B.C. seeks ban on public drug use, dialing back decriminalization
The B.C. NDP has asked the federal government to recriminalize public drug use, marking a major shift in the province's approach to addressing the deadly overdose crisis.
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.
Garcia Luna is accused of accepting millions of dollars to let the Sinaloa cartel operate with impunity as it sent tons of cocaine to the U.S.
Defence lawyers haven't yet had their chance to question Nava Valencia, but they have argued that the case rests on lies from self-interested criminals. Garcia Luna has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have said the former cabinet member tried earnestly to combat the drug trade and is being abandoned by a U.S. government that once viewed him as a partner.
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.
That enterprise had ties to the Sinaloa cartel during the reign of infamous kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, whose recent U.S. trial aired testimony about alleged payoffs to Garcia Luna.
Nava Valencia told jurors he paid $5 million to Garcia Luna and other high-level government officials to try to free a shipping container packed with 10 tonnes (9,070 kg) of Colombian cocaine after it was seized in the Mexican Pacific Coast port of Manzanillo around 2007.
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.
At a meeting about a month later in a cartel bigwig's country house outside the central Mexican city of Cuernavaca, Garcia Luna said he hadn't been able to intervene because the U.S. government and Mexican marines had been involved in the seizure, Nava Valencia testified.
But he said Garcia Luna came through in another way: He later provided a document showing that the U.S. government had known about the shipment and its origins, information that the Mexican traffickers used to persuade their irritated Colombian suppliers that the problem had been on the Colombians' end. The Colombians then backed off their demand for a $50 million reimbursement, 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.
"There were going to be operations and investigations against us, and we wanted to try to put a brake on them," he explained.
So, he said, he and his associates paid $500,000 to get a meeting with Garcia Luna, and another $2.5 million when the then-security secretary showed up for the sit-down in an office above a car wash in the city of Guadalajara. That was when, according to Nava Valencia, Garcia Luna and the police official with him pledged "to stand with us."
Garcia 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. He left Mexican government service and moved to Miami in 2012. He was arrested in 2019 in Texas and has since been held without bail in a federal lockup.
He could face decades in prison if convicted of drug trafficking and engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise.
The B.C. NDP has asked the federal government to recriminalize public drug use, marking a major shift in the province's approach to addressing the deadly overdose crisis.
More than 115 people who viewed the solar eclipse in Ontario earlier this month experienced eye damage after the event, according to eye doctors in the province.
An orca whale calf that has been stranded in a B.C. lagoon for weeks after her pregnant mother died swam out on her own early Friday morning.
George Mallory is renowned for being one of the first British mountaineers to attempt to scale the dizzying heights of Mount Everest during the 1920s. Nearly a century later, newly digitized letters shed light on Mallory’s hopes and fears about ascending Everest.
Sophie Gregoire Trudeau says there is 'still so much love' between her and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as they navigate their post-separation relationship co-parenting their three children.
An Ontario man who took out a loan to pay for auto repairs said his car was repossessed after he missed two payments.
Donald Trump's defence team attacked the credibility Friday of the prosecution's first witness in his hush money case, seeking to discredit testimony detailing a scheme between Trump and a tabloid to bury negative stories to protect the Republican's 2016 presidential campaign.
An American Airlines flight attendant was indicted Thursday after authorities said he tried to secretly record video of a 14-year-old girl using an airplane bathroom last September.
Devastating tornadoes tore across parts of eastern Nebraska and northeast Texas Friday as a multi-day severe thunderstorm event ramped up in the central United States.
Mounties in Nanaimo, B.C., say two late-night revellers are lucky their allegedly drunken antics weren't reported to police after security cameras captured the men trying to steal a heavy sign from a downtown business.
A property tax bill is perplexing a small townhouse community in Fergus, Ont.
When identical twin sisters Kim and Michelle Krezonoski were invited to compete against some of the world’s most elite female runners at last week’s Boston Marathon, they were in disbelief.
The giant stone statues guarding the Lions Gate Bridge have been dressed in custom Vancouver Canucks jerseys as the NHL playoffs get underway.
A local Oilers fan is hoping to see his team cut through the postseason, so he can cut his hair.
A family from Laval, Que. is looking for answers... and their father's body. He died on vacation in Cuba and authorities sent someone else's body back to Canada.
A former educational assistant is calling attention to the rising violence in Alberta's classrooms.
The federal government says its plan to increase taxes on capital gains is aimed at wealthy Canadians to achieve “tax fairness.”
At 6'8" and 350 pounds, there is nothing typical about UBC offensive lineman Giovanni Manu, who was born in Tonga and went to high school in Pitt Meadows.