MEXICO CITY (AP) — A U.S. indictment unsealed Wednesday in the District of Columbia claims that the leader of one of Mexico’s most violent gangs continued to run an offshoot group, the Northeast Cartel, from inside a Mexican prison.
Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, alias “Zeta 40,” was a founder and leader of the notorious Zetas cartel. He has been in a Mexican prison since his arrest in 2013.
Together with the killing of the Zetas' other top leader in 2012, the old cartel, which spread terror throughout Mexico with bloody massacres, basically fell apart.
The indictment says the new Northeast Cartel was created and run by Treviño Morales and his brother Omar — who was arrested in 2015 — as a successor organization to the Zetas. The brothers allegedly got their relatives to run day-to-day operations for the new gang.
Those accusations represent a grim comment on the lack of security at Mexican prisons, where inmates can often hold large numbers of relatively unsupervised meetings with lawyers and relatives, allowing them to pass messages to the outside.
The defendants renamed the Zetas to “Cartel Del Noreste” or CDN, according to the indictment, which adds they ”continued to control the Cartel and installed various family members to operate the CDN after their incarceration."
The new indictment accuses the brothers of drug, conspiracy, money laundering, criminal enterprise and other offenses that could get them up to life in prison. The U.S. has filed a request for the extradition of Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, but it has been held up for about a decade by court appeals.
Drug lords in Mexico usually fight extradition tooth and nail, in part because they can continue to run their gangs if they stay in Mexican prisons.
In 2022, one of those relatives who allegedly ran the day to day operations of the CDN cartel, Juan Gerardo Treviño — whose alias was “El Huevo” or “The Egg”— was captured and deported to the United States because he apparently had U.S. citizenship, thus avoiding the long route of extradition.
The CDN cartel dominates the border city of Nuevo Laredo, across the border from Laredo, Texas.
Like the Zetas, the Northeast gang is ruthlessly violent. It regularly carries out violent shooting attacks on army patrols there, and just last week one soldier was killed there in a shootout.
President Claudia Sheinbaum said earlier this week that “Nuevo Laredo is where criminal groups have carried out the most attacks on the army and the National Guard.”
U.S. Attorney Jaime Esparza of the Western District of Texas, said the Treviño Morales brothers had committed “horrible atrocities.”
"For decades, these individuals have controlled one of the most violent drug organizations in Mexico, committing and directing the commission of horrible atrocities against our neighbors, the people of Mexico, and also in the United States,” Esparza said.
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FILE - This file photo shows a mug shot, released on July 15, 2013 by Mexico's Interior Ministry, of Zetas drug cartel leader Miguel Angel Trevino Morales after his arrest in Mexico. (AP Photo/Mexico's Interior Ministry, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — The man once heralded as the architect of Mexico’s war on drug cartels was sentenced to more than 38 years in a U.S. prison on Wednesday for taking massive bribes to aid drug traffickers.
Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s former secretary of public security, was convicted by a New York jury in 2023 of taking millions of dollars in bribes to protect the violent Sinaloa cartel that he was supposedly combating. He is the highest-level Mexican government official to be convicted in the United States.
At his sentencing hearing before a federal judge in Brooklyn on Wednesday, García Luna continued to maintain his innocence and said the case against him was based on false information from criminals and the Mexican government.
“I have a firm respect for the law,” he said in Spanish. “I have not committed these crimes.”
García Luna, 56, led Mexico’s federal police before he served in a cabinet-level position as the top security official from 2006 to 2012 under then-President Felipe Calderón. At the time, García Luna was hailed as an ally by the U.S. in its fight on drug trafficking.
But U.S. prosecutors said that in return for millions of dollars, he provided intelligence about investigations against the cartel, information about rival gangs and the safe passage of massive quantities of drugs.
Prosecutors had asked for a life sentence. García Luna's lawyers had argued that he should get no more than 20 years.
U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan said he wasn't moved by past accolades that García Luna received for his work in the war on drugs.
“That was your cover,” Cogan said before imposing the sentence. “You are guilty of these crimes, sir. You can’t parade these words and say, ‘I’m police officer of the year.’”
Besides the sentence of 38 years and four months, the judge imposed a $2 million fine.
During the trial, photos were shown of García Luna shaking hands with former President Barack Obama and speaking with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Sen. John McCain.
But prosecutors said García Luna secretly advanced a drug trafficking conspiracy that resulted in the deaths of thousands of American and Mexican citizens. He ensured that drug traffickers were notified in advance of raids and sabotaged legitimate police operations aimed at apprehending cartel leaders, they said.
Drug traffickers were able to ship over 1 million kilograms of cocaine through Mexico and into the United States using planes, trains, trucks and submarines while García Luna held his posts, prosecutors said.
During former Sinaloa kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán’s trial in the same court in 2018, a former cartel member testified that he personally delivered at least $6 million in payoffs to García Luna and that cartel members agreed to pool up to $50 million to pay for his protection.
“He enabled the cartel. He protected the cartel. He was the cartel,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Saritha Komatireddy told the judge Wednesday.
García Luna enabled a corrupt system that allowed violent cartels to thrive and distribute drugs that killed multitudes of people, she added.
“It may not have been the defendant pulling the trigger, but he has blood on his hands,” Komatireddy said.
Prosecutors also said García Luna plotted to undo last year's verdict by seeking to bribe or corruptly convince multiple inmates at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn to support false allegations that two government witnesses communicated via contraband cellular phones in advance of the trial.
García Luna’s lawyer, Cesar de Castro, said the defense intends to appeal the sentence. He said his client is someone who “has served his country” and has now lost his money, his reputation as well as policies he championed in Mexico.
“He has lost close to everything. All that remains is his wonderful family,” de Castro said.
In Mexico, newly inaugurated President Claudia Sheinbaum briefly commented on the case Tuesday, saying: “The big issue here is how someone who was awarded by United States agencies, who ex-President Calderón said wonderful things about his security secretary, today is prisoner in the United States because it’s shown that he was tied to drug trafficking.”
Associated Press writer Fabiola Sánchez in Mexico City contributed to this report.
FILE - Mexico's Genaro Garcia Luna speaks during a ceremony to designate June 2 as Federal Police Day in Mexico City, June 2, 2011. (AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini, File)
FILE - Mexico's Genaro Garcia Luna speaks during an interview with The Associated Press in Mexico City, Sept. 3, 2009. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills, File)
