Cd Juarez: García Luna's Favor of the Sinaloa Cartel was Notorious

Yaqui for Borderland Beat from: El Diario

The alleged bias of the Ministry of Public Security in charge of Genaro García Luna in favor of the Sinaloa Cartel was notorious in Ciudad Juárez between 2008 and 2012, a period in which different statistical comparisons showed a greater number of arrests of the opposing group to the aforementioned criminal organization.

Since 2010, when the Chihuahua Joint Operation was in charge of the Federal Police, El Diario reported on several occasions that there was a difference in the number of arrests that were recorded between one group and another, such as May 8 of that year, when it published : "PF has stopped 31 of La Línea this year ... and only 4 of "El Chapo"'s group.

The headline of another note in the following December was: "There are 44 detainees from the Sinaloa Cartel and 189 from La Línea."

Questioned on one of the occasions by the disparity in the combat of one group and another, the then general commissioner of the PF, Facundo Rosas Rosas, explained that “here the mathematics do not apply. There it is very complicated that you carry exactly the balance (…) there are different ways of operating ”.

He also said that “La Linea, the groups linked to the Juarez Cartel, have a very different way of operating, and even the activities are similar, but they are not the same. Those who distribute the drugs and who are linked to the Juarez Cartel are more in sight than the others, they have a very different behavior. ”

Genaro García Luna, who as Secretary of Public Security of President Felipe Calderón commanded the Federal Police between 2006 and 2012, was arrested last Tuesday by the US federal government in the city of Dallas, Texas, accused of having accepted millionaire bribes from the Sinaloa cartel.

“It was very clear: in 2010, when the thousands of federal police officers were in Juárez, it was when the high-impact crimes, kidnappings, floor charging, (piso , ie extorsion) carjacking, the homicides were more than 3,000 and, simply, when they leave it is when they start to go down, ”said Leticia Chavarría yesterday, a doctor who was a member of the Security Bureau headed by García Luna here in 2010.

"Most of the Juarenses noticed it, some kidnap victims also had that perception that there were military or federal involved," Chavarría said in an interview.

Juarez was the city in which the violence attributed to the dispute over the territory between drug trafficking groups left the highest number of victims in the Calderón administration, with 10,672 people killed in that period in the northern part of the state.

Since then, different sources stated that the federal government had "chosen a side", an observation on the perception that was even reported by the then consul general of the United States in Juarez in an official communication cable of 2009.

“The general opinion is that the Army feels comfortable allowing the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels to undermine each other's strength in their struggle to control the 'square', ie Plaza, (with the consequent theory that the Army would like to see the Sinaloa Cartel win ) ”, warned the then head of the diplomatic headquarters, Raymond McGrath, in a cable broadcast in 2011 by WikiLeaks and published by El Diario. “When the Sinaloa Cartel begins to be protected by the entire government apparatus after 2001, it felt for the first time the power to occupy places that for many years belonged to other cartels. So you see them fighting with the Gulf Cartel in Nuevo Laredo and now with the Juárez Cartel in Juárez. ”

The article was published on the occasion of a visit by Calderón to Washington, and was titled "Mexico seems to favor the Sinaloa Cartel in the war on drugs."