Mexico’s president said Wednesday he hopes that the former Mexican security chief convicted this week in the U.S. of bribe-taking will cooperate with prosecutors there and perhaps implicate former Mexican presidents.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he hopes Genaro Garcia Luna will make a deal with prosecutors to reduce his sentence, in exchange for testifying about López Obrador’s predecessors.
The former top Mexican security official was convicted Tuesday of taking massive bribes to protect the violent drug cartels he was tasked with combating. Garcia Luna served in different security posts under former presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon between 2000 and 2012. Both are political enemies of López Obrador.
“I would say, as president of Mexico, for the good of the country, that hopefully he will do it,” López Obrador said, referring to a possible sentencing deal, “in exchange for informing about whether he received orders or gave information to the former presidents Fox and Calderon.”
López Obrador said he hoped Garcia Luna would also provide information about his relationship with U.S. authorities, who he said must have known about his corruption.
“He even got prizes from U.S. authorities, it is not possible they didn’t know,” he said.
López Obrador welcomed the U.S. verdict on Garcia Luna, and depicted it as opportunity to root out corruption.
But López Obrador fought tooth and nail to avoid a U.S. trial of former defense secretary Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos on similar charges in 2020, at one point threatening to kick DEA agents out of Mexico unless the general was returned, which he was. Cienfuegos was quickly freed once he returned.
And López Obrador railed against Mexican judges who ruled Tuesday against Mexican government efforts to freeze the accounts of Garcia Luna’s wife, Linda Pereyra Gálvez. The government blocked her accounts in 2019, when her husband was arrested in Texas.