The American justice sentenced this Wednesday to 10 years in prison to Ivan Reyes Arzateformer commander of the Sensitive Investigation Unit of the Mexican federal police and one of the main DEA contacts in Mexico, the Brooklyn court reported.
Reyes Arzate had pleaded guilty last October of conspiring to send cocaine to the United States.
According to judicial authorities, he received at least $290,000 in exchange for reporting on the status of the joint US-Mexican investigations into the drug trafficking group El Monitoring 39, associated with the Sinaloa Cartelthat of the almighty Beltran Leyvaand other gangs in Mexico, to introduce cocaine to the United States.
“Reyes Arzate turned a blind eye to drug traffickers, allowing them to operate with impunity, when he was head of Mexico’s federal police,” US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent Ray Donovan said at trial.
A jury found him guilty on January 24, 2020, of three counts of international conspiracy to distribute cocaine in the United States between September and November 2016.
The justice determined that the DEA contact in Mexico “abused his position by granting assistance to Mexican drug cartels in exchange for at least hundreds of thousands of dollars” between 2008 and 2016, said then-District Attorney Richard Donaghue. .
The former police officer was assigned from 2003 to 2016 to the Sensitive Research Unit (UIS). In 2008 he was named head of the unit and main contact for sharing information with US personnel and other colleagues in the group.
The UIS is made up of Mexican police officers who fight drug trafficking, money laundering and other crimes in cooperation with US DEA agents. Its members receive training at the agency’s headquarters in the United States and have information on ongoing investigations in the neighboring country.
Reyes Arzate turned himself in in 2018 in Chicago after being accused of leaking sensitive information to Mexican drug cartels.
He was sentenced that year in Chicago to 40 months in prison. According to the United States Bureau of Prisons, he was due to be released on January 27, 2020 to be deported to Mexico, but a New York grand jury decided to charge him with conspiracy to traffic drugs into the United States.
The case fell to Judge Brian Cogan, who presided over the trial against the former head of the Sinaloa cartel Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmanand is carrying out the case for drug trafficking against the former Secretary of Public Security of Mexico, Genaro Garcia Luna.