Smuggler tells US jury he paid off ex-Mexico safety chief

NEW YORK (AP) — Describing conferences at a automobile wash and a smuggler’s nation home, a onetime drug trafficker testified Monday that he paid a former cabinet-level Mexican safety official hundreds of thousands of {dollars} for assist that included U.S. authorities details about an enormous cocaine cargo in Mexico.

Óscar Nava Valencia, often called “El Lobo,” mentioned the funds to former safety secretary Genaro García Luna additionally have been supposed to guarantee safety at a time when a schism within the infamous Sinaloa cartel was heading towards a drug-world conflict.

García Luna and a high-ranking police official “mentioned they have been going to face with us,” Nava Valencia informed jurors at García Luna’s U.S. federal drug trafficking trial.

García Luna is accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of {dollars} to let the Sinaloa cartel function with impunity because it despatched tons of cocaine to the U.S.

Protection attorneys have not but had their likelihood to query Nava Valencia, however they’ve argued that the case rests on lies from self-interested criminals. García Luna has pleaded not responsible, and his attorneys have mentioned the previous cupboard member tried earnestly to fight the drug commerce and is being deserted by a U.S. authorities that after considered him as a associate.

Nava Valencia — who is usually often called “El Lobo” Valencia and whose nickname means “the wolf” in Spanish — pleaded responsible years in the past to cocaine conspiracy. He as soon as helmed Mexico’s Milenio drug cartel.

That enterprise had ties to the Sinaloa cartel in the course of the reign of notorious kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, whose current U.S. trial aired testimony about alleged payoffs to García Luna.

Nava Valencia informed jurors he paid $5 million to García Luna and different high-level authorities officers to attempt to free a delivery container filled with 10 tons (9,070 kg) of Colombian cocaine after it was seized within the Mexican Pacific Coast port of Manzanillo round 2007.

The traffickers did not get the medication again; certainly, one other 10-ton container was seized days later, and the medication have been incinerated, Nava Valencia mentioned.

At a gathering a few month later in a cartel bigwig’s nation home exterior the central Mexican metropolis of Cuernavaca, García Luna mentioned he hadn’t been capable of intervene as a result of the U.S. authorities and Mexican marines had been concerned within the seizure, Nava Valencia testified.

However he mentioned García Luna got here by way of in one other approach: He later supplied a doc displaying that the U.S. authorities had identified in regards to the cargo and its origins, data that the Mexican traffickers used to steer their irritated Colombian suppliers that the issue had been on the Colombians’ finish. The Colombians then backed off their demand for a $50 million reimbursement, Nava Valencia mentioned.

Nava Valencia recounted a second face-to-face assembly with García Luna a while later, amid a rift within the Sinaloa cartel. Nava Valencia in the end aligned with Guzman’s faction, which fearful that its allies-turned-adversaries would flip to informing authorities in order to get police to harass their rivals.

“There have been going to be operations and investigations towards us, and we wished to attempt to put a brake on them,” he defined.

So, he mentioned, he and his associates paid $500,000 to get a gathering with García Luna, and one other $2.5 million when the then-security secretary confirmed up for the sit-down in an workplace above a automobile wash within the metropolis of Guadalajara. That was when, in line with Nava Valencia, García Luna and the police official with him pledged “to face with us.”

García Luna led Mexico’s Federal Investigation Company from 2001 to 2005, then served as secretary of public safety to then-President Felipe Calderon from 2006 to 2012. He left Mexican authorities service and moved to Miami in 2012. He was arrested in 2019 in Texas and has since been held with out bail in a federal lockup.

He may face a long time in jail if convicted of drug trafficking and fascinating in a seamless legal enterprise.