Drug Lord Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman Found Guilty On All Counts In Federal Trial

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Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, the infamous drug lord known as “El Chapo,” was found guilty on all counts against him and now faces a lifetime in prison, ending a remarkable fall for a kingpin who spent years evading law enforcement officials while they say he continued amassing power and wealth atop a sprawling empire.

Guzmán gained worldwide notoriety for the reach of the Sinaloa Cartel, which prosecutors have called “the world’s largest and most prolific drug trafficking organization,” and for his own audacious escapes from Mexican prisons. He spent years on the run, assembling what U.S. authorities have described as a private army. Following his most recent prison escape in 2015, using a tunnel dug to his cell, he was hunted again, arrested again and then extradited to the United States, where he faced federal charges in multiple locations.

His trial in Brooklyn ended a little more than a year after he was removed from Mexico, where prosecutors say Guzmán, as the cartel’s leader, pumped drugs into the United States, bribed Mexican officials, laundered money and repeatedly commanded his “sicarios” – or “assassins” – to commit brutal acts of violence.

Guzmán’s conviction came after prosecutors assembled an extensive case that included cooperating witnesses and intercepted messages, which demonstrated a remarkable degree of penetration into the cartel’s activities, said John Horn, a former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Mexican cartel cases.

Horn said a conviction in a case like this also carries a deeper meaning.

“There does need to be a conviction of somebody like Chapo Guzmán, both for the symbolism and the pure factor of justice being served,” Horn, who is now in private practice, said in an interview before the verdict. “It does show that . . . for somebody at his level, justice will be done, it will be served. It’s an incredibly powerful victory for DOJ, for law enforcement.”

Prosecutors have been unsparing in depicting Guzmán as a purveyor of brutality and horror spanning borders.

But defense attorneys have insisted that he has been made a scapegoat. Guzmán’s lawyers asked the jury to dismiss the testimony of the government’s cooperating witnesses, describing them as liars out to save themselves by seeking the best possible deals with authorities.

For Guzmán, a conviction in a U.S. courtroom that guarantees life in prison cuts to the heart of his underworld myth, which only grew while he was a notorious fugitive.

Federal prosecutors have described Guzmán’s rise in the 1980s as being fueled by his skill at funneling cocaine into the United States and then getting proceeds back to Colombian cartels. Guzman continued expanding his empire, prosecutors said, even after he was taken into custody in Guatemala in 1993 and placed in a maximum-security prison in Mexico.

His 2001 escape from that prison – infamously said to involve him slipping away in a laundry hamper – began what would be more than a decade evading capture. Those years were filled with financial successes, violence and efforts to corrupt Mexican government officials, prosecutors wrote in court filings. They also said Guzmán and his associates obtained drugs and supplies from other countries and sent cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and marijuana into the United States.

Guzmán was arrested again in 2014, and he escaped into the tunnel the following year. In 2016, he was arrested once more, and spent a year in custody before his extradition.

The drug trade was a gold mine for Guzmán, enabling him to “exponentially increase his profits to staggering levels,” prosecutors wrote in one court filing. But a key part of that, prosecutors continued, was “thousands of acts of violence” – including murder, torture and kidnappings – committed by assassins who he aimed at possible witnesses or people who sought to help law enforcement.

Prosecutors say Guzmán carried out some of the violence personally. During closing arguments in the trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Goldbarg said Guzmán once cursed and shot two men, both of whom were already badly beaten, for working with a rival cartel. He then ordered their bodies thrown into a bonfire, Goldbarg said.

While Guzmán had sought to shield his communications from authorities, he also wiretapped people around him – including his family, mistresses and other associates – which Goldfarb said ultimately helped law enforcement officials.

The IT technician who set up a system for Guzmán to surveil those around him ultimately gave it to the FBI. Goldfarb said Guzmán found out the technician was working with U.S. authorities and sought to have him killed, but no one could find him. The technician testified at trial.

(c) 2019, The Washington Post · Mark Berman, Katie Zezima 

{Matzav.com}


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