When Joaquin Guzman Loera - better known as El Chapo - went on trial in New York it was alleged he paid a US$6 million bribe to Enrique Peña Nieto, who was President of Mexico between 2012 and 2018.
Peña Nieto had succeeded Felipe Calderón as President and Calderón’s Secretary of Public Secretary was Genaro Garcia Luna, who is facing trial for accepting corrupt payments from the Sinaloa Cartel.
Jim Creechan, a Canadian sociologist who has studied Mexican cartels for 25 years and is writing a book about them, said: "The case against Garcia Luna is virtually air tight."
Garcia Luna, who has pleaded not guilty to conspiring to traffic cocaine and making false statements, led Mexico’s Federal Investigation Agency from 2001 to 2005 and later controlled the "federales", the main police force in Mexico.
In US journalist Alan Feuer’s book, El Jefe, about the hunt to capture Guzman, he says the FBI never trusted the federales, believing they had been corrupted.
Mr Creechan said: "The evidence against Garcia Luna is coming from the same wire-taps and electronic surveillance that finally led to El Chapo's demise. The charges and indictments will be from the same period of time (2010-2012). There may be additional ‘forensic accounting’ evidence that was collected after the intense wire-tap era described by Feuer."
The US Justice Department says the Sinaloa Cartel were allowed to act with impunity because Garcia Luna had received multi-million dollar bribes.
In July 2019 El Chapo was jailed for 30 years and ordered to forfeit US$12 billion in cash and assets by a court in New York.
Mr Creechan said: "Everyone in Mexico knew that Garcia Luna was crooked and corrupt. The Mexican weekly Proceso regularly described incidents where Garcia Luna was meeting with cartels and even described shoot-outs where he escaped with his life."
He said there would be many "protected witnesses" brought forward to testify against Garcia Luna in return for leniency from the Department of Justice in their own criminal cases.
"It will be an interesting trial with a foregone conclusion - Guilty. But what will be even more interesting is to see whether the charges stop with Genaro Garcia Luna or go even higher,” Mr Creechan told Sputnik.
"The testimony of the 'protected witnesses' will be interesting to watch and will be closely followed by several former Mexican Presidents and their staff," he added.