Genaro Garcia Luna sat in the room in the Hotel Bristol in Mexico City, just blocks away from the U.S. embassy, doing his best to hear what was going on next door. In the adjacent room, Joe Bond, an agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was chatting with Arturo Guzman, younger brother of Mexico’s most-wanted drug lord, El Chapo. Arturo’s bodyguard sat in the room with Garcia Luna, at the time the head of Mexico’s Federal Investigative Agency, the AFI.
It was late 2001. Bond had arranged the meeting through an informant and Garcia Luna had intercepted the call. He and Bond had met a couple of years before and cultivated a strong working relationship, and Garcia Luna had shown a willingness to let the DEA do its thing on his turf. On this occasion, he insisted he accompany Bond and pose as his chauffeur. Since January of that same year, Garcia Luna had helped lead the manhunt for El Chapo after his escape from Puente Grande prison. Garcia Luna needed the brother, Arturo, behind bars, but Bond wanted to talk to him first; the DEA agent thought he’d get good intelligence out of Arturo regarding the entire Sinaloa cartel, not just El Chapo. His own top informant had become overexposed, and he needed a new inside man.
Garcia Luna wanted Arturo for himself, to bring down El Chapo.
Arturo Guzman and Garcia Luna passed each other in the hotel hallway. Not a hint of recognition from Arturo. They proceeded into their allocated rooms. Bond gave Arturo a cellphone, which he was to use solely for calling the DEA agent. Arturo was optimistic: he told Bond a meeting with El Chapo “can be arranged.”
Arturo left the hotel, and Garcia Luna and Bond once again discussed his fate. Garcia Luna was inwardly furious that someone so close to El Chapo could be allowed to get away. In addition, Arturo was a criminal in his own right, wanted on drug trafficking charges. Bond’s plan appeared to be on the right track.
Just a few hours later, as he drove out of Mexico City, Arturo Guzman was arrested by members of Garcia Luna’s police corps. It was Bond’s turn to be irate. He understood Garcia Luna’s sense of urgency—he had been leading the hunt for El Chapo, and was therefore getting most of the blame from his superiors and the public for failing to catch him—but Bond truly had thought he might even get a meeting with El Chapo himself. Bond had met once with El Chapo in Puente Grande prison in 1998, and the drug lord had tried unsuccessfully to become an informant. Bond was holding out hope for similar desperation this time around, desperation that might lead to his capture and the collapse of the cartel.
Arturo would be killed in prison in 2004, a bullet to the head. Bond would never get that close to El Chapo again; a few years later, the DEA agent would be transferred out of Mexico. Garcia Luna would become federal security secretary, a cabinet position, in 2006, and continue to help lead the hunt for El Chapo for another six years. It would be another 17 years before El Chapo finally faced formal charges in the United States and be sentenced in a Brooklyn court.
It would be 19 years before Garcia Luna was arrested in Texas and charged in a New York court with conspiring with the Sinaloa cartel to traffic drugs into the United States. U.S. government prosecutors allege that for nearly two decades, Garcia Luna and two members of his inner circle took bribes from members of the Sinaloa cartel to “facilitate their crimes and empower their criminal enterprise.” The prosecution has 189,000 pages of documents and “voluminous intercepted communications.” Many of the accusations stem from the trial of El Chapo, during which one of his cronies claimed to have bribed Garcia Luna personally, paying him between six and eight million dollars in two suitcases in 2005 and 2006. Garcia Luna has also been accused of making false financial statements to U.S. authorities. Garcia Luna has denied all charges against him, and the trial is expected to last two to three months.
***
Garcia Luna was supposed to be different from all the police chiefs who came before him. The DEA has long eyed Mexican police chiefs—from the local level right to the top cabinet posts—with caution and often, outright suspicion, but in recent decades, as Mexico’s democracy has evolved, the relationships between the DEA and its counterparts has improved. A former spy in Mexico’s national spy agency CISEN, Garcia Luna’s appointment as head of the AFI, an investigative agency he himself helped create, was supposed to herald a new age of policing in his country. Mike Vigil, a former DEA Chief of International Operations who met Garcia Luna around the time he took control of the AFI, remembers the young, ambitious Mexican official, who was still only in his 30s. Vigil had worked with many Mexican law enforcement counterparts during his two stints in Mexico with the DEA in the 90s; he had worked closely with Guillermo Gonzalez Calderoni, who ran the shadowy federal judicial police and would eventually end up dead with a bullet to the head after fleeing to El Paso, Texas, in 2003. Garcia Luna was far less arrogant than Calderoni, and less anti-American in his outlook. Garcia Luna took Vigil out to dinner in Mexico City for their first meeting; the former DEA agent remembers his Mexican counterpart being jovial, forthcoming, jocular even. As they got to know each other over the years to come, Vigil found Garcia Luna easy to work with—“whatever we needed, assistance or personnel, he would provide it”—but he was not always easy to relate to. Garcia Luna spoke fast, often jumbling words together in a way that made it difficult to follow his conversations. He could flip from serious to joking in a split second, too. He always seemed like he had something on his mind, and then just a moment later, he’d be somewhere else. “He would kind of leave the conversation and become very pensive,” Vigil says.
For most of his career, Garcia Luna’s mind has been focused on making his own myth. The now-defunct CISEN spy agency was feared by many on the Mexican left, having played a key role in surveillance and crackdowns against opposition members and activists from the 1960s to the 1980s. Garcia Luna came of age during a new era for the Cisen, in which it would become an essential branch of a blossoming democracy and human rights prosecutors would seek to hold it accountable. When he took charge of the AFI in 2001, Garcia Luna sought to portray himself as a new kind of top cop. He had a degree in mechanical engineering from the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City as well as a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from the Instituto de Estudios Superiores in Monterrey. He was a clean cop, not a dirty one. He was a former spy, but was not going to be a spy cop. He was adept at technology and would be open and transparent with the media, unlike previous top cops in Mexico.
The myth was a difficult one to build from the outset. El Chapo’s escape was more than just a black eye for Garcia Luna; rumors that the Sinaloa cartel had him on their payroll would swirl around Mexico from that moment on. But Garcia Luna would forge on, trying to create a working relationship with an increasingly take-no-prisoners Mexican press. Perhaps ironically, it was a public relations stunt dreamed up by Garcia Luna himself that would backfire and increase suspicion and shatter public trust in his police forces. On December 8, 2005, he ordered a group of AFI agents to raid a house where the alleged leader of a kidnapping gang was hiding out with his French girlfriend, Florence Cassez. Garcia Luna invited reporters along to televise the raid, and even interview the suspects. Unfortunately, it was soon revealed that the arrest had in fact already taken place in secrecy the day before, at a different location. The Cassez case soon turned into an international spat; when Garcia Luna was arrested in 2019, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy shrugged at the news. “I was not at all surprised. I didn’t know when or how it was going to happen, but I’ve known for a long time that it was going to happen,” he told the Mexican newsmagazine Proceso.
Garcia Luna was no stranger to staged raids, or at the very least, heavily assisted ones. Working closely with his DEA counterparts, he had been involved in countless drug trafficking busts that were orchestrated by DEA supervisors in Mexico or Washington. But now public trust had plummeted again, and he’d be more susceptible to attacks and allegations. They came quickly. At the same time, Mexican crime reporter Ricardo Ravelo reported that Garcia Luna had recently been kidnapped by the Beltran Leyvas on the same road where his men had arrested Arturo Guzman back in 2001, and taken him to a house where “El Senor” would speak with him. (“El Senor” was a common nickname used by El Chapo, but in this instance, the alleged meeting would be with Arturo Beltran Leyva, a.k.a. El Barbas.) Arturo Beltran Leyva and his brothers had long been responsible for corruption and bribery on behalf of the Sinaloa cartel, worming their way through the upper echelons of the Mexican power structure. “You see how easy it is to get to you,” El Barbas allegedly told Garcia Luna, citing testimony from his bodyguards. No evidence of money exchanging hands ever emerged, and Garcia Luna has always denied the incident took place. But rumors in Mexico often spread fast and stick around, sometimes eventually turning into fact.
The same month as the Cassez arrest, the PGR received a fax, which appeared to be from the drug trafficking and paramilitary organization known as Los Zetas. It accused Garcia Luna of colluding with the notorious Beltran Leyva brothers, who helped El Chapo run the Sinaloa cartel.
While the police chief was establishing a reputation as a no-nonsense cop, even if he didn’t hesitate to pull a theatrical stunt every now and again to boost his image and that of his police corps, the nation’s most-wanted drug lord was developing a similar strategy. El Chapo was known throughout the underworld to be no-nonsense, too, preferring to toil in obscurity and operate in a calculating manner. But every so often, legend had it, the drug lord would appear at a restaurant surrounded by an armed entourage, where he would proceed to eat in the back room while the customers continued to dine, having given up their cellphones when he entered. The restaurant stories were fabrications, and only one—in his home state of Sinaloa—was confirmed, but the stories helped to create an aura of untouchability and invincibility about the man, and even offer his following a gentlemanly side. He always paid for the customers’ meals, after all.
Some critics weren’t sucked in by Garcia Luna’s showmanship from the outset. “His signature use of the press included a lurid style of presenting captured suspects as prey, chained and humiliated, to be tried before public opinion, while letting the judicial system continue with its guarantees of impunity,” recalls Laura Carlsen, director of the Mexico City-based Americas Program of the Center for International Policy. “The Cassez incident, whether or not you believe in her innocence, revealed the AFI’s control of the mainstream media and its cynical attitude toward rule of law.”
***
It was under this shadow that Garcia Luna would leave the AFI and become President Felipe Calderon’s Secretary of Public Security in December 2006, and helped spearhead a militarized drug war that would result in tens of thousands of lives lost. He would continue to cultivate his image as a warrior-scholar, publishing a book called “Why aren’t 1661 police corps enough? The past, present and future of the police in Mexico.” From the beginning of the Calderon presidency, he would also give regular press conferences and even meet with critics in public forums, explaining the security strategy as best he could.
Moving on from the AFI meant an even clearer departure from the shadows in which Garcia Luna had previously operated. Almost immediately after taking the political position, Garcia Luna’s tense relationship with the Attorney General’s Office, or PGR, would come to light. He had cultivated a good relationship with the DEA’s favorite Mexican prosecutor, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, several years before, and some DEA agents who knew them both said the two partners shared an ethos of transparency and honesty that worked well in the Americans’ favor. But Garcia Luna was now butting heads with Calderon’s Attorney General, Eduardo Medina Mora, according to officials who worked with the two. Contentious issues included funding—the U.S. provided about $400 million in annual Merida Initiative assistance toward police and security reform throughout the Calderon administration—made the jockeying for the top dog position even more intense.
At the time, Medina Mora was seen as Calderon’s golden boy, Garcia Luna as the man plagued by allegations of corruption, abuse of force and other antics. He had a lot to prove in an administration that had vowed to “clean house.” When one of his subordinates, Victor Gerardo Garay Cadena, was arrested by the PGR in 2008 for alleged links to the Beltran Leyvas, Garcia Luna summoned his people, a dozen or so high-ranking officials. They sat around a conference table, and a nameplate for Garay rested in front of an empty seat, according to David Gaddis, who was serving as a DEA regional director in Mexico at the time and got wind of the meeting from his sources. A pen and a pad of paper had been laid out in Garay’s place. Garcia Luna gave the group a speech, telling them that “the seat is empty for a reason. If you don’t want your seat to be empty, learn. Learn the reasons.” More than a decade later, Gaddis admits he still isn’t sure what exactly Garcia Luna’s message was. “I don’t know what he was saying or trying to say. If you’re gonna be corrupt, don’t get caught? Or don’t be corrupt? Or don’t be stupid? [But] he made the point to everyone in that room: Don’t make mistakes, this is a serious business.”
Indeed, it was Garcia Luna’s subordinates who most often got the bad rap, allowing their boss to escape unscathed, at least when it came to evidence. No U.S. official who worked with Garcia Luna would be naïve enough to suggest that the possibility he might be corrupt did not cross their mind. Some admit he didn’t particularly care for his subordinates—particularly anyone working in the municipal police forces. “[Mexico’s] federal police don’t like the municipal police,” says former DEA supervisor Vigil. “There’s corruption at the federal level, but the other ones—the state and local police—they’re nothing more than criminal organizations. They don’t work for the government, they work for the cartels. Garcia Luna may have gone through the motions, yes, but would he have cared? No. The proof of that pudding is the fact that Mexico never solves any of the crimes where they murder municipal police officers. They don’t investigate them, they don’t care. They look at the municipal police forces like they’re criminal organizations.”
Throughout his time at the top of the Sinaloa cartel, El Chapo knew the federal police didn’t care about the other cops, and took advantage of that fact, recruiting and bribing municipal and state policemen throughout Mexico. But he drew the line at indiscriminate killings and torture. During his Brooklyn trial, tape recordings revealed El Chapo reprimanding his subordinates for being too “harsh” on the police. “Just reprimand them,” El Chapo said. “Don’t beat them up.” According to a source with intimate knowledge of the legal discussions at El Chapo’s trial, the drug lord did not harbor any particular animosity toward the police in general. “The sense I got was he did not hate law enforcement,” the source says. “It was something that had to be dealt with.”
And yet still, some in the DEA remain loyal to their Mexican counterpart until the end. Shortly after his stint in Mexico City began in 1997, the DEA’s Bond was invited by Garcia Luna to have dinner at his house. The U.S. Embassy asked Bond to take along a date—a spy, as it turns out—to check Garcia Luna out. Garcia Luna didn’t raise any suspicions, nor did his house, which was nothing extravagant, by Bond’s recollection. Garcia Luna really wanted to show off his new motorbike to Bond, the agent recalls. Bond continued to work with him, and the two developed a close relationship, one that crossed into the personal realm on occasion. Bond put the unfounded allegations of corruption down to the culture in which Mexican police chiefs operate, and continues to dismiss them until further proof emerges, as does Vigil. Both scoff at the idea that Garcia Luna was handed briefcases full of cash in 2005 and 2006, as is claimed by one of El Chapo’s closest cronies Jesus “Rey” Zambada, arguing that it’s impossible to fit that amount of cash into a briefcase. The source with knowledge of El Chapo’s legal discussions says that El Chapo now says he never tried to bribe Garcia Luna, and that such matters were deemed the work of Rey’s brother, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, who remains on the lam and who U.S. prosecutors now claim has always been the real leader in the Sinaloa cartel. El Chapo also didn’t appear particularly concerned about Garcia Luna’s efforts—or lack thereof—to catch him. “He certainly didn’t lose any sleep over Garcia Luna,” the source says.
Garcia Luna, it would seem, felt similarly about El Chapo, and most certainly never obsessed about the fugitive drug lord in public, even as the media turned him into Garcia Luna’s nemesis. During the Calderon administration, it would actually be Garcia Luna’s penchant for showing off that would attract the most criticism from his foreign counterparts and other independent observers. He was particularly proud of one shiny new toy in particular—a $120 million state-of-the-art bunker smack in the middle of Mexico City. This underground tech hub—paid for by U.S. taxpayers—would serve as Garcia Luna’s command and control center in the hunt for El Chapo and other high priority criminals throughout Mexico. Much like the EPIC intelligence center in El Paso, Texas, which is shared between DEA and the other agencies operating under the Homeland Security umbrella, it was designed to increase and improve intelligence sharing between all of Mexico’s federal agencies and the rest of the world, particularly as cartels like the Sinaloa organization expanded.
Visitors to the bunker always left impressed, particularly by the row upon row of disciplined analysts and the information being shown on the large screens. Nothing like that existed in Latin America, says one Calderon administration official who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak on intelligence matters. Data showing flights—registered and illegal—all over the region flooded the screens; U.S. Southern and Northern Command were on speed dial. But the inner skeptics of most visitors sounded alarms when Garcia Luna inevitably harped on about how intelligence-sharing was now a blissfully smooth process. Eric Olson, Associate Director of the Mexico Institute in Washington DC, remembers Garcia Luna showing off a triangular conference table in the bunker, proudly pointing to each seat occupied by a head of a government department. One seat for SEDENA, the military; another seat for the PGR; another for the CISEN, and so on. “[He was] implying all these ministers came together and shared their information and came up with a logical strategy,” Olson says. “Nothing could be further from the truth. He created the impression that this was what was going on. It was very clear there was no clear synergy. Everybody was in it for themselves. SEDENA doesn’t share information. The federal police doesn’t share information.”
***
Observers would also point to the rivalry between Attorney General Medina Mora and Garcia Luna as a key reason cooperation and intelligence sharing declined during the latter years of the Calderon administration. “Leadership and personality conflicts may, in fact, be one of the most significant drivers of whether or not agencies set themselves up as rivals or allies in sharing important information. Some observers see the new federal police and PGR reforms as unlikely to resolve the zero sum competition,” read one U.S. embassy cable from Mexico City sent in November 2009 and published by Wikileaks.
El Chapo would exploit that lack of cohesion, sending one lawyer in particular, Humberto Loya Castro, to bribe police officials in all realms of law enforcement. There’s no doubt among former counter-drug officials that El Chapo understood that agencies unwilling to work closely with each other could more easily be exploited, and the chaos created by Garcia Luna and his nemeses in officialdom facilitated El Chapo’s expansion of his fiefdom.
In the latter years of the Calderon administration, as Garcia Luna’s dream of a “mando unico” (unified command) came into being, some police chiefs overseeing the project complained that none of the forces working together in the unified command, from local to state to federal police, trusted one another. The cohesive federal force of roughly 40,000 policemen and women, which effectively later became the “mando unico,” had been “his baby,” says Shannon O’Neil, a Mexico expert at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. “They had their own flag, a memorabilia coin. Garcia Luna had modeled this force along U.S. lines, to appeal to U.S. forces. “He had this whole ethos,” O’Neil says. “He was creating this whole mythology around the federal police. He was like a general.”
Garcia Luna’s mando unico was supposed to replace the military’s controversial role in the drug war. As early as 2008, Garcia Luna told the press that the military would return to its barracks, and no longer be used to fight against drug traffickers. The military, with its own history of brutal, oppressive tactics, was under fire for human rights violations, and Garcia Luna felt the police could handle the war on its own. The Mexican military—particularly the Army—still had a reputation of agreeing with everything its U.S. counterparts recommended or demanded, and then turning around and doing whatever it damn well pleased. Calderon had embraced the military from his first week in office, deploying several thousand troops to his home state of Michoacan, while Garcia Luna had decided they were more a hindrance than an asset. The Calderon administration even turned Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro, a general who had been convicted of links to the Juarez cartel in 2000 (he was released in 2007 due to lack of evidence) into an unofficial envoy in the drug war.
In 2008, Acosta Chaparro was deployed to meet with various cartel leaders throughout Mexico; he was even sent to the mountains of Sinaloa by two high-ranking Calderon administration officials to ask El Chapo to quell the violence that was ravaging the state at the time. Rumors of the meeting were first made public by drug trafficker and enforcer for El Chapo, Edgar Valdez Villareal, aka La Barbie, in a letter sent to the Mexican newspaper Reforma in 2012. In the letter, he claimed that Calderon wanted to make a pact with the cartels, and alleged that Garcia Luna had taken a bribe from him personally. The allegations about Acosta Chaparro and the meeting with El Chapo have since been reported by Mexican investigative journalist Anabel Hernandez. A former Mexican intelligence official and two former U.S. counter-drug officials confirmed the meeting took place, but could not confirm whether a pact was on the agenda. According to two of the officials, Acosta Chaparro was deployed by Juan Camilo Mourino, then Mexico’s Interior Secretary and a close friend of Calderon’s, and another member of Calderon’s inner circle; the president had no knowledge of the meeting, the former officials say. Mourino died shortly after, in a plane crash over Mexico City that was deemed an accident; in 2012, also in the capital, Acosta Chaparro took two bullets to the head and one to the chest and died shortly after in the hospital.
The role of the military, which never did return to its barracks, in spite of Garcia Luna’s promises, remains murky at best. The DEA prefers to work with the Mexican marines—they were responsible for capturing El Chapo in 2014 and 2015—but generals continue to run the show, even amid a swirl of suspicion. Since at least 2015, U.S. agents have been monitoring wiretaps regarding a shadowy Mexican figure nicknamed “El Padrino” who they believed was helping one of the cartels operate; on Oct. 15, they arrested him in San Diego. El Padrino, it turns out, was Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos, who served as Mexico’s Secretary of Defense from 2012-2018. He faced charges of money laundering and trafficking drugs from 2015 to 2017, and directing military operations toward other cartels. He was the highest ranking Mexican official to ever be charged with such crimes, and the allegations against him shattered confidence in what remains Mexico’s most-trusted institution among citizens of that country. On Nov. 17, the U.S. Department of Justice dropped the charges against him, citing the high level of cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico in the war on drugs, and said he would return to Mexico to face charges there.
Former DEA agents are not particularly surprised by the news about Cienfuegos, however, including Gilbert Gonzalez, who worked in Mexico in the early 90s, several years before Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo was convicted of working with the Juarez cartel in a ruling that opened Washington’s eyes to the endemic corruption south of the border. “With the generals, sometimes we were like the tick on the elephant’s back” says Gonzalez. “You couldn’t say you knew something but you could know you knew… You knew they were corrupt, or that they were turning a blind eye. With the generals, we knew we were dancing with the devil, but as long as you knew the dance…” At that time, Gonzalez says, corruption was “prevalent and institutionalized” in the military, adding that he could not address the current state of the military as he has not worked for DEA or in Mexico for decades. Vigil, however, is more candid. “No matter what they say about [the military] being the most trustworthy institution, a prestigious institution… Quite frankly it’s just as corrupt as any institution, probably more corrupt than the federal police. The vast majority of admirals and generals in Mexico are all corrupt, just like the governors. What you have is the difference between the caught and the uncaught.”
***
In the 00s, while the military scrambled around the country trying to quell the violence and keep its human rights abuses to a minimum, El Chapo and Garcia Luna both built their own armies of footsoldiers, and both attempted to create unprecedented surveillance networks. While Garcia Luna likely benefitted from the assistance of U.S.-authorized wiretaps—the National Security Agency, NSA, has repeatedly refused to answer reporters’ questions regarding such matters, but former DEA agents like Vigil say that the agency has long been a quiet, useful ally of the DEA and its Mexican counterparts—El Chapo used technology to spy on his wife and mistresses, among others. At one point while hiding out in the Sinaloan mountains, he even asked his tech guru if it would be possible to install spyware in every Internet café in Culiacan, a city of roughly 750,000 in habitants. Both El Chapo and Garcia Luna were thought to be vigilant with their use of technology, but it would appear from U.S. prosecutors claims of “voluminous” recordings—in both cases—that both men slipped up. “Garcia Luna would have to be really stupid to be talking about corrupt things on the phone,” says Vigil. “It’d be insane. He knew the capabilities we had in Mexico. He knew what was going on, he knew everything. He was CISEN, then head of the AFI, then head of everything.”
Some U.S. officials claim to have been skeptical of Garcia Luna from Day One. Jack Riley, a former DEA supervisory agent who worked with Mexican counterparts but was never based in-country, says he was initially worried about Garcia Luna’s ability to wear multiple hats. “He was the product of what I was worried about in Mexico—guys who straddle the intelligence and law enforcement side,” Riley says. “They were constantly trying to remake their agencies and their roles. For law enforcement, that’s not a good thing. I don’t see how he could have been in the position he was in and not known what Sinaloa was up to. I always kept the guy at arm’s length. Those are lessons I learned early on, dealing with our own CIA overseas.”
While based in El Paso during the early days of the Calderon administration, Riley recalls working with Garcia Luna. “He wanted to know more about me and what I was doing,” he says. “I wondered, why was he concerned? I thought it was very invasive.” For Riley, the red flags went up when some of the intelligence his DEA team was getting via wiretaps or informants was passed on to Garcia Luna’s people, and nothing happened. No followup, nothing. Just intelligence disappearing into the abyss. “He was very, very reluctant to do anything with it,” Riley says of Garcia Luna, prompting the American to think: “Wait a minute, this guy is touting cooperation?”
Other former DEA agents who worked with Garcia Luna believe he was just playing the game, one he would continue to play with Washington bureaucrats and counter-drug officials alike. Garcia Luna “had a pretty good instinct for people,” says Vigil. He thought many of the DEA’s people in Washington were just “milking the government teat… He had a good read for people who were not operators. Genaro Garcia Luna did not respect you if you didn’t understand the operational terrain. He wouldn’t waste any time on you. He had great disdain for talking to American agents who had no idea what was going on.”
Garcia Luna knew how to work Washington. He was in particularly good form during a January 2008 session with counterparts and journalists in the U.S. capital, when he highlighted the effects of U.S. gun laws on the drug war, capitalizing on the Obama administration’s willingness to accept responsibility for the U.S. role in Mexico’s drug war. There was little doubt, he argued, that U.S. guns were killing Mexicans, and there was not much any U.S. official could do to counter that argument. He would continue to impress, particularly as El Chapo’s home state of Sinaloa erupted later that year as the kingpin waged war against the Beltran Leyva brothers, who by that point had become his rivals. His federal police would be deployed to Sinaloa to take the heat off the state forces, who were overwhelmed. “On the surface he seemed to be doing what a normal top leader of a law enforcement agency would be doing,” says David Gaddis, who served as a DEA regional director in Mexico City from 2006 to 2009. Gaddis recalls that Ramón Pequeño García, head of counter-narcotics for the federal police force and one of the two other men named in the U.S. indictment against Garcia Luna, would brief the DEA on their meetings. “Genaro was breaking their balls,” Pequeño would tell them. “He was a very demanding boss, according to Pequeño,” Gaddis says. “From our standpoint it appeared the guy was doing what he should be doing. He was in the office before 8 a.m., stayed late, appeared to be very committed and a dedicated civil servant.”
Today, Pequeño and Luis Cardenas Palomino, who served as the federal police’s regional operations director during the Calderon administration, stand accused alongside Garcia Luna. The police chief, now 51 years old, is no longer viewed by anyone as the wonderboy who once wooed Washington. At best, he’s a former U.S. ally who pocketed some of the Merida Initiative money the U.S. gave to Mexico and used bonuses handed out during the Calderon administration to invest in various U.S. luxury properties. Like many U.S. allies before him, he settled in Florida. Like many former law enforcement veterans, Garcia Luna started his own private security consulting firm, working with some of his U.S. counterparts (Raul Roldan, an FBI representative at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico during Garcia Luna’s tenure, was on the board of his firm, GLAC Consulting, as were other former members of the intelligence community). Like many former Mexican law enforcement veterans, he most likely feared for his safety, even in retirement. “In Mexico, under one administration, you can be held in high esteem and then a new administration comes in and all of a sudden you become an enemy and they paint a bullseye on your chest,” says Vigil, adding that Calderoni fled to the U.S. for precisely that reason. “Once they leave government they have zero protection. The criminals know this and they’ll come after you. If you don’t have enough money, you’ll be dead in six months.”
Garcia Luna appears to have emerged the winner of the contentious battle with Medina Mora, with the former securing the majority of Merida Initiative funds and the latter being sent off to London as ambassador. Regardless of guilt or innocence, most observers see Garcia Luna’s grand plan as having, at best, failed. “Part of Garcia Luna’s job was to create a facade of a professional, non-military security force under a highly militarized and corrupt model,” says Carlsen. “Garcia Luna had no chance of creating a new kind of police and no intention of doing so.” Indeed, at worst, Garcia Luna has been playing the U.S. for decades and will end up serving anywhere from a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years to a maximum of life. Dozens of his drug trafficker enemies from the 00s are locked up or dead, but the two law enforcement agencies he helped create and build, the AFI and the SSP, are now defunct. The CISEN, too, has been disbanded. And he faces a very different fate to the one he had likely planned out for himself when he embraced his first top cop role back in 2001.
“I guess there was another side to him,” Gaddis says.
*
