Antonio Navalón
In the history of mankind, there have been many times in which seeking justice, holding a trial seeking to establish the truth, has been insufficient, improbable, or simply the elements to justify the mechanisms that guarantee its attainment have been lost. The trial currently being held in New York – in the same courtroom that sentenced to life imprisonment the Badiraguato, Sinaloa native who continued the techniques implemented by Pablo Escobar to satisfy the needs of the never-ending U.S. drug market – is a peculiar trial. It is so because, although it is nominally directed against the former Secretary of Public Security of Felipe Calderón’s government, Genaro García Luna, it is inevitable to realize that to do justice, it is necessary to call things by their name again.
At the end of World War I, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles included a clause instructing the trial of Kaiser Wilhelm II as “guilty of a supreme offense to international morality and the sacred authority of treaties”, being the first time that someone was tried for war crimes. England opposed the trial, and the Kaiser was allowed to die in exile. However, this fact was fundamental for what was to come later and ended up being the antecedent for the emergence of the concept of “crimes committed against humanity”, introduced at the end of World War II and as a reaction to the indignation provoked by the Holocaust. After the war came the Nuremberg trials, which were very important in creating jurisprudence and the exact legal characteristics for judging someone for having committed crimes against humanity. Today, seeing the number of victims that, day by day, drug trafficking and drug consumption have around the world, I do not see why these crimes should not be classified as crimes against humanity.
According to the 1998 Rome Statute, there are eleven types of crimes against humanity: intentional homicide; extermination; enslavement; forcible transfer of a population; imprisonment in violation of established norms; torture; rape or sexual crimes; political, racial, religious persecution or on grounds unacceptable under international law; forced disappearance of persons; the crime of apartheid; or other inhumane acts against the mental or physical integrity of persons. Many of them, undoubtedly, are committed in the illegal practice of drug consumption and trafficking. It took many years, millions of deaths, and a Holocaust to lay the foundations, concepts, and mechanisms to enforce justice and condemn those who threaten humanity.
García Luna, unlike the one born in Badiraguato, is not the bad guy among the bad guys; he is just one more who has the partners and asks and leads to all the questions. The New York trial is a universal trial because, at the same time that all of us are being judged, our capacity for deduction, investigation, and seriousness is also put on trial. What is happening in the Big Apple is the test and the proof of the capacity of two countries – Mexico and the United States – to fight against drug trafficking, against corruption, and against illicit enrichment. The U.S. intelligence and counter-intelligence policy is also being trialed along with former Secretary Garcia Luna. Also, the Mexican State is being tested, and all the time we have spent on the issue and avoiding facing an issue that has been the cancer of our society for more than two six-year periods. But not only that, it has also been one of the main issues that always comes up when we sit down with the main consumer and market for drug users.
The ephemerality of power makes us look for culprits that, in addition, coincide with our familiar demons. In this case, if the trial of García Luna would also allow the prosecution of Calderón, it would be perfect for the current regime to die in peace in the face of the alleged electoral robbery of 2006. But that is clearly not enough for their children or the children’s children because this trial and its consequences will only make sense if it causes two countries as important and intertwined as the United States and Mexico to change not only their drug war mechanism, but this supreme hypocrisy in which we are living.
Mexico provides the dead, but it also provides the fentanyl, cocaine, and other drugs consumed on U.S. soil. However, the Americans only put the dead from overdoses. Markets exist as long as there is demand and supply, and the United States has plenty of consumers to meet the supply from Mexican smugglers. Today, what is lacking is efficiency and seriousness; even in the times of Prohibition and Al Capone, there was an Eliot Ness and a desire to enforce the law that transcended the complicated situation.
At this point and following, on the one hand, the chronicle of the trial; on the other hand, the interpretation on the morning press conferences (Mañaneras) of the trial; and, on the other hand, the collapse of the U.S. apparatus, it is inevitable to ask ourselves what we have to do not only to put an end to the García Lunas if he is really as corrupt as they claim. What really comes out of all this is the question of what we must do to change this hypocritical and suicidal verbena we are in with our security.
It used to be that words and institutions like the DEA, the FBI, the U.S. courts and prosecutors, the Pentagon, and the Sixth Fleet, made the world tremble. At this moment, I tremble because of the collective failure of their intelligence service. It worries me a lot to think where I have lived or where the people I pay with my taxes and who are responsible for the security of the country I live, who had had to discover what it seems they already knew for a long time – or could have known – and remedy the problem, when it was not so serious, of the Genaro García Lunas’ case.
This trial is the universal trial, and it is a trial that must have a culprit above all. The culprit is the failure of the Mexican and U.S. security and intelligence services and, regardless of taking García Luna to a cell and having him die of old age and sunlessness in the prairies of Colorado – if the Court finds him guilty, which is very likely – there should be an exemplary punishment. A sentence that not only affects the implicated in question, but that is retroactive and seeks to bring to justice those who, in the last thirty years, have been responsible for the inadmissible and permitted failures of the security apparatuses of both countries, since they have also been intellectual accomplices and participants in the García Luna case.
When it comes to trials of men, there is always room for small things. However, history is only made when we humans truly play big. To think and act big is not only to put the corrupt in jail, but to destroy the system that allowed that corrupt person to be corrupt for so long with the approval of so many people and splashing whoever was around him. Who is to blame for all those dying because of drug consumption? The Chinese, the Mexicans? Or, that Americans worship everything that is the law of the market or, which is the same thing, the fact that demand imposes supply.
The New York trial is a trial that is simultaneously against the corrupt who, initially and until proven otherwise, took advantage of their positions to work in favor of what they had to destroy. But not only that, they took advantage of the public trust placed in their person to make the most of it, as is the case of Genaro García Luna. As I mentioned, this is also a trial against both countries’ security and intelligence services, although mainly those of the United States.
Gone are the days when talking about U.S. security institutions was almost a sentencing in advance. Since the U.S. justice system ceased to have the efficiency that characterized it before, we find ourselves with the growing and increasingly common role of the figure of protected witnesses. Anything that helps to put an end to evil is good, unless the will to fight against evil does not bring with it other harmful elements. Because if it is already serious to challenge the security and intelligence mechanisms of the States, it is worse to create convictions that, in themselves, justify the choices of political power.
Whether the judge, prosecutors, and others involved in the trial know it or not, not only is a former Mexican public official on trial, but also the entire judicial, security, and intelligence network of Mexico and the United States is being put to the test.
The United States has to know that its greatest crisis is not that it has been losing wars around the world for years, but that the evidence of the losses caused by the internal war it is suffering is now appearing more and more frequently. Neither the guarantee of the efficiency of its judicial system, the seriousness of its institutional framework, nor the control over the performance of its officials today deserves the recognition they once had and which were some of the bases of American power. And then there is a fundamental element: if one looks at the country’s fight against drugs, one has to ask oneself, first, what have they done to ensure that their society – regardless of age – has become the most drug-consuming market in the world. Secondly, and much more importantly, they have to question why the bad guys are always the others and not them, even though they are the first consumers of the vice they are fighting to eradicate.
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