PA
MEXICO CITY
The morning conference of the Mexican president will have a new space starting Tuesday: to report everything that is said in the trial of former Security Secretary Genaro García Luna, accused of receiving million-dollar bribes to protect the Sinaloa Cartel.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador explained that he does not trust the traditional Mexican media and that he wants all possible accomplices mentioned in the trial, which began the day before, to be exposed. It is “a judicial drama,” a “tragicomedy,” he said. “We don’t want people not to find out.”
The daily morning conference already has other thematic “spaces” such as one called “Who is who in the lies” where media critics of the government are harshly attacked.
García Luna was the head of public security in Mexico from 2006 to 2012 during the presidency of Felipe Calderón. Before, during Vicente Fox’s term (2000-2006), he directed a federal police force. When he was arrested in 2019, the government said that there was an open investigation against him in Mexico, but nothing more about it has been made public.
On the first day of the trial, a former police officer who later joined the Sinaloa Cartel, Sergio Villarreal Barragán, known as “El Grande”, spoke of joint operations by the cartel and the police against antagonistic criminal groups; how the former official warned of raids or that one day he took 14 million dollars in cardboard boxes from a warehouse full of cocaine that the police had seized from the Gulf Cartel and delivered to the Sinaloa group.
López Obrador said that he is consulting the matter with the lawyers of the presidency but on Tuesday he already began to comment on the matter, reading one of the chronicles of the newspaper La Jornada close to the government.
García Luna’s trial has broad implications since he was not only President Calderón’s right-hand man in the war against the cartels, but also the main ally of the United States in the fight against drug trafficking, praised and awarded by authorities in that country.
López Obrador has used the case to attack previous presidencies, arguing that because of their corruption, criminal groups increased their power and, therefore, violence. But he has also used it to criticize Washington’s interference in the fight against drug trafficking in Mexico.
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