US trial will tell tale of Mexican drug lord ‘El Chapo’ Guzman
● Trial delayed as one of the jurors is excused for ‘reasons unclear’
A lawyer for the Mexican drug lord known as “El Chapo” says he’s ready to defend his client and has nothing to prove.
Eduardo Balarezo spoke to journalists yesterday while entering the highly secured Brooklyn federal courthouse where Joaquin Guzman is being tried.
One of the jurors was excused shortly before opening statements were set to begin. The reason was unclear.
The lawyers and judge have been working to select a replacement and it was not known how long that would take.
Guzman, who has been held in solitary confinement since his extradition to the United States early last year, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune smugmr gling tons of cocaine and other drugs in a vast supply chain that reached New York, New Jersey, Texas and elsewhere north of the border.
If convicted, he faces a possible life prison sentence.
Prosecutors have said they will use thousands of documents, videos and recordings as evidence, including material related to the Guadalajara airport shooting, drug smugglers’ safe houses, Guzman’s 2015 prison escape and the law enforcement operation to recapture him.
More than a dozen co-operating witnesses are scheduled to testify, including some who worked for Guzman’s Sinaloa cartel. Prosecutors say they risk retribution by taking the stand and the court has taken steps to conceal their identities. US District Judge Brian Cogan barred courtroom sketch artists from drawing them.
Guzman’s lawyers are expected to attack the credibility of the witnesses by emphasising their criminal records, saying some have an incentive to lie to win leniency in their own cases.
Balarezo, has suggested that he hopes to convince jurors Guzman wasn’t actually in charge of the cartel but was a lieutenant taking orders from someone else.
“Now that trial is upon us, it is time to put up or shut up,” Mr Balarezo said.
Despite his diminutive stature and nickname that means “Shorty”, Guzman was once a larger-than-life figure in Mexico who has been compared to Al Capone and Robin Hood and been the subject of ballads called narcocorridos.
Among the highlights of his lore: He was known for carrying a gold-plated AK-47, for smuggling cocaine in cans marked as jalapenos and for making shipments using planes with secret landing strips as well as container ships, speedboats and even submarines.
But Guzman is perhaps best known for escaping custody in Mexico, the first time in 2011 by hiding in the bottom of a laundry bin.
He escaped again in 2015 through a mile-long tunnel dug into a shower in his jail cell that he slipped into before fleeing on a motorcycle.
Guzman’s second escape was a black eye for the Mexican government, an embarrassment amplified when the actor Sean Penn was able to find and interview him at one of his hideouts in Mexico while he was on the run from authorities.
Guzman’s extradition to New York City shook up Mexico’s drug underworld.
Mexican security analyst Alejandro Hope said it created “something of a civil war within the Sinaloa cartel” that has essentially ended with the arrest of internal rivals and allowed his sons to take control of what remains a “weakened” but far-from-finished smuggling operation.
Mr Hope said he has seen no sign that Guzman’s extradition and jailing in the US had a major impact on drug flows or routes.
“But symbolically I think it’s important,” Mr Hope said.
“It’s a bit of an end of an era. There are very few kingpins of that size left, of that importance”