Mexico's former top security official Genaro Garcia Luna was sentenced to more than 38 years in a US prison on Wednesday for aiding the very drug cartels he was tasked with dismantling. Garcia Luna, 56, was convicted at a high-profile trial in New York last year of taking millions of dollars in bribes to allow the Sinaloa Cartel to smuggle tons of cocaine. District Judge Brian Cogan sentenced Garcia Luna, who served as secretary of public security under president Felipe Calderon from 2006 to 2012, to 460 months in prison and a $2 million fine at a hearing in federal court in Brooklyn.
Prosecutors had sought a life sentence. "Today's sentencing of Genaro Garcia Luna is a critical step in upholding justice and the rule of law," US Attorney Breon Peace said in a statement. "His betrayal of the public trust and the people he was sworn to protect resulted in more than one million kilograms of lethal narcotics imported into our communities and unleashed untold violence here and in Mexico," Peace said.
Garcia Luna's month-long trial shone a spotlight on the corruption of the highest-ranking Mexican government figure ever to face trial in the United States. It also opened a window on the vast resources of the Sinaloa Cartel under Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, who is now serving a life sentence in a US penitentiary. At his trial, prosecutors said Garcia Luna, who held high-ranking security positions in Mexico from 2001 until 2012, was the cartel's "partner in crime.
" That included his ti.