By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A lawyer for a former Mexican security chief facing U.S. drug trafficking charges asked on Wednesday for details of the evidence prosecutors would use against his client, arguing the documents he reviewed so far showed no links to crimes.
Genaro Garcia Luna, who served as Mexico’s secretary of public security from 2006 to 2012, pleaded not guilty last year to charges he accepted millions of dollars in bribes to protect the Sinaloa drug cartel once run by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and allowed it to operate with impunity.
In an appearance in Brooklyn federal court on Wednesday, Garcia Luna’s attorney Cesar de Castro said he was still reviewing “millions of pages” of evidence that prosecutors shared, and asked them to pinpoint which documents they would use to build their case.
“We have not seen any evidence of criminality” or links to drug traffickers, de Castro said, adding the majority of the documents he had reviewed did not mention Garcia Luna’s name.
U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan agreed that the defense was “entitled to assistance” by prosecutors, likening their task of identifying relevant evidence to “looking for a harbor in an ocean.”
Prosecutors said they had also completed a review of classified materials related to the case. Cogan scheduled a hearing for next June to discuss how the documents could be used in the case.
Mexico’s government in September filed a lawsuit against Garcia Luna in Florida, where he had been living before his 2019 arrest in Dallas, in an effort to recover what it called illegally obtained assets.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
