Breathe
By Adela Navarro Bello
When sentences in the United States are expected to carry the maximum sentence of life imprisonment, but are instead sentenced to years of imprisonment, it means, most of the time, that there was an agreement between the defendant and the prosecutorial authority to receive a lesser sentence.
To Benjamin Arellano Felix, for example, who was the criminal leader of the cartel that bears his surname, Judge Larry Burns in the Southern District Court of California in the city of San Diego anticipated that, once the drug lord's guilt was established, for his crimes and his "ruthless and inhumane leadership at the head of the cartel," he would have imposed life imprisonment. However, he had to abide by the drug trafficker's plea bargain and the maximum sentence available to him under those conditions: 25 years in prison. A very condescending and generous sentence for a man who for more than 20 years headed one of the most violent criminal organizations in Mexico and murdered enemies, citizens, journalists and transshipped tons of drugs. But that's what agreements with the authorities are.
Despite having presumed his innocence during the almost 60 months he was in prison in the United States, former federal Security Secretary Genaro García Luna and his lawyers asked Judge Brian Cogan, of the District Court in Brooklyn, New York, to be lenient with his sentence. For them, that means receiving a 20-year prison sentence in the face of the U.S. prosecution's request for a life sentence.
Without a plea agreement from the defendant and in the face of the jury's deliberation finding him guilty of the five crimes for which he was indicted - international conspiracy to distribute cocaine, conspiracy to distribute and possession, conspiracy to import cocaine, organized crime and false statements - Cogan, whose fierce deliberations on Garcia Luna's conduct contrasted with the sentence handed down, sentenced him to serve 38 years and four months in prison. It was magnanimous. Neither the life sentence requested by the prosecution, nor the 20 years requested by the lawyers: an intermediate sentence that would make the convict spend the rest of his productive life in prison, considering that, if he survived the sentence, he would leave prison close to 90 years of age, when five years of probation would await him.
In Mexico, despite the presidential harangue, particularly from former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, if we assume the veracity of the evidence presented before the US Court, Garcia Luna remains unpunished. In this country he was neither investigated, nor prosecuted, nor arrested in the seven years after his departure from the administration of Felipe Calderón Hinojosa nor in 2019, when he was apprehended in the United States and AMLO was already governing the country.
López Obrador, Sheinbaum and their prosecutor, Alejandro Gertz Manero, are guilty of criminal omission by not investigating the man who was labeled by the New York judge as having "the same thuggery that Chapo had, only he manifests it differently". How many more like him in Mexico?
Despite the anti-corruption discourse with which he won the Presidency of the Republic, few high-impact criminals and fewer corrupt politicians or former officials were prosecuted in the past six years and, as heard in the current presidential discourse, impunity will continue in his movement called 4T, which, in any case, has not transformed the administration of justice in Mexico from corrupt and promoting impunity to efficient and with exemplary punishments.
According to Judge Cogan, Genaro García Luna was evidenced and proven to have received millionaire bribes during the years he was a public official, from the cartels (with special inclination to the Sinaloa cartel) to favor them not only in the drug trafficking through Mexican territory and to the US, but also in murders and the commission of other crimes.
"He helped the cartel, he protected the cartel, he was the cartel," said Cogan, who also sentenced him to pay a $2 million fine, evidently of ill-gotten money, as the judge told him, "I'm sure you have some money stashed away."
To the justification of presumption of innocence by the accused with photographs showing him with high-ranking U.S. officials and receiving awards for his work as the "super cop" that was catalogued in the Calderon administration, the judge did not demerit him and instead used him to quantify the seriousness of his crimes: "You had a double life, but one of them dominated the other and was the one that caused tremendous damage".
Indeed, crimes committed by public officials exercising an abuse of the power vested in them usually carry two or three times the number of years of punishment, precisely because they had the power to serve and twisted it to harm. Perhaps that is why Judge Cogan was harsher with Garcia Luna than Judge Larry Burns was with Benjamin Arellano, giving him 38 years in prison compared to the 25 sentenced to the CAF leader.
At the end of the day, the sentence is enough, they believe, to keep him behind bars for the rest of his life, considering that 90 years is not the maximum life expectancy in a cold prison.
Mexicans seeking justice, rule of law and exemplary punishment, those who demonstrated outside the Brooklyn courthouse, are content to witness the former federal security secretary's fall before the weight of the law, even if it is in another country, because in Mexico and in the times of the so-called Fourth Transformation, everything remains the same: corruption, impunity and injustice reign.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of the company. Opinion 51.
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