El Chapo guilty, guilty, guilty ...
GUZMAN: MEXICAN DRUG BARON FACES LIFE IN JAIL
New York
The world’s most infamous cartel boss Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who rose from poverty in rural Mexico to run a global drug empire and amass billions of dollars, was found guilty of drug trafficking in a US court yesterday.
Jurors in federal court in Brooklyn found Guzman, 61, guilty on all 10 counts. He faces a possible sentence of life in prison.
One of the major figures in Mexican drug wars that have roiled the country since 2006, Guzman was extradited to the US for trial in 2017 after he was arrested in Mexico the year before.
Guzman sat and showed no emotion while the verdict was read. Once the jury left the room, he and his wife put their hands to their hearts and gave each other the thumbs up sign.
The trial, which featured testimony from more than 50 witnesses, offered the public an unprecedented look at the inner workings of the Sinaloa Cartel, named for the state in Mexico where Guzman was born in a poor village.
The legend of Guzman was burnished by two dramatic escapes he made from Mexican prisons and by a “Robin Hood” image he cultivated among Sinaloa’s poor.
Prosecutors said he trafficked tons of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine into the US over more than two decades, consolidating his power in Mexico through murders and wars with rival cartels.
Small in stature, Guzman’s nickname means “Shorty”. His smuggling exploits – the violence he used and the sheer size of his illicit business – made him the world’s most notorious drug baron since Colombia’s Pablo Escobar, who was shot dead in 1993.
Guzman’s lawyers say he was set up as a “fall guy” by Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, a powerful drug lord from Sinaloa who remains at large.
In a statement after the verdict, lawyers for El Chapo said they were “obviously” disappointed. “We were faced with extraordinary and unprecedented obstacles in defending Joaquin, including his detention in solitary confinement,” the statement said.
The most detailed evidence came from more than a dozen former associates who struck deals with US prosecutors. Through them, jurors heard how Guzman made a name for himself in the 1980s as “El Rapido”, the speedy one, by building cross-border tunnels that allowed him to move cocaine from Mexico into the US faster than anyone else.
Estimates of how much money Guzman made from drugs vary. In 2009, Forbes Magazine put him on its list of the world’s richest people, with an estimated $1 billion.