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.
Oscar Nava Valencia, known as "El Lobo," said the payments to former security secretary Genaro Garcia 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.Garcia Luna and a high-ranking police official "said they were going to stand with us," Nava Valencia told jurors at Garcia Luna's U.S. federal drug trafficking trial.
Nava Valencia -- who is sometimes known as "El Lobo" Valencia and whose nickname means "the wolf" in Spanish -- pleaded guilty years ago to cocaine conspiracy. He once helmed Mexico's Milenio drug cartel. The traffickers didn't get the drugs back; indeed, another 10-tonne container was seized days later, and the drugs were incinerated, Nava Valencia said.
Nava Valencia recounted a second face-to-face meeting with Garcia Luna some time later, amid a rift in the Sinaloa cartel. Nava Valencia ultimately aligned with Guzman's faction, which worried that its allies-turned-adversaries would turn to informing authorities so as to get police to harass their rivals.
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