Even if it is the same movie – the eternal battle of the good guys against the bad guys – we watch it anyway. Mounted on his white horse and wearing a hat of the same color, our hero — handsome and noble — always ends up defeating the villain: ugly, bad, and dressed in black.
You don’t have to be a genius to recognize that a good part of the success of the classic western plot lies, precisely, in the fact that it is about the same formula that we accept to consume once and the other, too. That is, from the beginning of the story we already know what the end will be. The same can be said of the trial against Genaro García Luna.
With very small changes, the script of the process carried out in a federal court in New York and which found him guilty of participating in the trafficking of 50 tons of Colombian cocaine from Mexico to the United States and thus favoring a specific criminal organization -the Sinaloa cartel–, is the same one that was built against the government of Miguel de la Madrid, that of Carlos Salinas and practically all the Mexican administrations of the last half century.
This time the villain of the story is the mechanical engineer from the UAM who began his career in the government’s espionage apparatus, he was the main builder of the Federal Investigation Agency, the “Mexican FBI” — under his command he went from being a he forces 7,000 elements to a virtual army of 40,000– and, above all, he was for almost a decade the favorite Mexican policeman of the big “intelligence” agencies and the fight against drug trafficking in the United States.
It’s the same movie. This time the villain’s last name is García Luna, but it could well be the story of General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, that of Governor Mario Villanueva, Deputy Attorney General Mario Ruiz Massieu, or that of General Salvador Cienfuegos. Not to mention the other politicians and or “big bosses” such as Chapo Guzmán, Juan García Abrego, Osiel Cárdenas. And not to mention the presidents Antonio Noriega (Panama) or Ernesto Samper (Colombia), who, in their turn, suffered the consequences of the Game of Thrones in Washington, DC.
There are different details – as in soap operas or westerns–, but in the film that we let ourselves tell, there are elements that are invariably repeated:
(1) The heroes are always the brave and honest American policemen, politicians, and judges. Although they often represent the same interests that once embraced and financed those who today condemn.
(2) And, above all: always-always, whoever has fallen – from Al Capone to date – has fallen, the criminal business continues to prosper. In the case of drug trafficking, leaving a clear trail of violence and blood in the south. And in the north, of complicity and death by overdose.
We already knew that trials in the United States are, above all, a show. A kind of fable to tell themselves and the world, the story that justice always reaches the criminals.
We already knew that in the case of García Luna -on the same track as the process against El Chapo and the aborted case “for reasons of national security”, against the Secretary of Defense of Enrique Peña Nieto–, the final objective was never going to to reveal the brutal dispute for power between the CIA, DEA, FBI and the other mafia bureaucracies within the American justice system.
As long as it continues to be claimed that behind the great crimes there are only evil individuals and not a whole system of international complicity that, in the case of drug trafficking, make up enormous networks of an economy in perfect synchrony with the laws of the market, trials such as that of the bishop of President Felipe Calderón will not stop being, if anything, material worthy of a new adventure of El Libro Vaquero, or Netflix.
García Luna, 54, is likely to be sentenced to life in prison. Perhaps his old complicity and/or his silence will allow him to buy a sentence that will allow him to reach old age in freedom. There will be a lot of noise about the entire “system” that sheltered it, but I have little doubt that, to say it in tune with the choir that is celebrating today, sooner rather than later “today’s wolves will become tomorrow’s lambs”.
