Ricardo Pascoe Pierce
Most Americans have not seen the Narcos series, but the political class of both parties in their country has confirmed their conviction that Mexico is a country where crime reigns. In the U.S. perception, what exists in Mexico is a narco-state where cartels dominate national life. The trials of Chapo Guzman and Genaro Garcia Luna more than confirm this perception. All the testimonies of the confessed criminals in both trials confirm these facts.
Incidentally, at the time, there was, in broad sectors of the United States, the same idea about Cuba and Havana before the Revolution, but mixed with the New York Mafia. And today, Colombia shares with Mexico that fantasy of being a territory of narcos, excess money, and violence that can reach everyone.
Indeed, the U.S. prosecution considered this subjective strategic ally when initiating the Guzman Loera and Garcia Luna trial. The general negative public opinion about Mexico represented a substantial initial advantage in its favor when the U.S. Prosecutor’s Office began its investigations of the former Mexican commander.
The reason is that an essential part of a jury’s assessment is based on the subjectivity of each member and their cultural and social environment. They are not citizens living isolated in a bubble. When issues such as drug trafficking, migration, and foreigners are mixed in a trial where the evaluation of values, behaviors, and responsibilities are crucial issues, prejudices emerge strongly, even if in a proportion of unconscious way.
Migration, drug addiction, fentanyl, drug trafficking criminals, and “rapists from Mexico illegally entering our country” (Trump dixit) have been in the public narrative for years. It is easier for any country to blame other societies for its problems and shortcomings than to assume its own responsibility. The United States has condemned others for their drug addiction for decades (Mexico, Colombia, and others) and the entire Arab world for the Twin Towers, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
We understand that logic well. Our President and his party blame everyone but themselves for poverty, the presence of drug trafficking, violence, and disappearances. Even for the Covid pandemic, the lack of medicines, long etcetera. So the U.S. attitude is nothing new.
It is essential to understand this U.S. social mood to comprehend why the jury did not need photographs, receipts, or recordings to believe absolutely everything that was said about García Luna. And if it had been anyone else, they would have believed it too. If General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda had faced a jury in any state in the U.S., he would have been hanged, too, if possible.
Some argued, with good reason, that they presented nothing more than hearsay in the case. And that this lack of credible evidence should have served to at least mitigate the result or, in any case, to establish some administrative responsibility for the immigration issue. But this was not the case, in the opinion of the jury, in the entire legal representation of the American people. It was enough for the jury to hear the pleadings of some convicted criminals to conclude that everything they had listened to their politicians and leaders says about Mexico for decades was confirmed in that Brooklyn trial. In a way, they agreed with López Obrador: if I have to choose between legality and justice, I prefer justice.
It is no coincidence that several U.S. officials, most notably the head of the DEA, took advantage of the backdrop provided by the Garcia Luna trial to make aggressive critical remarks to Mexico about its government’s lack of cooperation in the fight against drug trafficking. They made those accusations because they knew, as does the White House, that it was not just Garcia Luna sitting in the defendant’s chair: it was Mexico, its government, and its justice system.
It is no secret in Washington, both in intelligence circles and on Capitol Hill, that there is a close relationship between President Lopez Obrador and the Sinaloa Cartel: precisely the same thing Garcia Luna is accused of. The DEA said the same thing about Manuel Bartlett and the Guadalajara Cartel in the 1980s. A U.S. newspaper recently reported that U.S. intelligence intercepted information that when Ovidio Guzman was arrested, a high-ranking Mexican government official personally justified to the Sinaloa Cartel that it was not their fault, but that of Biden. And that, in the middle of the García Luna trial.
The annual reports of the U.S. Congress on the drug trafficking situation in the world always begin and end in Mexico. These are public documents and accessible on the pages of the U.S. Congress. Mexico is the central base of drug trafficking activity worldwide, with tentacles in nearly 60 countries. The Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels have created transnational companies as important as the big oil companies. The U.S. Army considers that more than a third of the national territory is in the hands of organized crime organizations.
These threads on drug trafficking and Mexico, on the trials of Mexican and foreign drug traffickers, and corruption at the highest levels of Mexico’s political, judicial, and military systems lead to the conclusion that all of this determined the guilty verdict against García Luna and not the “lack of convincing and irrefutable evidence against the accused”. Mexico sat in the chair in the Brooklyn courtroom next to Garcia Luna. And was found guilty.
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