MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s president stated Wednesday he hopes that the former Mexican security chief convicted this week within the U.S. of bribe-taking will cooperate with prosecutors there and maybe implicate former Mexican presidents.
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador stated he hopes Genaro Garcia Luna will make a take care of prosecutors to scale back his sentence, in change for testifying about López Obrador’s predecessors.
The former high Mexican security official was convicted Tuesday of taking large bribes to guard the violent drug cartels he was tasked with combating. Garcia Luna served in several security posts beneath former presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon between 2000 and 2012. Each are political enemies of López Obrador.
“I might say, as president of Mexico, for the nice of the nation, that hopefully he will do it,” López Obrador stated, referring to a attainable sentencing deal, “in change for informing about whether or not he obtained orders or gave data to the former presidents Fox and Calderon.”
López Obrador stated he hoped Garcia Luna would additionally present details about his relationship with U.S. authorities, who he stated should have identified about his corruption.
“He even acquired prizes from U.S. authorities, it isn’t attainable they didn’t know,” he stated.
López Obrador welcomed the U.S. verdict on Garcia Luna, and depicted it as alternative to root out corruption.
However López Obrador fought tooth and nail to keep away from a U.S. trial of former protection secretary Gen. Salvador Cienfuegos on related fees in 2020, at one level threatening to kick DEA brokers out of Mexico except the final was returned, which he was. Cienfuegos was rapidly freed as soon as he returned.
And López Obrador railed in opposition to Mexican judges who dominated Tuesday in opposition to Mexican authorities efforts to freeze the accounts of Garcia Luna’s spouse, Linda Pereyra Gálvez. The federal government blocked her accounts in 2019, when her husband was arrested in Texas.
Nevertheless, judges later dominated the freezing of the accounts violated her rights.
“As we’ve been saying, the judicial department in our nation wants a profound reform,” López Obrador stated.
The Mexican president has incessantly sparred with the judiciary, as a result of judges have typically blocked his initiatives on constitutional grounds.
García Luna, 54, was convicted on fees that embrace partaking in a unbroken prison enterprise. He faces at the very least 20 years and as a lot as life in jail at his sentencing, set for June 27.
García Luna, who denied the allegations, headed Mexico’s federal police and was later the nation’s high public security official from 2006 to 2012 in Calderon’s administration. His attorneys stated the costs have been primarily based on lies from criminals who needed to punish his drug-fighting efforts and to get sentencing breaks for themselves by serving to prosecutors.
On Tuesday, Calderon stated Garcia Luna’s conviction didn’t diminish his administration’s coverage of preventing drug cartels.
“I by no means negotiated or agreed with criminals,” Calderon wrote in a press release.
Rubén Salazar, director of the Mexican political evaluation agency Etellekt Consultores, stated García Luna’s conviction has rocked Mexico’s political world by underlining the likelihood that the U.S. justice system may open circumstances in opposition to high-profile Mexican politicians.
