Appearing in a crisp suit and dark tie, Genaro García Luna – the highest-ranking Mexican official ever to be convicted in the United States – remained impassive as his sentence was handed down in a New York courtroom.
He was sentenced to more than 38 years in prison, as well as a $2m (£1.5m) fine. It was not the life sentence he could have received, but a jail term that the judge, Brian Cogan, felt reflected the severity of his crimes.
A small group of demonstrators outside court on Wednesday greeted the news with jubilation.
It marks the final chapter in the story of the most spectacular fall from grace in modern Mexico.
If anyone was Mexico’s drug war tsar – the chief architect and public face of the government’s security strategy under then-President Felipe Calderón – it was García Luna.
The sentence will also increase the pressure on Mr Calderón, too, who has always claimed he knew nothing of his security chief’s illegal activities.
García Luna has maintained his innocence. But to see him sentenced to almost four decades behind bars for drug-related crimes is more than even his fiercest critics dared to imagine while he was in office.
“His role in ramping up the war on drugs in Mexico from 2006 to a whole new level can’t be overstated”, says Falko Ernst, an independent drug war and security expert in Mexico.
“He championed a force-based solution against organised crime in Mexico like never before and revamped the state apparatus accordingly.”
To find that during his outwardly “proactive” stance on drug crime, he was in fact in bed with one of the region’s most violent and feared cartels, is emblematic of the kind of corruption and duplicity that makes Mexicans so sceptical of their politicians.
For Mr Ernst, the García Luna case also reveals a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the so-called “war on drugs”.
“It shows how this recipe of a supposedly ‘good’ state acting against the bad guys and wiping them off the map doesn’t square with the realities on the ground in Mexico,” he argues.
As Mexico’s Public Security Secretary, Genaro García Luna was able to direct state resources and security forces against the Sinaloa cartel’s main rivals, an extremely brutal and violent criminal organisation called Los Zetas. In return for that favouritism, he received millions of dollars in bribes, for which he was convicted in a US federal court last year.
