El Chapo a scapegoat – lawyer
Infamous Mexican drug lord and escape artist Joaquin ‘‘El Chapo’’ Guzman has been alternately portrayed at the starts of his US trial as the calculating leader of a bloodthirsty smuggling operation that funnelled tonnes of cocaine and other drugs into American cities, and a scapegoat for a conspiracy whose actual mastermind bribed crooked Mexican officials as high as the president to keep his freedom.
In opening statements amid tight security in federal court in Brooklyn yesterday, Assistant US Attorney Adam Fels told a jury whose identities have been kept secret how the man who got his start in a modest marijuana-selling business became a kingpin known for using an army of hit men to wipe out his competitors and anyone within his Sinaloa cartel who betrayed him.
‘‘Money, drugs, murder . . . That is what this case is about,’’ Fels said.
Defence attorney Jeffrey Lichtman sought to shift blame to Ismael ‘‘El Mayo’’ Zambada, another reputed drug trafficker in the cartel’s leadership who is still at large in Mexico.
Lichtman claimed that unlike Guzman, Zambada remained on the loose because of bribes that ‘‘go up to the very top’’, including hundreds of millions of dollars paid to the current and former presidents of Mexico. He also suggested that US law enforcement turned a blind eye to the situation.
In a tweet, a spokesman for current President Enrique Pena Nieto called the sensational allegation ‘‘completely false and defamatory’’. A separate tweet by ex-president Felipe Calderon called it ‘‘absolutely false and reckless’’.
One of Zambata’s sons is expected to be the first of several government cooperators to testify against Guzman, possibly as early as today.
Guzman, who has been held in solitary confinement since his extradition to the US early last year, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune smuggling tonnes of cocaine and other drugs in a vast supply chain that reached well north of the border.
Despite his diminutive stature and nickname that means ‘‘Shorty’’ in Spanish, Guzman was once a largerthan-life figure in Mexico who has been compared to Al Capone and Robin Hood.
He listened to Fels describe how he started modestly in the early 1970s by selling marijuana in Mexico, but built his reputation by constructing tunnels across the Mexico-US border to swiftly transport marijuana and cocaine.
As his business flourished using the tunnels, trains, planes and boats, Guzman began taking aim at rivals in the early 1990s, leading to bloody wars. In 1993, he fled to Guatemala, but was captured and imprisoned in Mexico for eight years, where he continued running his drug empire, Fels said.
Fels spoke of two dramatic escapes from prison by Guzman, and said he was planning a third when he was brought to the US. One of his escapes, in 2015, was through a long tunnel dug into a shower in his jail cell.
Fels said Guzman used some of his wealth to pay off the Mexican military and police and to finance assault rifles, grenade launchers and explosives to engage in ‘‘war after bloody war’’. –AP
‘‘Money, drugs, murder . . . That is what this case is about.’’
Assistant US Attorney Adam Fels