After spending his life as a dedicated servant in law enforcement, Genaro Garcia Luna did what any smart, wealthy person from Mexico would do upon his retirement at the ripe old age of 44: He immigrated to America and moved to Florida. Duh! Why wouldn’t he? Mexico is a dangerous place! Plus, America’s immigration bureaucrats are idiots and will let anyone in.
Most Americans have probably never heard of Genaro Garcia Luna, but in Mexico, he is every bit as famous as someone like a James Comey, Robert Mueller or Bill Barr is to us. Everyone in Mexico knows who Garcia Luna is, because he was in the news every single day during the last dozen years of his career.
From 2000 through 2005, during the Vicente Fox administration in Mexico, Garcia Luna served as the head of that nation’s Federal Investigation Agency – Mexico’s equivalent of our FBI. Then from 2006 through 2012, Garcia Luna was Mexico’s incredibly powerful Secretary of Public Security.
We have no equivalent position to that in America. Imagine if Bill Barr was the Attorney General and was in charge of the National Guard troops in all 50 US states, and that’s sort of what Garcia Luna’s position was like as head of Mexico’s Public Security.
In other words, Garcia Luna is extremely recognizable to the people of Mexico as one of that nation’s top political and law enforcement figures. And… he was just arrested in Dallas.
Federal prosecutors say Garcia Luna was taking bribes from the Sinaloa Cartel for his entire 12-year stint working for two presidential administrations in Mexico. Garcia Luna is accused of taking $6 million in bribes from the cartel. He’s been charged with three counts of conspiracy to traffic cocaine into the US, as well as lying to federal investigators. It’s also believed that Garcia Luna used his positions of power to help the cartels infiltrate virtually every layer of law enforcement in Mexico.
That must have been some crack police work by our storied Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as dedicated employees of the Immigration and Naturalization Services, to track down Garcia Luna and arrest him, right?
Actually, no.
No one in the US federal government thought it was unusual that a public servant from Mexico would suddenly want to retire to the US at the age of 44 with millions of dollars in the bank. Rubber stamp! Come on in, buddy!
The feds found out about Genaro Garcia Luna’s crimes completely by accident, during the federal trial against former cartel boss Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman. El Chapo’s former son-in-law testified against him in New York, where he suddenly started blabbing from the stand that he had paid more than $6 million to Garcia Luna on behalf of the cartel. El Chapo’s federal trial has been conducted under a lot of secrecy for obvious reasons.
So, when the feds learned about that accusation and tried to reach out to Mexican authorities in secret, because it was such a delicate matter, they discovered that – whoops! – Garcia Luna was no longer in Mexico. We had let him immigrate to the US and therefore, Garcia Luna was suddenly our problem.
El Chapo’s former son-in-law also testified that the bribes paid to Garcia Luna paved the way for the cartel to safely smuggle tons upon tons of cocaine, meth and black tar heroine into America for years. The drug problem in America started to skyrocket on this guy’s watch – and yet our federal government viewed him as an ally in holding the cartels at bay.
Garcia Luna is an encapsulation of a host of problems in America right now: Our wide-open southern border, 70,000 annual overdose deaths, and an idiotic immigration bureaucracy that doesn’t bat an eyelash when a foreigner who is obviously corrupt wants to move in.
Even the people who we think are on our side in the battle against the cartels are on the take. The cartels have infected Mexico from top to bottom. Our neighbor to the south is a failed narco-state. Here’s another thought: If the cartels are able to bribe Mexico’s equivalent of the US Attorney General, how many people in our own government are on the take? It seems like a wall on the southern border is only the beginning of a solution to this problem.
