The US government is preparing for the trial of Mexican drug lord El Chapo.
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Prosecutors detail evidence against El Chapo
US federal prosecutors released a 90-page summary of the evidence they plan to offer against Joaquin Guzman, the Mexican cartel boss known as “El Chapo,” in his trial this fall. The evidence is expected to span multiple decades and include crimes such as drug smuggling, murder, torture, and money laundering.
El Chapo is a Mexican drug cartel leader who was the boss of the Sinaloa Cartel. He has been considered the most powerful drug trafficker in the world since the early 2000’s and has staged a number of dramatic prison escapes. He was first captured in Guatemala in 1993 and famously escaped from jail in a laundry cart. He was then captured again in 2014, but again escaped from a high-security prison just a year and a half later. When authorities captured him a third time in 2016, they took no chances. He was extradited to the United States in 2017 and will face trial here in the fall. He is facing 17 separate charges related to importing and distributing hundreds of tons of narcotics and conspiring to murder his rivals, among others. He is currently waiting for his trial in a solitary confinement prison cell in Manhattan.
Most of his crimes are very well-known, so the news from the prosecutor’s report is more interesting for the details rather than for the scale of his criminal enterprise. The report says that El Chapo had sicarios, or hit men, kidnap his enemies and deliver them to him, where he personally interrogated them, observed them being tortured, and sometimes killed them himself. He would then order their bodies thrown into a hole in the ground and set on fire. At least one of these violent interrogations was videotaped and uploaded to YouTube.
One of the more colorful details was the so-called 1993 Chili Can Seizure, where Mexican authorities discovered seven tons of cocaine hidden in hundreds of cans of jalapeño peppers being exported to the United States; the discovery was made just south of the border with America.
Another of his famous crimes took place in Puerto Vallarta in 1992, when he sent his henchmen to a disco where he thought his rivals would be partying one night. They shot up the nightclub and killed six people in the process, but his targets got away.
According to prosecutors, Guzman was also responsible for smuggling firearms across the Mexican-American border and for smuggling over $14 billion in cash from the United States to Mexico.
And, of course he is well-known for his escapes from jail. You cannot escape from a maximum-security prison without a lot of help, so among the charges against El Chapo are charges that he bribed prison officials to aid his escape. In his first escape from prison in 2001, corrupt prison guards smuggled him out in a laundry cart. In his second escape, he dug a tunnel from the shower of his prison cell to an abandoned house a mile away; he rode through the tunnel on a motorcycle. Before his extradition to the United States, he was planning yet another escape, which he didn’t have time to pull off.
The American prosecutors are seeking to have several details withheld from the jury that will judge El Chapo’s guilt or innocence in the trial. They don’t want the jury to hear about the drug lord’s charitable works and they don’t want them to see a flattering interview he conducted with the American actor Sean Penn for Rolling Stone magazine in 2016.
Speaking of the jury, a judge ruled that the jurors will remain anonymous in his trial. Usually, both the defense and the prosecutors are able to know the full names of potential jurors. This time, though, the judge decided that El Chapo is dangerous enough to present a threat to members of the jury. Furthermore, the jurors will be escorted to and from the courthouse by US Marshalls for their protection.
The 61-year old Guzman has pleaded not guilty to the charges. His trial will begin in September in Brooklyn, New York.
I’ve been on a jury once before and I can tell you I would not want anything to do with that trial, that’s for sure.
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