Smuggler tells US jury he paid off ex-Mexico security chief
Describing meetings at a car wash and a smuggler’s country house, a onetime drug trafficker testified Monday that he paid a former cabinet-level Mexican security official millions of dollars for help that included U.S. government information about a huge cocaine shipment in Mexico.
Óscar Nava Valencia, known as “El Lobo,” said the payments to former security secretary Genaro García Luna also were intended to assure protection at a time when a schism in the notorious Sinaloa cartel was heading toward a drug-world war.
García Luna and a high-ranking police official “said they were going to stand with us,” Nava Valencia told jurors at García Luna’s U.S. federal drug trafficking trial.