Smuggler tells U.S. 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. Nava Valencia testified that at a meeting about a month later in a cartel bigwig’s country house outside the central Mexican city of Cuernavaca, García Luna said he hadn’t been able to intervene because the U.S. government and Mexican marines had been involved in the seizure. That was when, according to Nava Valencia, García Luna and the police official with him pledged “to stand with us.” García Luna led Mexico’s Federal Investigation Agency from 2001 to 2005, then served as secretary of public security to then-President Felipe Calderon from 2006 to 2012.