Mexico City.- Colombian drug trafficker Harold Poveda Ortega, alias “El Conejo”, finished testifying this Thursday in a Brooklyn, New York court, in the trial of former Secretary of Public Safety Genaro García Luna, whom he acknowledged not having directly bribed him.
“El Conejo” also asserted before the jury that he never saw García Luna in person and that the bribes that drug traffickers allegedly made to the former official were what other bosses told him.
Yesterday, the Colombian drug trafficker assured that federal police attached to the Mexico City International Airport (AICM) gave him special treatment before federal agents broke into a mansion in the Desierto de los Leones in October 2008.
“El Conejo” reported that on one occasion when he had to travel to Colombia he was received at the terminal by the agents, who passed him through special doors without any inspection and even loaded his suitcases.
That trip to his native country, he narrated, was because at that time he was introducing shipments of cocaine through the beaches of Guerrero without the authorization of Arturo Beltrán Leyva, “El Barbas”, who controlled that territory, and the Mexican drug lord wanted to assassinate him.
However, he pointed out, he later returned to Mexico, met with Beltrán Leyva and put him in contact with the bosses of the Norte del Valle Cartel, which in those years was the main Colombian organization that sent cocaine to the United States with the complicity of its Mexican partners.
The drug trafficker also ratified part of what he declared to the Mexican authorities after his capture, recorded in November 2010 in Ajusco, in the sense that he was a link between the bosses of the Sinaloa Cartel and the Valle del Norte.
He assured that in those years, between 2000 and 2010, he managed to traffic hundreds of tons of cocaine that left Colombia by boat, which were thrown into the sea near the Guerrero coast and picked up by speedboats operated by people from Beltrán Leyva.
