Mayor Pete’s Wine-Cave Problem
By Sarah Jones
Photo: Martina Albertazzi/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Days have passed since a photo of Pete Buttigieg inside a wine cave went viral. The reason isn’t mysterious. Voters rarely get such tantalizing glimpses into the high-end presidential fundraising circuit; the photo is something of a portal. It shows us Buttigieg at dinner with donors underneath a glorious crystal chandelier. To attend, people of means had to max out their donations to the Buttigieg campaign. The price of a plate, then, was $2,800, a small sum to a multimillionaire or billionaire, but out of reach for most. And what can $2,800 purchase?
The food was probably delicious, and the wine excellent. But nobody goes to dinners with candidates just to eat. The table conversation is what matters. Buttigieg, who’s since announced that future fundraisers will be open to the press, didn’t do anything markedly unusual by hosting a dinner in a Swarovski-bedecked wine cave. He was playing the game the way it’s usually played, especially when a presidential nomination is at stake. The only remarkable thing about Cavegate is the fact that it’s a controversy at all. During the last Democratic debate, Buttigieg faced fierce criticism from senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, the furthest-left candidates in the race. Even Andrew Yang got in a dig, as he touted his universal-basic-income plan. Americans shouldn’t have “to go shake the money tree in the wine cave,” he said.
Regrettably, the wine-cave defenders did log on. The excuses were varied, if not especially creative. Wine caves are an agricultural necessity; the wine did not actually cost $900 a bottle, as was first rumored; not everyone at the dinner was a billionaire. “Of the roughly 50 folks in attendance, plenty were people of means, and certainly all of us who were able to go to an event like that should consider ourselves lucky,” Buttigieg donor Bill Wehrle, who attended the wine-cave dinner, wrote in an editorial for the Washington Post. “But the whole experience fell short of proving Warren’s suggestion that ‘billionaires in wine caves’ will ‘pick the next president.’”
Wehrle’s editorial at least gave the Post an opportunity to get the most amusing correction of 2019 in right under the wire. Wehrle, a former executive for Kaiser Permanente, wrote that he is not a millionaire, but he’s wealthier than he let on; his home cost over $3 million. The entire event is shaping up to be a legitimate problem for Buttigieg, even though he is personally not as wealthy as other candidates in the race. There is no polling on Cavegate itself (thank God), but one FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll does show a post-debate Buttigieg slump. Buttigieg has defended his campaign’s fundraising practices. But his spelunking may be more costly than he anticipated.
The photo of Buttigieg in the cave, at the disposal of those who could afford to be there, affirms old fears about the order of the world. Voting is a mere formality. Somewhere in a secret and elegant place, the powerful decide who gets to join America’s ruling class. This is obviously a simplification. The Cigarette Smoking Man belongs to the world of The X-Files; he isn’t going to dinner with Pete Buttigieg. At its worst, this conspiratorial logic can manifest in anti-Semitism, phenomena like the cult of QAnon, or in the belief, widespread among supporters of President Trump, that impeachment is a coup in the making.
But there’s a certain truth underlying this suspicion. America does have weak campaign-finance laws and an upper class that hoards wealth. Corporations and the wealthy do wield excessive power over the electoral process. Leaders of both parties accommodate that influence instead of challenging it, albeit to different extents, and their strategies undermine the structural integrity of democracy itself. An election ought to be a fair contest. Instead, they often resemble initiations, with a candidate anointed by unseen processes before a campaign ever formally launches. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, for example, favors candidates with access to big donors. The same candidates are, by default, more likely to be of means themselves; they encounter fewer obstacles in the road to victory. And while Sanders and Warren tout their reliance on small donors — a more recent development for Warren than for Sanders — most candidates at the federal and the state level still aggressively seek out donations from people like Craig Hall and Kathryn Walt Hall, the Democratic billionaires who own the now-infamous wine cave.
Voters aren’t entirely powerless, however. A sense of inevitability bedeviled Hillary Clinton in 2016, though the candidate and her aides never seemed to realize it was a problem. In Shattered, journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes reported that Clinton campaign aides even contemplated using the slogan “Because it’s her turn.” Clinton’s embrace of Wall Street and big money — her old speeches to Goldman Sachs, the glittering dinners in the Hamptons, the celebrity supporters — did harm her in the end. Though Trump himself is no man of the people, he didn’t have to work hard to convince anyone that Clinton was aloof, out of touch with the fears and needs of everyday people. Clinton may have defeated Sanders in 2016, but three years later, the Vermont socialist is now the one with a viable shot at the presidency.
Buttigieg, meanwhile, clings to business as usual. Axios reported over the weekend that H.K. Park, a top fundraiser for Buttigieg, promised a would-be donor influence in exchange for money. “If you want to get on the campaign’s radar now before he is flooded with donations after winning Iowa and New Hampshire, you can use the link below for donations,” Park allegedly wrote in an email. Sean Savett, a spokesperson for the Buttigieg campaign, told Axios that the campaign didn’t authorize Park’s language. “But it is ridiculous,” he said, “to interpret as anything more than asking potential supporters who may be interested in Pete to join our campaign before caucusing and voting begins.” Previously, Politico reported that the Buttigieg campaign omitted the names of 20 top fundraisers from a list it released to the public. The campaign called the omission a simple mistake. But neither incident helps Buttigieg dispel the nascent perception that he is more eager to court wealthy interests than he is in listening to the poor and the working class, and that, for Pete, is a problem.
Though his fundraising practices are identical to those of Joe Biden — to say nothing of Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, two billionaires who essentially purchased their places in the primary — Buttigieg has more to lose. Nostalgia insulates Biden from outrage over his own dinners with the rich. That emotion is not available to Buttigieg, an inexperienced politician with no national profile. He’s losing, instead, not just to Biden but to Sanders and Warren, two candidates who have made redistribution and corruption the respective cornerstones of their campaigns. Buttigieg can’t afford his cave moment.
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle
class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire
sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
The wealthiest
Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking
analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
Census Says U.S.
Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
GRAPHIC: Gulf Cartel Gunmen Burn
Rivals Alive in Mexico near Texas Border
Mexico
Will Reject U.S. Designations of Cartels as Terrorists, Says AMLO
Mexico’s president announced Monday that he will reject any
designation of cartels as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.
Enough Is Enough’: Josh Hawley Calls for Sanctions on Mexican
Cartels
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said Wednesday that
“enough is enough” and called on the U.S. government to sanction Mexican officials
and cartel members complicit in trafficking meth and killing Americans.
The architect of Mexico's war on cartels was just arrested in
Texas and accused of drug trafficking and taking bribes
'Another black eye for
Mexico'
A new Gilded Age has emerged in America — a 21st century
version.
The wealth of the top 1% of
Americans has grown dramatically in the past four decades, squeezing both
the middle class and the poor. This is in sharp contrast to Europe and Asia,
where the wealth of the 1% has grown at a more constrained pace.
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle
class against “concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire
sectors of the United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In an interview on The Realignment podcast,
Hawley said that “long gone are the days where” American workers can depend on
big business to look out for their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead, Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated
corporate power” of whole sectors of the American economy — specifically among
Silicon Valley’s giant tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle
class Americans.
“One of the things Republicans need to recover today is a
defense of an open, free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the
length between that and Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here
a great democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich.
They’ve already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they
don’t need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help
them further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this
country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of
this day.
“You have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well,
we’re based in the United States, but we’re not actually an American company,
we’re a global company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits
for some of our biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs
overseas where it’s cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you
don’t have to pay any taxes.”
“I think that we have here at the same time that our economy has
become more concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control
more and more of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as
less and less American and frankly they are less committed to American workers
and American communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem
which is one of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust
competition in this country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to
bring jobs back to the middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to
the middle and working class of this country.”
While multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley
said the GOP must defend working and middle class Americans and that big
business interests should not come before the needs of American communities:
A free market is one where you
can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also by the way, where people can
start a small family business, you shouldn’t have to be gigantic in order to
succeed in this country. Most people don’t
want to start a tech company. [Americans]
maybe want to work in their family’s business, which may be some corner shop in
a small town … they want to be able to make a living and
then give that to their kids or give their kids an option to do that. [Emphasis
added]
The problem with corporate
concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The worst thing about corporate concentration is that it
inevitably believes to a partnership with big government. Big business and big government always get
together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech
sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you
have this alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call
it, it’s a problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated
the Republican and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the
globalist economic model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply
chains” and sending them to China, among other countries.
“The thing is in this country is that not only do we not make
very much stuff anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,”
Hawley said. “The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot
of it to China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As Breitbart News reported,
Hawley detailed in the
interview how Republicans like former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World
Order’ agenda and Democrats have helped to create a corporatist economy that
disproportionately benefits the nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The billionaire class, the top 0.01
percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much
wage growth as the bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been
reinforced with federal rules that largely benefits the wealthiest of
wealthiest earners. A study released last month
revealed that the richest Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than
all other Americans.
Economists: America’s Elite Pay Lower Tax Rate Than All Other
Americans
The wealthiest
Americans are paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans, groundbreaking
analysis from a pair of economists reveals.
For the
first time on record, the wealthiest 400 Americans in 2018 paid a lower tax
rate than all of the income groups in the United States, research highlighted by the New York Times from
University of California, Berkeley, economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel
Zucman finds.
The
analysis concludes that the country’s top economic elite are paying lower
federal, state, and local tax rates than the nation’s working and middle class.
Overall, these top 400 wealthy Americans paid just a 23 percent tax rate, which
the Times‘ op-ed columnist David Leonhardt notes is a
combined tax payment of “less than one-quarter of their total income.”
This 23
percent tax rate for the rich means their rate has been slashed by 47
percentage points since 1950 when their tax rate was 70 percent.
(Screenshot
via the New York Times)
The
analysis finds that the 23 percent tax rate for the wealthiest Americans is
less than every other income group in the U.S. — including those earning
working and middle-class incomes, as a Times graphic shows.
Leonhardt
writes:
For
middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal
income taxes have also declined modestly for these families, but they haven’t
benefited much if at all from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And
they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social
Security) than in the past. Over all, their taxes have remained fairly flat.
[Emphasis added]
The report
comes as Americans increasingly see a growing divide between the rich and
working class, as the Pew Research Center has found.
Sen. Josh
Hawley (R-MO), the leading economic nationalist in the Senate, has warned
against the Left-Right coalition’s consensus on open trade, open markets, and
open borders, a plan that he has called an economy that works solely for the
elite.
“The same
consensus says that we need to pursue and embrace economic globalization and
economic integration at all costs — open markets, open borders, open trade,
open everything no matter whether it’s actually good for American national
security or for American workers or for American families or for American
principles … this is the elite consensus that has governed our politics
for too long and what it has produced is a politics of elite ambition,”
Hawley said in an August speech in the
Senate.
That
increasing worry of rapid income inequality is only further justified by
economic research showing a rise in servant-class jobs,
strong economic recovery for elite zip codes but not for working-class
regions, and skyrocketing wage growth for the billionaire class at 15 times
the rate of other Americans.
Census Says U.S.
Income Inequality Grew ‘Significantly’ in 2018
(Bloomberg) -- Income
inequality in America widened “significantly” last year, according to a U.S.
Census Bureau report published Thursday.
A measure of inequality
known as the Gini index rose to 0.485 from 0.482 in 2017, according to the
bureau’s survey of household finances. The measure compares incomes at the top
and bottom of the distribution, and a score of 0 is perfect equality.
The 2018 reading is the
first to incorporate
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
the impact of President Donald Trump’s end-
2017 tax bill, which was reckoned by many
economists to be skewed in favor of the
wealthy.
But the distribution of
income and wealth in the U.S. has been worsening for decades, making America
the most unequal country in the developed world. The trend, which has persisted
through recessions and recoveries, and under administrations of both parties,
has put inequality at the center of U.S. politics.
Leading candidates for
the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, including senators Elizabeth
Warren and Bernie Sanders, are promising to rectify the tilt toward the rich
with measures such as taxes on wealth or financial transactions.
Just five states --
California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana and New York, plus the District of
Columbia and Puerto Rico -- had Gini indexes higher than the national level,
while the reading was lower in 36 states.
WHILE THE U.S. SQUANDERS HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS AND TROOPS TO DEFEND THE BORDERS OF MUSLIM DICTATORS WHO HATE OUR GUTS, MEXICO IS OVERRUN AMERICAN WITH DRUGS!
GRAPHIC: Gulf Cartel Gunmen Burn
Rivals Alive in Mexico near Texas Border
|
|
Mexico
Will Reject U.S. Designations of Cartels as Terrorists, Says AMLO
Mexico’s president announced Monday that he will reject any
designation of cartels as terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.
During his morning press conference, Mexican President Andres
Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) said he would not accept the U.S.’s potential
designation of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations–which could enable
direct actions in Mexico.
“We will never accept that, we are not ‘vendepatrias’ (nation
sellers),” Lopez Obrador said.
The president’s statements come
after the relatives of nine U.S. women and children who died in a cartel ambush in
Sonora revealed they would be meeting with President Donald Trump. The family is
expected to ask for some cartels to be labeled as terrorist organizations.
Last week, Tamaulipas Governor Francisco Cabeza de Vaca used the
term “narco-terrorism” to refer to the brazen attacks on citizens of Nuevo
Laredo by a faction of Los Zetas Cartel called Cartel Del Noreste. Cabeza de
Vaca publicly called out Mexico City for past inaction in confronting Los
Zetas.
Earlier this year, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) filed legislation for the most violent
cartels in Mexico to be labeled as a foreign terrorist organizations, a move that would limit cartel members’ abilities to travel
and provide tools to better clamp down on financial transactions, Breitbart
Texas reported.
On Monday morning, Lopez Obrador’s foreign relations minister
Marcelo Ebrard called designations unnecessary and inconvenient, adding that
the U.S. and Mexico have a healthy working relationship in fighting cartels.
According to Ebrard, terrorist designations would give the U.S. the legal
avenue to take direct action on cartels on Mexican soil.
Ildefonso
Ortiz is an award-winning journalist with Breitbart Texas. He co-founded
Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Brandon Darby and senior
Breitbart management. You can follow him on Twitter and on Facebook. He can be contacted
at Iortiz@breitbart.com.
Brandon
Darby is the managing director and editor-in-chief of Breitbart Texas. He
co-founded Breitbart Texas’ Cartel Chronicles project with Ildefonso Ortiz and
senior Breitbart management. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He can be contacted at bdarby@breitbart.com.
Enough Is Enough’: Josh Hawley Calls for Sanctions on Mexican
Cartels
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said Wednesday that
“enough is enough” and called on the U.S. government to sanction Mexican officials
and cartel members complicit in trafficking meth and killing Americans.
Hawley called for harsh
retribution against the Mexican cartels complicit in ambushing and murdering
nine American women and children near the New Mexico border.
In the wake of the attack on
Americans, as well as the Mexican cartels’ complicity in Missouri’s meth
crisis, the Missouri conservative called for the U.S. government to sanction
the cartel members who are “openly slaughtering American citizens.”
“With Mexico, enough is enough. US
government should impose sanctions on Mexican officials, including freezing
assets, who won’t confront cartels,” Hawley tweeted Wednesday. “Cartels are
flooding MO [Missouri] w/ meth, trafficking children, & openly slaughtering
American citizens. And Mexico looks the other way.”
Hawley said that just over the last
14 days, there had been over 40 drug overdoses coming from drugs across
America’s southern border.
Hawley continued, “In SW Mo last two
weeks alone, over 40 drug overdoses & multiple deaths from drugs coming
across [the] southern border. Story is the same all over the state. Cartels
increasingly call the shots in Mexico, and for our own security, we cannot
allow this to continue.”
With Mexico, enough is enough. US
government should impose sanctions on Mexican officials, including freezing
assets, who won’t confront cartels. Cartels are flooding MO w/ meth, trafficking
children, & openly slaughtering American citizens. And Mexico looks the
other way
In SW Mo last two weeks alone, over 40 drug
overdoses & multiple deaths from drugs coming across southern border. Story
is the same all over the state. Cartels increasingly call the shots in Mexico,
and for our own security, we cannot allow this to continue
Hawley spent much of his August
recess traveling across rural Missouri, learning what matters to the average
Missourian.
This AM I had the great privilege of
meeting Brittany Tune, a nurse, a mother of two, a follower of God, and a remarkable
woman. Born & raised in rural Shannon Co., she has raised two kids on her
own while putting herself through nursing school & dedicating her life to
others
Brittany says meth is hammering this
community. She has many friends & family members who have been touched by
this epidemic. She worries about what it means for her own kids, ages 15 &
10. It’s much worse now than when she was growing up, she says
In an interview with Breitbart News
in September, Hawley said that meth coming from
Mexico is destroying local Missouri communities.
“Come with me to any town, any town
in the state of Missouri of any size, and I will show you communities that are
drowning in meth, drowning in it. It is literally killing people; it is
destroying families it is destroying schools and whole communities,” he said.
“Missouri is a border state,” Hawley
said, adding that “we have to got to secure the border to stop the meth” and
“stop the flow of illegal immigration.”
Hawley’s remarks about the Mexican
cartel attack on Americans mirrors that of President Donald Trump, who said Tuesday that the
United States was ready for war against the drug cartels.
“This is the time for Mexico, with
the help of the United States, to wage WAR on the drug cartels and wipe them
off the face of the earth,” the president tweeted.
Trump has campaigned on cracking
down on violence on the southern border as well as handling the drug cartels.
During an exclusive interview with
Breitbart News, Trump said he is “very seriously” thinking of designating the
drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs).
“It’s psychological, but it’s also
economic,” Trump told Breitbart News in March. “As terrorists — as terrorist
organizations, the answer is yes. They are.”
Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT) told Breitbart News in May
that he would back Trump’s potential designation of the Mexican cartels as FTOs
and that seizing cartel leader El Chapo’s assets would build the wall and make
the cartels pay for it. In a similar manner to Missouri, Daines told Breitbart
News about how Montana has been ravaged by meth from Mexican cartels.
Daines said that by seizing
“billions” of El Chapo’s assets, it “would absolutely fulfill President Trump’s
promise to build the wall and make Mexico pay for it. In this case, it would be
a Mexican cartel paying for it would be an excellent idea.”
The architect of Mexico's war on cartels was just arrested in
Texas and accused of drug trafficking and taking bribes
45 Comments
Genaro
Garcia Luna Mexico
LUIS ACOSTA/AFP via Getty Images
·
Genaro Garcia Luna, who was
Mexico's public-security secretary between 2006 and 2012, was arrested in Texas
on Monday.
·
Garcia Luna, the architect of
Mexico's campaign against organized crime in the late 2000s, is the latest
Mexican official accused of corruption and involvement in drug trafficking.
A former high-ranking Mexican
security official who led the country's crackdown on organized crime in the mid-2000s
was arrested in the US and been charged with drug-trafficking conspiracy and
making false statements.
Genaro Garcia Luna, 51, was
arrested in Dallas by US federal agents, according to the US district attorney
for the Eastern District of New York, which said it plans to seek his removal
to face charges in New York.
"Garcia Luna stands accused
of taking millions of dollars in bribes from 'El Chapo' Guzman's Sinaloa Cartel
while he controlled Mexico's Federal Police Force and was responsible for ensuring
public safety in Mexico," US Attorney Richard P. Donoghue said in the
release.
Garcia Luna faces three counts of
conspiracy to import and distribute cocaine and a fourth count of making false
statements with regard to an immigration naturalization application.
Garcia Luna began his career with
Mexico's Center for National Security and Investigation in the late 1980s
before moving to the federal police in the late 1990s. He was then head of
Mexico's federal investigation agency, AFI, between 2001 and 2005 and secretary
of public security, then a cabinet-level position in control of the federal
police, between 2006 and 2012.
Genaro
Garcia Luna Felipe Calderon Mexico
ALFREDO ESTRELLA/AFP/GettyImages
He was 38 when appointed to the
latter position by then-President Felipe Calderon but already had nearly 20
years of experience in Mexico's security services, much of it spent tracking
organized crime and drug trafficking.
"By his late 20s, he was
considered something of a wunderkind," according to a 2008 New York Times profile.
"He really was the architect
of Calderon's war on drugs," said Mike Vigil, former chief of
international operations for the US Drug Enforcement Administration, who worked
with Garcia Luna in Mexico in the 1990s.
That war comprised major military
deployments inside the country and the kingpin strategy, which entailed
targeting high-level cartel figures in an effort to weaken the cartels. This
approach has been criticized for fostering more violence, both by state forces and
fragmented cartels.
According to the release, Garcia
Luna received millions of dollars in bribes from the Sinaloa cartel. In return,
the release states, the cartel received safe passage for drug shipments,
sensitive law-enforcement information about investigations targeting it, and
information about rival cartels — all of which allowed it to move multiton
quantities of drugs into the US.
Financial records obtained by the
US government showed that by the time Garcia Luna relocated to the US in 2012,
he had a personal fortune worth millions of dollars, according to the release,
which said he is also accused of lying about those alleged criminal acts on an
application for naturalization submitted in 2018.
'Another black eye for
Mexico'
El Chapo
Joaquin Guzman
Reuters
One detail in the release mirrors allegations made during the trial of Sinaloa cartel chief Joaquin "El Chapo"
Guzman, who was convicted on drug trafficking and other charges in the Eastern
District of New York in February.
"On two occasions, the
cartel personally delivered bribe payments to Garcia Luna in briefcases
containing between three and five million dollars," the release states.
During testimony in November
2018, Jesus "El Rey" Zambada — the youngest brother of Ismael
"El Mayo" Zambada, who is considered Guzman's peer at the top of the
Sinaloa cartel and now its de facto leader — said the cartel twice made
multimillion-dollar payments to Garcia Luna.
A $3 million payment, which
"El Rey" said was to Garcia Luna at a restaurant in Mexico City
between 2005 and 2006, was to ensure he would pick a specific official as
police chief in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state and the cartel's home turf.
"El Rey" said the other
payment, between $3 million and $5 million, was in 2007 and was to make sure
"he didn't interfere in the drug business" and that "El
Mayo" was not arrested. Zambada also said that the Sinaloa cartel and its
partners also pooled $50 million in protection money for Garcia Luna.
A press officer for the Eastern
District of New York did not immediately respond when asked by email whether
the charges unsealed Tuesday against Garcia Luna stemmed from allegations made
during Guzman's trial.
At the time, Garcia Luna denied
Zambada's claims, calling them a "lie, defamation and perjury." On Tuesday, Calderon said he had heard of Garcia Luna's
arrest but was awaiting confirmation and further details, tweeting that his "position will always be in favor of justice
and the law."
El Chapo
Guzman home town
REUTERS/Roberto Armenta
Vigil, who was the DEA assistant
country attache to Mexico during the 1990s, was skeptical of the allegations
made during the Guzman trial and said he was "surprised" by the
arrest on Tuesday.
"I worked with Genaro Garcia
Luna," Vigil said. "We, DEA, had a very good working relationship
with Genaro. At that time there were no allegations of corruption. There we
coordinated investigations with them, and we never saw any evidence of
compromise."
The allegations made during that
trial seemed "less than credible," Vigil said, in large part because
Guzman was arrested twice during the administration of President Enrique Peña
Nieto, who followed Calderon into office in 2012.
But it was possible that a high-ranking
Mexican official could obscure activities in one area from their work with the
US in another area.
"In terms of what the US
sees, [it's] very different than what occurs within the Mexican government, but
through time if he were taking bribes, obviously some of those investigations,
you would've known if they had been compromised," Vigil said. "But
there's some areas that could be compartmentalized in terms of efforts by the
Mexican government."
If convicted on the
drug-conspiracy charge, Garcia Luna faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10
years and a maximum of life in jail.
"Today's arrest demonstrates
our resolve to bring to justice those who help cartels inflict devastating harm
on the United States and Mexico, regardless of the positions they held while
committing their crimes." Donoghue, the US attorney, said in the release,
thanking the DEA, the Department of Homeland Security Investigations, as well
as police in New York City and New York state.
Regardless of the outcome of the
case, it tarnishes a bilateral relationship in which cooperation against
organized crime and drug trafficking has been a major component.
"I don't know what the
evidence is against Genaro Garcia Luna," Vigil said Tuesday, "but it
certainly is another black eye for Mexico."
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