) and that it had a double function, according to the accusations”, stated the president.
López Obrador exhibited in his daily press conference an account of the first day of the trial in New York, where the Mexican drug trafficker Sergio Villarreal Barragán, alias El Grande, assured that he saw “on several occasions (García Luna) to pay him bribes from the Sinaloa cartel.
Furthermore, heThe United States federal prosecutor accused García Luna of betraying Mexicoalthough the defense claimed that there is “no money, no photos, no videos, no recordings, no texts, no evidence” of the accusations.
The Mexican president acknowledged that “until now there has been no reliable evidence”but cited the accusations against the former secretary, such as “that he accumulated a fortune of a lot of money of around 1,000 million dollars.”
“At the same time that he was in charge of public safety protected one of the cartels or one of the organized crime groupshe was at the service of an organized crime group and he received money for that,” he said.
The trial of García Luna has shaken Mexico’s politics because he led the “war on drugs” of then-President Calderón, who is one of López Obrador’s biggest rivals.
For this reason, the current president He warned that he will expose the progress of the trial daily in his conferencearguing that he does not trust “the conventional media in the country because they kept silent for a long time, they even endorsed actions linked to previous governments.”
“There is already talk of his accomplices, of García Luna, of some who worked with him, but it is a judicial drama, as the writer José Agustín would say, a tragicomedy, and We don’t want it to happen at night or that people don’t know”, said.
García Luna, arrested in December 2019 in Dallas (Texas, USA), is facing trial for five crimes, four of them related to drug trafficking: participating in a criminal enterprise and conspiracy for international distribution, possession and for the importation of cocaine. The fifth corresponds to the alleged false testimony that he gave to the US authorities.
With information from Efe.
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