Mexican ex-security chief on trial: multimillion bribe claims and a cat named cocaine

Over nearly three weeks of proceedings, jurors have heard testimony from top cartel operators, an ex-police officer and a former state attorney general. Their accounts include a million-dollar cash drop at a Guadalajara car wash and a brazen kidnapping, and have even implicated a former Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, in the scheme granting the Sinaloa cartel protection.

But the accusation, in which Veytia alleged that in 2011 both Calderón and García Luna had instructed the Nayarit state governor at the time to support El Chapo, was a secondhand account. Veytia was convicted on drug trafficking charges in 2019, and is serving a 20-year sentence.

Calderón, who appointed García Luna to his cabinet as security secretary in 2006, was quick to deny the allegation.

The accusation against Calderón was just one in a series of wild cartel stories heard in the Brooklyn courthouse.

Witnesses testified that at one point, the cartel kingpin Arturo Beltrán Leyva had García Luna kidnapped for refusing to take his side in an increasingly violent war against El Chapo and his allies. Another former cartel leader claimed he personally gave García Luna $2.5m at an office above a car wash in the city of Guadalajara in exchange for protection.

Even the Mexican press has been implicated: on Monday, a former official in the state of Coahuila testified that García Luna paid the owner of the national El Universal newspaper millions of dollars for favorable coverage.